<p>As freshman year approaches, I'm noticing more and more of my peers saying "I'll come visit you!" I have no problem about the idea of visiting, but there seem to be so many problems/variable associated with it. Trips can get expensive, roommates can be uncooperative about strangers in their room, school schedules almost surely will overlap. </p>
<p>Share how you managed to visit a friend at another college that was a significant distance away from yours and how you may have dealt with the money and scheduling conflicts that came with it. Thanks.</p>
<p>ummmm.. don't worry about the roommates being uncooperative. i highly doubt they'll be uncooperative and if they do, tell them to freakin deal with it for a few days.</p>
<p>as for school schedules, don't worry about overlapping. if you want to visit a friend or a friend wants to visit you, you'll MAKE time. </p>
<p>and money? c'mon now. how much would you possibly need to spend, unless you're flying like across the united states. and most people wouldn't make that far of a trip anyway, just to visit a friend at college.</p>
<p>yeah, from my own experience it never really works out. I suppose the biggest factor is how far away you are form one another and what the local transportation is like, also what activities and commitments you each have during the weekends. Like I ride horses on saturday mornings, and I'm a minimum of a 3 hour car drive (5 hour bus ride) away from any of my friends, so I never visited, and no one ever visited me because the transportation was so difficult to navigate.</p>
<p>If you're close it could work, if you're far it won't happen.</p>
<p>I often visit friends at other schools. It really depends on proximity, however. It is easy for me to go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and such, but I could never visit a friend at, say, Stanford or Chicago.</p>
<p>Visiting friends at other schools is alot of fun. I went a few times this year... all to schools within a 5 hour drive. I have a car on campus so Friday around noon me and a few of my friends packed up our cars and took off to some college. We each knew a few people at each college so it was just one big party. I insist on staying in a hotel because A) I don't like imposing on other people even if they say they don't mind, B) I don't want to sleep on their floor, and C) I don't want to ruin the relationship between my friend and his/her roommate(s) because s/he's having a friend over.</p>
<p>it's hard, but by no means impossible. i had a couple of friends visit me last year (they drove... 3 hours!), and I visited a friend at another school (three-hour busride from my school). it's lots of fun, seeing your friend in "college mode" and meeting the friends you've heard about. odds are, you'll only visit people you're really close with.</p>
<p>My roommate moved out to live with her boyfriend last year and I think my friends spent more nights in her bed than she did.. which shows how often friends came to visit me.. It really just depends on where they are coming from.</p>
<p>I had a break inbetween my spring semester and my lagniappe semester so I went home to jersey from nola, then proceeded to drive 3 hours into PA to visit a friend. To be honest most people like meeting new people. There are hardly ever any problems.</p>
<p>I went to other colleges a good 5-6 times through out the year, and it was a blast everytime. Friends party hard when people visit since they want to show their friends a good time. Never had a problem with their roomates. As for sleeping on the floor, I was always to drunk to care.</p>
<p>it's reallly easy to visit people... and fun for everyone! i loved meeting my friends' friends when i visited other people, as well as meeting the high school friends of my friends at school.</p>
<p>I go to school & live in CA, and I had a friend at MIT and he was stuck there all summer & begged me to fly out to visit him. He got out of classes before me - so his schedule wasn't a problem. I had an internship starting a week after my classes/finals ended, so I booked a flight for the day after my finals, arriving back the day before my internship. I searched all sorts of travel sites trying to find the best deal. There are some cheap sites exclusively for the poor student population like statravel, and xfare (fly standby for dirt cheap). </p>
<p>Personally my tripped sucked ass because all my friend wanted to do was sit in his room & watch anime and batman cartoons.. so I ended up getting in touch with a girl who was in my elementary school girl scout troop because on facebook it said she was in the Boston area. (I had plenty of time to waste online & research who else was around while he was watching tv)</p>
<p>Thats too bad. I was visiting UCLA and my friends there were in a frat. The other school i manily visited was ucsb. Kinda hard not to have fun with a ton of friends at these schools.</p>
<p>Get a AAA membership. Not only will it help you if something happens to your car on campus or on the trip, but you can also get hotel discounts. Find a good, inexpensive motel in the area--I recommend Holiday Inn Express or Sleep Inn as budget places. This way you're out of the way of potentially bothersome roommates/floormates.</p>
<p>As for me, I live at home. So when people who go away come back for a weekend, there is time to visit without the dorm garbage and whatnot. My door is always open to my friends and the closest thing I have to a roommate, which is an ancient golden retriever, never bothers anyone.</p>
<p>Join some sort of traveling EC like debate or model UN that will pay for the trip, then stay overnight with your friend rather than with the team.</p>
<p>Yeah, I have a friend who plays Ultimate Frisbee. One of their games was an overnighter and it gave him an excuse to see our buddy from that school. I don't think he stayed in his room and was with the team instead, but it was still a good incidental way to visit.</p>