I have two loans - each requires A payment about 150 dollars a month. Thus around 300 in total. Its pretty manageable as long as my current job remains steady.

Consolidating isn't essential. If you have work just live within your means and make your monthly payments. Don't go out and buy fancy apartments and furniture and cars. Keep living a student lifestyle and put your salary towards loans. Find a cheap apartment to rent. Don't commit to mortgages and car payments and over extend yourself. Don't buy things on credit, instead wait until you have the cash available. Just be financially responsible. That's my advice.

If you are unemployed there are deferment options and flexible payment plans.

You should also understand that consolidating - when it was an easily available option - didn't usually lower your overall interest rates significantly - unless some or all of the original loans were certain types of variable-rate loans. Consolidating just took the weighted average of the rates on all your loans. The reason it usually resulted in much lower payments was because when you consolidate student loans you're usually allowed to change the term to 20, 25, or 30 years, instead of the original 10 years. And really that's not a great thing to do - because in the end you are paying much more this way, unless you pay the loans off early, in which case you'd really be back somewhere around where you were with the original un-consolidated loans in terms of monthly payments...

Sallie Mae lowered my interest rates 2 pull points when I consolidated (about 4.25% now, I believe)

(that was a while ago, though)

thanks for the tips - bloopox, i'm not looking for lower payments or an extended term, but to lock a nice rate like 3 or 4% like trace, but that seems to be a thing of the past despite the super-low prime rate right now.

- bad timing for the grads of the past year and beyond.

You guys should understand the effort now to shut down the private student loan lenders. They take government money at 2%, then loan it to you at 4 or 5 or 8%. It's outrageous! Write your congressman and tell him that you want loans direct from the government with a middleman taking his share.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/us/politics/13student.html?hp

The are three ways that consolidation lowered interest rates. Sometimes the rate decrease is the result of a combination of these:
1. At least some of the original loans were variable-rate and/or certain types of Stafford loans that could be converted to a lower rate.
2. (this is the more common situation) The original loans are converted into a different type of loan - usually one that loses a lot of the special conditions that student loans have in the first place. For example, when you consolidate you usually lose the ability to have parts of the loans forgiven by doing things like the Peace Corps, teaching in inner-city high schools, etc. - which aren't generally concerns for architects. But consolidation often also shortens the unemployment deferment that is available to you, which is more of a concern these days...
3. If your first student loans were taken out prior to July of 1993, and any of these are still open and available to consolidate, then the rules that apply are slightly different, and tend to allow better consolidation terms. (This may have been the case for Trace.)

If your current loans are mostly subsidized Stafford loans then consolidating would likely have allowed you to lock in a low interest rate. But if the majority are other types of loans then the best consolidation would usually do is give you the weighted average of the interest rates of the existing loans.