Seeing that most college graduates leave school with a mountain of debt versus their income from their employment I was wondering if anybody has had any luck securing traditional financing with a high student debt to income ratio?

We went the traditional commercial loan, which was 25% down of purchase price.

I intend to begin visiting various banks and credit unions in the area to look into traditional lending numbers and begin to line-up financing.

When you invest in real estate, for example, and want to maintain reserves, some should be in either cash or a comparable asset such as a money-market or CD, but you can easily put excess reserves and earnings from real estate into traditional stocks, funds, etc. as well - it doesn't just have to sit there.  

Yeah, Seems the traditional route would be to pay off debt, repair credit, save, and get a traditional bank loan.

Whereas with a fixed lease, you'll be required to pay whether you receive payment from the sub-tenant or not, such as with a traditional lender.

What I found was several traditional multi-family properties but there were also a large number of listings in which there were 3 SFR homes bundled together and being offered as a package.If an investor wanted to purchase one of these property bundles, how does a bank view the properties for financing? 

So traditional FHA i need to wait till 2017.

You won't be able to get a traditional 80% or 90% LTV HELOC like with a primary residence, but I'm sure you can pull some of your equity out one way or another.  

Buying a property with a tenant in place traditionally means any type of construction will at the very least be more complicated as the tenant and their stuff is in the way.