debt free

My partner and I have finally finished paying off her student loans.  She is about four years older than myself and finished her degree a while before we ever met.  Since we got married we have been trying our best to pay off her loans together so that, now, I could go to school.  It was an interesting process because I had no idea what debt consolidation meant and we worked together to get her loans paid off in about five years  Now I have started my degree and she has agreed to help me do the same thing but we hope to be debt free at the absolute minimum before I finish school.  She is now a professor of Political Sciences and she makes enough that we are even thinking about buying a house while I am still in school.  So as you can imagine debt consolidation will be a keyword for life in the next few years.  

At the moment I am at the end of my first semester in international relations which is a branch of political sciences.  I eventually want to work outside of the country for the government or some type of aid organization.  I got in to this major out of interest in social activism and a true belief that we can create a system of government from what we already have, that can uphold the rights and freedoms of every person who stands on American soil.  I know that from my work in various political races and organizations that I have the personality to get things like this to manifest beyond just the ideas and in to the real world.  I was actually torn between political sciences and secondary education.  I wasn't sure until I met my partner if I would have a bigger impact as a teacher or a political scientist.  When I started to talk to her about it  I realized I was asking the wrong question.  It isn't about how much of an impact each profession has, but it is really about what kind of impact you want to have.