<p>No, I think you can only defer payments during periods you actually are in school. So you would have to make payments while you were working.</p>
<p>You can prepay the loan at any time, however – so basically if you had money sooner, you could send in payments to reduce the loan. There really is no good reason to do that for a subsidized loan until payment is due, however, as you are not being charged interest.</p>