[natural sound: CTA announcement]
A majority of Northwestern’s undergraduate student body lives on or near campus — but a select few undergrads, along with many graduate students, choose to commute to campus using the CTA.
Last year, Weinberg senior Maxine van der Donk lived 10 minutes walking from Tech. But she says her apartment wasn’t ideal.
MAXINE VAN DER DONK: Rent was high and increasing even more, and the apartment was not very nice at all, and we couldn’t find any other kind of apartments within the price range we were looking for that were actually to our standards.
Now, van der Donk lives in South Evanston. She takes the Purple Line from South Boulevard to Noyes for class — a train ride that takes around 10 minutes, but with waiting and walking, the total commute can be anywhere between 20 to 40 minutes.
She says commuting is cheaper — and gives her a world outside of Northwestern.
VAN DER DONK: There’s a lot more, I think community, like I know my neighbors in this new apartment. I’ve chatted with some of them. I can go downstairs to ask to borrow something, and I feel like I don’t get that same sense of community when I lived closer to campus, even though most of the people living in the same building as me were probably other students.
van der Donk says the transition came easily — there’s been no significant change for her extracurriculars or social life.
Still, she’s had to adjust to the uncertainty that comes with taking the train.
VAN DER DONK: You definitely have to plan much more in advance where you’re gonna be and what you’re gonna do. You can’t be quite as impulsive of, oh, I’m just gonna go meet up with friends right here at this time.
Time management is essential when it comes to commuting, especially for students who live far.
Medill part-time student Max Sullivan lives on the southwest corner of Pilsen on the west side of Chicago. Sullivan uses ze/hir pronouns.
Ze hops on the Pink Line at Damon, then catches the Purple Line Express from the Loop. Hir commute to campus usually takes between 90 minutes to two hours.
MAX SULLIVAN: I’m part-time, so that’s the only reason why any of this is viable. If I were doing this four or five days a week, I think it would wear me absolutely thin.
Sullivan takes classes on Monday and Tuesday. On Monday, ze rides the CTA to campus and stays in the area overnight with family friends in Rogers Park. After hir second class on Tuesday, ze heads back to Pilsen.
One downside of commuting? Sullivan doesn’t have a place to store food or clothing — so ze had to get creative.
SULLIVAN: I have this very large backpack. Inside of the backpack, I put my class backpack. It fits two backpacks in it, so that has anything that I would need for class. And then in the rest of the room, I stuff the next day’s clothes and snacks and my water bottle, and I carry a lunch box and so on.
A Nashville native, Sullivan watched the city’s increase in population outpace its public transit infrastructure. This made hir appreciate the CTA — and the feasibility of commuting from Pilsen to Evanston — even more.
SULLIVAN: So being in a city that has so much more comprehensive public transit, even with its, you know, occasional downsides, you know, your ghost buses and so on, it definitely feels like a major upgrade for me, and I enjoy getting around that way.
Sullivan says ze can turn off hir brain when ze’s on the CTA, and the experience has taught hir not to be “on” all the time.
SULLIVAN: I think one thing that I like about transit in general is that it helps remind me that, like I’m not the main character of the universe. There are other people having their own days, and sometimes the guy who’s talking your ear off, he’s the main character of the day, and that’s okay, and I think it helps me, you know, remember like, the values of like community, even with people who I might not understand on face value.
[natural sound: CTA doors closing and CTA leaving the platform]
For WNUR News, I’m Evelyn Won.