How can I get to college?

nontraditional
Sun, 28 Jun 2009 13:53:59 +0000

I’d look into hiring professional movers. If you (1) are willing to pack everything up yourself, including putting bubble wrap around your furniture (so that the labor-intensive part of their work involved driving to where you live now and putting things into their truck), and (2) are willing and able to be very flexible around when you get your stuff (meaning that they could take it whenever they have an almost-full truck), it might be cheaper than you think. You can also try Craigslist or something to see whether there’s anyone in your area who is going to be going to the same city as you at about the same time: if you split the driving and share rental/gas costs, it might be affordable.

I’d look into shipping what you can by UPS. Again, it might be cheaper than you think, depending on what you need moved.

I’d also really look at the train again. Most stations have redcaps who will put your luggage on wheeled carts and haul them anywhere else in the station for a tip. If you’ve just sold your furniture, you’ll have money for the tips.

But I think my first choice would be to sell as much of my furniture as was going to be difficult to deal with, UPS a big box of things I didn’t really need right away, and take either the train (be sure to budget in 1 or 2 days for delays, depending on how far you’re going – if I’m doing DC to Chicago, for instance, I tend to budget about 36 hours – because once trains start falling behind schedule, they end up having to wait for other trains to clear tracks, and the delays snowball) or Greyhound (again, you will want to budget some time for buses being late and not meeting their connections; I haven’t done too many long-distance trips, but I think I ended up 12 hours late on a DC-to-Indianapolis run once).

If you are planning to live in your new area for the next four years, meaning that you won’t have to ship everything back across the country in the summers, I would suggest starting out with an air mattress and looking into buying used furniture – or, at the end of semesters, picking through furniture people leave out on the streets – when you get there.

If your new school is a university, or if there is a university in town, there will be grad students in the same position you’re in, and either way there will be undergraduates who aren’t going to live in dorms and who don’t have parents in a position to buy them all new stuff. There will be people prepared to sell to those students, and there will be ways to move furniture. If you start with an air mattress, a lamp, and some plastic crates to organize things, go after a chair and table next (because having a comfortable study setup is going to be important – but not vital: there’s always the library), then bookshelves (which can be as simple as cinderblock and boards) and then fill in the rest when you find good deals, you can have a full setup (granted, not one where everything matches, but a lot of students decorate that way) by the start of next summer at very little cost.

I’d skip the airlines. Yes, it’s faster (and you don’t have to worry about food the way you would on a long train or bus ride), but there’s a lot more stress involved too. And you do hear regularly about people who show up at the airport to find out that their flight is canceled and the airline is offering them a seat on another flight 2 days later. Besides, I’ve always liked meeting people on trains and buses. (Of course, I grew up with parents who thought 2 years old was old enough to sit still for an 18-hour car ride, so I may have more patience for that sort of thing than most people do.)

As long as you don’t leave it to the last minute (so that you can’t handle delays) and you’ve picked a method cheap enough that you can have about $100 in cash in your pocket in case of emergencies, though, you will probably be fine whatever you choose.