“Mo-om, I’m home!” By Julia Betancourt
U
nlike most Barnard students, I am fortunate enough to be able to say these words every day, as I let the apartment door slam shut behind me and walk into the living room to greet my parents. Commuting to school is a vastly different experience from that of other Barnard students, for whom packing a lunch, hugging parents “hello” after school, and carefully planning every day to make it home at a decent hour all seem like archaic customs. For Barnard’s commuting population, however, this is an everyday experience. Most students don’t realize that it is even possible to live at home for these four years. I can understand why—when applying to college, my high school insisted that “everyone dorms” and I was pushed to apply to two out of state schools despite knowing even back then that I would commute. For me, it made more sense to live at home, where I could enjoy my parent’s cooking every night, than to spend $10,000 a year or more on a dorm. If I didn’t dorm when I went to high school four miles from home, then why should I dorm at a school a quarter of the distance away? I knew the adjustment to college would be difficult and that changing my living space would only make that more stressful. This is not to say that commuting is never stressful—there are days when I wish I could roll out of bed at 8:30, still in my pajamas, and still make it to an 8:40 on time, or that I could THE BULLETIN -
snuggle up in my bed and nap for the strange, two hour break between my piano class and my seminar. But my bed is too far away from campus to make this happen. I would also like not having to come up on a day in the middle of reading week to drop a hard copy of my final paper under a professor’s door, especially when email will suffice. This simple request that takes ten minutes for a residential student can take two hours out of a commuter’s day. This semester, I am taking a science lab that requires me to stay on campus after dark, something I usually try to avoid. Assuming the class ends on time, I could catch a bus that leaves me across the street from my building twenty-five minutes later. However, on most days, more than half the class stays past the official end time to finish the work. If I stay after class and miss my bus, I have to wait at least thirty minutes for the next one or put myself in danger by walking through streets that are abandoned when the sun goes down. The difference between a class ending on time and two minutes late makes all the difference in a commuter’s day.
20 - Dec. 2019/Jan. 2020
