The fall semester at Morgan State University has officially begun, but a large number of students are still without housing assignments, including myself.

As a resident of Rockville, MD, in Montgomery County, I have to commute to school. I don’t have access to a car, so I have to get up early every morning and take at least one bus and two trains every day, and a trip that normally only lasts 45 minutes turns into two to three hours.

For just one day, a trip from Twinbrook Station, the Metro train station near my house, to Union Station in Washington D.C. and back, costs me about $10, and taking two MARC trains a day (to Morgan and back to Union Station) costs $16 a day. At week’s end, I will have spent about $130 on train rides alone.

The bus fare in Baltimore only costs 4.20 a day to and from the campus, but they are largely unreliable. As I waited for the Silver line, the bus responsible for taking me past MSU, I found that in the same 30-minute span it took for it to come there were three buses that came to bring people to Towson University. Uber is another option, but even the smallest-sized Uber can cost north of $8.

You can follow my entire experience below.