[danvasquez29]

saving 50k while paying student loans off is often a very daunting task. I would imagine one would generally need to have a bay-area type salary to begin with to pull off such a thing in a timeframe less than a decade, which leads to a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Or find a way to make a decent engineering level salary while having little to no housing costs. This means having parents willing to support you who also live close enough to a job that pays well, and in your scenario having a significant other who is also in the same or similar enough situation; this is not extremely rare, but it's not the norm either.