My esteemed colleague Eric Land recently pointed out several reasons not to live more than a half hour from VLS. Lise Daniels provided something of a rebuttal, but I would like to add my own thoughts. I live in East Montpelier, on a dirt road off of another dirt road (which is one-lane, but two-way), in what you could easily consider the boonies. It takes me 15 minutes to reach the interstate, and 35 minutes to get to the school. My advice: carpool if you can! I meet my carpool at the I-89 exit 8 park and ride. I carpool with four people, two of whom live in the Burlington area, a student who lives in Calais (near East Montpelier, also the boonies) and a girl who lives in downtown Montpelier. It was not hard to find these carpool-mates. I met them through classes, but VLS also provides a list server to facilitate creating carpools. Although we have different schedules, if someone wants to stay late it is usually advantageous for the rest of us to hang around and do work. I have found the carpool experience to be pleasant. Riding with fellow students gives me a chance to wake up in the morning, and decompress after classes in the afternoon.Eric lays out a few specific reasons for not living too far from campus. Here are my responses.
1) A 1/2 hour away is a hour of wasted study time each day.
Riding with other students, we frequently talk about classes and try to flush out concepts we’re working on. Also, you can’t spend all day every day studying. It can be nice to decompress for an hour each day. As Lise points out, you can also catch up with books on CD. If you really want to make all your time productive, you can find study aids on CD.
2) The farther you are from town, the fewer and slower the internet connections.
This is true. One guy in our carpool has no high speed internet (and no option to get high speed). At our house, we only recently got the option for high speed internet. So it’s improving, but don’t take it for granted. Ditto for cell phone coverage.
3) Class is never cancelled for snow. That’s the word on the street. So you live in the boonies and get snowed in - you miss class.
Class is cancelled from time to time. But if driving in the snow is a big concern or a big change for you, the boonies might not be your best option. However, the road crews in Vermont are well-trained and get major roads cleared very quickly. If you live near the interstate (in Montpelier, for instance) you shouldn’t have much of a problem. Of course, you need to count on extra time for the drive.
4) It’s more likely that you’ll need a 4 wheel drive or all-wheel-drive if you live in the boonies.
My family has been here for about 18 years and never had a four or all wheel drive vehicle. Oftentimes, people with 4 wheel drive think they can drive fast and furious on the snow-covered roads. These people end up upside down or worse. You can definitely manage with two-wheel drive.
5) Law school is tough. What keeps me going, is seeing other people keep going. “If that person can hack it and is in the library studying, then why aren’t I there.” When I’m at my beautiful house in the boonies, its almost like I’m not at law school - and its very difficult to take things seriously. I pick up my daughter from daycare and then I take her home. And then I eat dinner and I go back to school to study.
It can be nice to escape from the law school atmosphere. I love getting home in the evening and being able to put law school out of my mind for just a few hours. If you’re in South Royalton, law school becomes your life. You see students all the time, you see the school all the time, you are surrounded with law. Of course . . .
6) If you are a poor self-motivator for studying… do NOT commute.
If you can’t convince yourself to study in the evening, the law school library atmosphere will be helpful if not necessary. Of course, being surrounded by stressed-out law students can be a distraction, not a motivator at times.
7) There are a TON of on-campus activities that I REALLY REALLY wish I were around for, except I live a 1/2 hour away. All that undergrad club crap - in law school, its serious and you’re making connections and managing activities that you will actually put on your resume.
This is probably the single biggest negative for me. There have been a number of events after classes I wish I could attend but just really wanted to go home and didn’t want to come back. Of course, for events that I absolutely couldn’t miss, I just try to convince my carpool-mates to wait with me. Still, I feel that I’m not as much a member of the VLS student community since I commute.
In summary, deciding where to live is a big choice. A lot of it depends on your personal situation and preferences. Get all the information, talk to students, but make the best decision for yourself. You can make the best out of living anywhere.
3 Comments
Brian wrote: “I carpool with two people who live in the Burlington area, a student who lives in Calais (near East Montpelier, also the boonies) and a girl who lives in downtown Montpelier.”
Since you live in East Montpelier, you should be aware enough that Calais and Montpelier are not “in the Burlington area”, not unless one is thinking of VLS as the center of the universe however, rather one would realize that Calais and surrounding communities — including Montpelier itself — are located within the Barre - Montpelier region or area; or what some generally refer to Central Vermont (unless you are originally from an area outside of Vermont where cities like Montpelier and Barre seem to be too small or insignificant to count, especially compared to the likes of say by way of example: Burlington, Rutland or Brattleboro, etc.).
Anyway, like some Vermonters have been known to say, “the good thing about Burlington is that it is so close to Vermont.”
Don’t they teach geography at VLS, at least as it may concerns jurisdictions? Guess not or, maybe you were absent on that day.
Humor aside though, the Burlington area is Burlington and surrounding communities (i.e., those within a certain radius of the city and those within Chittenden County), not Central Vermont and most certainly not communities within Washington County, etc.
P.S.
Of course, the confusion in your statement could be due to how you wrote it and then how it was understood when reading it. It could be that you in fact carpool with four people, rather than just two from the local area (i.e., two people from the Burlington area and then one from Calais and another from Montpelier), which does not make itself clear enough from the way you originally wrote it.
By the way, I blogged about this within a blog post posted to the Montpelier Matters blog:
http://montpelier-vt.blogspot.com/2007/10/calias-montpelier-burlington-area.html
The sentence originally read: “I carpool with two people who live in the Burlington area, a student who lives in Calais (near East Montpelier, also the boonies) and a girl who lives in downtown Montpelier.” It is a list of the people I carpool with, but I see where the confusion arose.
Burlington is a solid 35 minutes from Montpelier and a good hour-plus from VLS. I should note that the two people who carpool from Burlington have a much longer ride than I, but both seem to enjoy having company for at least part of the trip and they usually carpool from Burlington to Montpelier as well.
I have changed the sentence to better spell out that I do indeed carpool with four people.
Thanks for your vigilance. Let’s eschew obfuscation once and for all.
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