Studying at Warwick from home

Hello everyone, I am about to start studying at Warwick this September and was wondering if anyone lives at home (around London or anywhere else, which is about 2 hours from the university) and travels to uni and back every day instead of staying at the campus?

Reply 1

artful_lounger

Universities Forum Helper

I'm not sure if that's a realistic commute. While the train from London to Coventry is only 1hr15 mins which is borderline but probably doable, it looks like it's another 20 mins bus from the Coventry train station to the uni (and with traffic that might be longer), plus however long it takes you to get from where you will live in London to London Euston. Also consider when does the bus leave relative to your train arriving? How often does the bus go? If you miss the bus, will you make your lecture/train/etc? What if there are strikes? Delays? Cancellations?

Commutes are very draining, even ones that don't seem too long, especially when you're doing it most days, and when you start daisy chaining different public transit services and having to balance all the different times and deal with different services having different possible disruptions. Commutes are also expensive (and you get less maintenance loan living at home), and you will inevitably end up with a situation of having one day where you have a single one hour lecture and are having to decide if you want to spend 2+ hours commuting for that or not. If you start skipping lectures because of your commute then things can get out of control very quickly. I really wouldn't recommend it for full time study.

University of Warwick

Coventry

Reply 2

Interea

Original post by Anonymous

So commuting 4 hours a day, 5 days a week? That seems impractical, especially since timetabled hours can be anywhere from 9am to 7pm.

I know one person who does a 3 hour round-trip by car from near London, but it really restricts them. It's too tiring/time-consuming for them to do the journey every day, so they had to choose their modules to ensure all their contact hours were on as few days as possible, rather than picking what actually interested them. They can't attend many social events either, as they always need to be either driving or studying/working.

I know someone else who had a similar length journey, but only because it was by public transport (would have been <1 hour if they drove). They had a bit more free time as they could study on the train, but still not much as they had to keep changing trains and getting on crowded buses etc., and they also were restricted on social events due to the timings of the last train home.

I'll also note that both of these are humanities students, it really would not be feasible with the number of contact hours scattered across the week on most STEM degrees. They also both lived on campus in first year, since there are more core modules and so less flexibility to choose modules/schedule around the long commute.