Commuter Culture Shock
Two hundred forty miles a week, 60 miles a day. On average, that’s how many miles I drive to-and-fro CSULB – not including leaving campus for food or going out for the weekend. During my first year as a junior transfer student, I had four days in which I had class and it was one of the most exhausting things I’ve done. This semester, my first one as a senior, I opted to load my classes up into just two days’ worth of class – meaning I’ve cut down my weekly travel time to just 120 miles.
Commuting is such a major part of my life here at LBSU, that I’ve ended up taking accelerated classes all on the same two days. Commuting, in some ways, controls my academic future – my schedule and my daily life are completely at the whim of how good or bad the commute is for any given time.
Above all else, commuting has made it so that I sometimes feel very isolated from the community here at Long Beach State. Many of the events that happen weekly are at times of day where commuting to them would make regular attendance impossible – such as how many events regularly take place later in the evening on Thursdays and Fridays, a time that makes commuting from Santa Monica to Long Beach an ordeal that takes well over an hour.
The 405 freeway stretches on during the evening on March 11, 2023 in Los Angeles, Calif. The freeway is a frequent commuting pathway, not the least of which includes Cal State Long Beach students from the Santa Monica area. Photo by Marc Federici.
In my second semester as a student journalist at LBSU, I opted to cover a whole host of sporting events. I thoroughly enjoyed the games that I reported on, but the fact that the commute between Long Beach and my home is so severe, especially in the late afternoons, meant that I often had to sacrifice something just to maintain my attendance. Most sporting events on campus begin at 7 p.m., but in a semester where my classes end at 3 or 4 p.m., the traffic back-and-forth would be so severe that it was more reasonable for me to simply remain on campus in the library for the gap in my schedule.
This has severely hurt my ability to enjoy a lot of what the CSULB campus offers – I’ve yet to join a club, as many of them meet later in the evenings as well, and the timing makes it so that I would spend more time on the road traveling, than I would enjoying myself at a given club.
I love driving, but the kind of driving that happens on my commute to campus can hardly be called driving. At times, traffic can be merciful, and it can be as simple as putting on my cruise control and letting the car go. The timings of my classes this semester – all of them starting in the mid-morning – has thankfully made it so my morning commute takes little more than 30 minutes. Last semester, with a lot of my classes having later timings, traffic was anything but kind – with commutes lasting upwards of an hour if not longer. Sitting in traffic isn’t just annoying, it’s seriously demoralizing and my academic performance has suffered at times due to the infuriating nature of it.
This semester is my penultimate and I still have yet to really figure this out. I have enjoyed my professors at LBSU greatly, and I wouldn’t trade my education for the world, but I would be lying if I said I did not feel like I have not really gotten the proper college experience.
Early on at my time at Long Beach, I had seriously considered staying in a dorm on campus. I had even gone through the process of setting everything up, prepaying for a semester and handling all of the paperwork necessary. Come move-in day, I ultimately ended up choosing not to dorm – for a variety of reasons, not the least of which involved the cramped living conditions.
At times, I regret that decision. Having ridden the parking shuttle every day, I’ve taken note of just how many students use the shuttle as their sole method of transportation – moving only between upper campus, lower campus, and their dorms. The proximity leaves me with some degree of jealousy – I’d no doubt attend events with considerably more frequency if they were just a small walk or an even shorter bus ride away from me.
Students ride the escalators towards upper campus at Cal State Long Beach on Feb. 9, 2023 in Long Beach, Calif. The path is one of the most traversed route running from lower campus and parking towards upper campus and an integral part of physical movement on campus. Photo by Marc Federici.
It's frustrating that I feel excluded from clubs because the commute is so severe that it would make attendance a near-impossibility. I hate that I miss a lot of sporting events because of their timings in the evening – sure, I can easily watch them at home on the variety of streaming services that LBSU games are broadcast on, but it’s not the same as being there. It certainly isn’t the same as having press access and being permitted to go to the bottom floor with a camera to practice my craft.
I don’t think I can stomach the dormitories and so I feel stuck in a bit of a vicious loop. Commuting seems like the safe option when it comes to my personal living preferences, but doing so leaves me isolated from the vibrant community LBSU has that I’ve only just barely been able to peek into.
Perhaps amusingly, working at DIG is probably the closest I’ve felt to the community here. Seeing the work that other people are writing and the variety of trends, people and micro-communities that are being covered here has opened my eyes to a lot of what LBSU culture has to offer.
In some manner, I suppose I’m hoping to treat my time at DIG as a personal experiment on culture – working here necessitates a degree of involvement, and that involvement has made me feel more part of LBSU than I ever have before.
Even though this is my senior year, and I might regret some of the time I’ve sacrificed to my commute, I’m looking forward to the opportunity to really see CSULB culture first hand.