Somewhere in intern year the pitch finds you: a lunch talk, a table by the cafeteria, someone who knows exactly what year you finish. The product is whole life insurance, and the case is that you should lock in your insurability while you're young and healthy.
One question comes before the price and the product. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the body your state regulator belongs to, puts it first in its buyer's guide: does anyone depend on you financially? Notice the conditional around that section. If you need life insurance, then decide how much.
For a resident with no children and nobody relying on their paycheck, the answer is often no — and the guide's own logic stops there. Student loans are not the reason to reconsider. Federal loans are discharged when the borrower dies. Private loans are the exception: the lender is not required to cancel the balance, and your estate can owe it. Federal law requires private lenders to release a co-signer when the borrower dies, but only on loans taken out since late 2018. If a parent signed for yours, find out when it was written.
If someone does depend on you, the need has an end date. Children grow up, a mortgage amortizes, and eventually your savings do the work the policy was doing. Term insurance covers that stretch and stops. Whole life covers your entire life and folds a savings account into the premium, which is why it costs more and why its two halves are hard to price apart. It has real uses (estate planning, a lifelong dependent), but an intern with no dependents is not the case it was built for.
That bundle is sold with an illustration, a page of columns projecting decades of growth. Read it with one question: which of these numbers are guaranteed, and which are not? The NAIC warns that premiums on many policies move with the insurer's investment earnings, claims costs, and expenses, and tells buyers to ask how high the premium could go. A projection is not a promise, and the difference sits in a column most people never look at.
Two more things regulators say plainly. Cash values in some policies are low in the early years. Surrender then and you can get back a fraction of what you paid in. And the coverage your program hands you "usually is less than you need." It may not follow you when training ends.
The pitch was never wrong about your age. Buying young is exactly right — for term, and for the disability policy in Issue No. 5. Whether it was right about the product is what the guaranteed column will tell you.