The following blog post was co-written by two of Campus Reach's fall 2015 interns, Shrinka Roy and Allison Kosic. Roy is a fourth year mechanical engineering student at Georgia Tech and currently interns in Structure Engineering for the Tech Ops Department. Kosic is a third year industrial engineering study at Georgia Tech and currently interns in Contract Services for the Tech Ops Department. It’s funny, but even though we go to the same school, we didn't meet each other until this semester on the first day at the Southwest Intern orientation. And even though we barely knew each other, we ended up traveling together that first weekend. Since then, we've become traveling buddies for nearly every trip we've taken! We've been to a ton of cities: Seattle, Vancouver, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Denver, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Austin, Atlanta, St. Louis, and San Juan. We’ve been to nine national parks and have each logged over 200 hours in the sky.
As our internship comes to a close, we now consider ourselves travel experts and want to share some essential tips on how to travel on a college student budget:
- Keep an eye out for flights, and be open to a bunch of different destinations instead of settling on one!
- Don’t underestimate the power of Facebook when your overnight accommodations don’t pan out. You’d be surprised by how many friends (or friends of friends) you have in random places!
- On your way back from a destination, consider a layover somewhere for a few hours—whether just for lunch or dinner, or to visit a landmark!
- If you stay at a hostel, make friends with fellow travelers like yourself. You can end up making friends all over the world, and that means more couches to sleep on in the future!
- Clear out the pictures on your phone before traveling, because you WILL run out of memory space and then agonize over which pictures to delete/keep to free up space.
- To conserve phone battery, put your phone on airplane mode whenever possible.
We sure have had an incredible past three months traveling from coast to coast across the U.S. Thank you, Southwest Airlines, for allowing us to experience the flight of our lives during our internships!