Transportation

Last Thursday my laptop crashed, luckily I had most of my documents backed up so I didn’t loose to much data but I did have to go through the lovely experience of re-installing everything on my laptop. Now I was able to get on every program I needed expect for one, Microsoft office, normally I would use Open Office (a free version of an office suit which can do almost everything the Microsoft product can do. I recommend that you download this version unless you need the Microsoft version. http://www.openoffice.org ) but since my current internship/class has be working with Access (a database program), I needed to get a hold of my copy of Microsoft Office which I have back at my house in NJ. Something that I never truly considered in choosing a college was how I was going to get from school back home to NJ; now I planned on living on campus while I was at school so it never dawned on me to make sure that I could get back and forth easily. Lucky for me in choosing Temple I can get back to NJ in just 2 train rides. I grab the R7 from campus right to Trenton Station then I grab a northbound train to Metropark or New Brunswick where I can get my parents to pick me up.

What I did consider transportation wise when picking a school was how I was going to get around campus/the city. Some schools I looked at had pre-set system with their town/city which would allow students to ride the metro system for free; University of Washington had this setup. What’s nice about it was that I would never need to pay for a ride, just flash my id and boom I could go anywhere. Now the downside was that the campus was a good 20 minutes outside of Seattle proper so I would have to ride a shuttle to a bus to the metro system so while I could ride within the city for free getting to the city was a bit of a hike. Temple on the other hand does not offer free public transportation but it makes the campus easy to access via public transportation. The regional rail line lets me get to and from NJ easily, and the subway makes quick work of going downtown. However if I’m just going to go downtown and time isn’t a factor I usually try to grab the shuttle. Now I mentioned that we have no free public transportation but we do have a shuttle system that connects our campuses what’s nice about Temple is that we have the one building downtown Temple University Center City, (I’ve actually only taken one class here and it was a night class, something I don’t particularly like but the professor was amazing). This shuttle runs all day and well into the night and any student can ride it, not just those going to class. The only downside to the shuttle is that it only runs once every hour and it’s been running a good 25 min late recently. On campus transportation doesn’t exist simply because the campus isn’t big enough to warrant it.