Last year I, like many other second-year students, decided to move off campus. The difference was that I was moving far enough to commute to campus. At 15 minutes in everyday traffic and no Wolfline near me, I had to drive.
I fell in love with the house, the independence it provided, and didn’t even mind my non-student roommates. But driving still presented me with a world of trouble, and eventually, I had to move. I hadn’t fully prepared for the real challenge that this seemingly small change turned out to be.
Therefore, I want to educate the undergraduates who follow me — whether looking for somewhere now or planning to in the future — on how commuting to campus is a bad idea for people like me. The experience distanced me socially, hit me where it hurts in terms of productivity and created new trivial problems that I had trouble adapting to.
Socially, it’s harder to hang out with friends when you live 15 minutes away. It’s certainly not impossible by any means, but compared to when my friends lived within walking distance and would just knock on my door, it was quite the change. Compound that with the fact that I have trouble being the one to initiate activities, and I often would spiral into a sort of social isolation. It was bad for my mental state, and although I avoided full-on depression, I was overall less happy.
Academically, it hit harder. I procrastinate; it’s one of my worst traits. This applies to attendance too; I even had trouble with attendance when I was on campus. When commuting, I would wake up and have to pack lunch, gather everything I would need until that evening (a lot) and drive 15 minutes just to attend a class I didn’t like which didn’t take attendance. Often I’d just go back to sleep. Missing classes hurt my grades, and sleeping in hurt my sleep schedule.
Small things also added up. Trivial parts of the day like lunch and occasionally dinner became a regular conundrum. If I didn’t have time to pack, I had to buy something to eat. Like many students, I’m responsible for budgeting food on top of many other things, and while working a part-time job at Technician gives me something, I am for the most part in no way financially capable of eating out more than a few times a week.
Meals, at times, would put me between a rock and a hard place. Should I drive to my house and back during classes (a 30-minute expedition), should I buy something or should I just be hungry? With no real way to measure, I would say I chose the options 30%, 30% and 40% of the time, respectively. I got hangry a lot last year.
The first option of commuting home and back also brings another issue to light: gas. The majority of the gas money I spent during the last year was spent on commuting to and from classes. Frankly, I never truly appreciated how great Wolfline was until I didn’t have it.
I’d like to be clear, though: Commuting was only bad for me because of factors like my personality, which finds trouble being alone, and specific character traits, like a tendency to procrastinate. Obviously, some people make it work, even despite the trivial challenges.
That being said, if upcoming students somehow relate to the warning signs I am sending, I urge them to consider commuting with a very critical and introspective eye. For me, it was a socially difficult, academically challenging and obstacle-filled experience. It taught me a lot about myself by challenging me, but it also taught me to move closer to NC State.
