My Moving Journey: What I Learned (Part 1)
By: Sydney Henry ‘24
Welcome back everyone! It’s a new semester, everyone is back on campus, and everyone is still not over the end of summer break. My last post of the spring semester talked about me getting ready to move cross country from New York to California to attend USC, and let’s just say I both did and didn’t follow my own advice. Yikes! But, as I said in that last post, this is a learning experience for all of us, and I definitely learned a lot. A lot that I can share with you all.
Let’s go back to the beginning…..
I had already known that my move-in date and time was August 17th at 10:45 AM, but the official USC move-in date was the 18th. Here’s where I made my first mistake, that I didn’t even realize was a mistake until I started thinking about it. Both my roommate and I had scheduled move-in on the same day and time. It was totally my fault as she applied for housing before me and picked a check-in time before me too. We did communicate, but I guess the time she picked totally slipped my mind and I ended up choosing the same time too. Thankfully, it worked out in the end.
Next up was the whole suitemate situation. Since my roommate and I, let’s call her Kay, picked a two bedroom, four person apartment and we only knew each other, that meant that we probably wouldn’t have known the other two people living with us. Of course, USC and their terrible housing website took a long time to update and tell us who our new suitemates might be, so my tip of communication and reaching out definitely helped out when it came to this one, even though we had less time to actually figure out who each of us were.
Wait, hold on. Let’s back it up a bit more to flight booking time! This one relates to move-in day and creates a whole timeline of the move-in process.
For me, I had my mom, dad, sister, and uncle going down with me, so that was a lot of tickets and a lot of money to be spent on those tickets. We ended up all booking our flights to depart on the morning of Friday, August 13th while my family went back home August 21st. Mind you, we booked our flights on July 14th, a whole month in advance.
On that note, let’s get into the do’s and don’ts of booking flights:
Airfare is expensive and if you’re traveling as a college student or with multiple people you’ll want to get the cheapest price there is. Southwest is a recommended airline for many people to fly with as they offer 2 free bags and their flights are relatively more affordable. One con however is that many of their flights have layovers, not necessarily long, but some people, like me, prefer to fly straight through.
So if Southwest isn’t the best option, what do you do? Try looking at sites that alert you as to when flight prices have dropped. I personally used SkyScanner and that got me the cheapest flight one-way for me and round-trip for the rest of my family. The only tricky part to SkyScanner was that for a round-trip flight, my family would have to go down to California with one airline company, JetBlue, and go back up to New York with another company, United. They didn’t mind and didn’t have much trouble with each airline, so it wasn’t too terrible and the price was just right.
I know I’ve been talking a lot about airlines and flights, but my last tip with flights will bleed into the next topic I want to cover and that’s luggage and perks.
Let’s do perks first! Personally, since we used SkyScanner to book flights, we were automatically signing up for the basic economy package which has limited “perks” (if you would even call them that). All we got was one free bag along with some free snacks and drinks on the plane. Since I went down to California with so many people, it was fine to be in basic economy, but there were definitely hiccups, like having to pay extra for a carry-on as a checked back because we were only allowed a personal item (like a duffel bag or backpack). We weren’t able to do early check-in either, so we had to wait in line with everyone else, but thankfully the line moved pretty quickly.
I think that as a student who’s going to have to fly back and forth between New York and California at least 2-3 times during the year, it might be worth it to look into a student credit card or program where flights can be paid for with the card and a whole bunch of perks come along with it while the card is paid off. Take note that credit cards are a muddy area for college students; I have one and I’m too scared to use it, but always make sure to have money ready to pay off the card whenver you need to.
Now let’s get into luggage. This was the biggest struggle for me as I had to fit shoes, clothes, toiletries, electronics, etc. between 4 different pieces of luggage (my dad, my mom, and my own) along with my backpack. That seems like a lot of space, but it also seemed like I had an endless amount of things.
Essential Tip: Buy a luggage scale. I probably closed and opened my suitcase over 30 times and weighed it each of those times to make sure I was under and not over.
Another Tip: Most airlines state that your luggage has to be 50 pounds or less or you’ll be charged a fee. I recommend you be under 50, at most 47, because the luggage scale isn’t always accurate and those pounds you left untouched could make a huge difference. I was holding my breath in that airport when my suitcase had to be weighed because I didn’t want to have to open it in the middle of the airport and rearrange things just because I was overweight. Thankfully, it was only flagged as heavy, not overweight, so I wasn’t charged an extra fee.
That also means I didn’t really end up following my former advice to pack light. Yikes!
That’s it for Part 1, but stay tuned for Part 2! #Fight On!
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