intern commute time

[psychrat]

I will be starting internship this summer and am interested to see how long current or past interns commuted to their internship sites. What was the average time door to door?

My site is in a city that was is cited for being one of the most dangerous in America, so most interns commute between 25-60 minutes. I am currently looking at apartments that are about a 20 minute train ride away (but then I will need about a 15 minute walk to the station and another 15 minute walk to the hospital). I believe interns are supposed to be in for around 8:30 at my site, so I would have to leave around 7:30am to get the train. If I had a car, my commute would only be around 20-35 minutes, but parking is an issue, and I really hate driving in cities, so I think I will just use public transit.

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[erg923]

I will be starting internship this summer and am interested to see how long current or past interns commuted to their internship sites. What was the average time door to door?

11 minutes.

 

[WisNeuro]

15-20

 

[Therapist4Chnge]

Mine was 45-60min, depending on weather. I actually didn't mind the drive bc it gave me a chance to decompress. I'm a city person and preferred a reverse commute, though paying for gas (this is back when it was $$$) stunk.

 

[cara susanna]

Mine's about 15-20 minutes with combined walking and public transit for one site. However, the other site I'm at is further away and requires a car. The drive ranges from 20 minutes to an hour depending on traffic.

 

[pavlove]

45-60 minutes each way I'm interning in west LA... carpooling helps, but there is ultimately no escape. Even the nights I have clinics until 8pm or later, there is still traffic. Thankfully this was not my first time living in an area with terrible traffic so it wasn't a total shock.

 

[HomeworkHelper]

Around 15 minutes. I am not a morning person and work started at 8am so I chose to live close-by. Was very happy I did!

 

[deleted343839]

About 10-15 minutes by car, 30 minutes by bus. My standard day was from 8:00 until 6:00 or later, so I valued a short commute.

 

[PsyDr]

Keep in mind that quality of life studies have found an negative correlation between commute time and quality of life self reports.

(and yeah, I know there are like 800 different reasons why this could be so. )

 

[Therapist4Chnge]

I'm a big fan of public transportation. I commuted ~35-45min via bus for two years during my fellowship years and it was far better than trying to fight traffic, chase parking, worry about construction detours, etc. I had a much higher likelihood of running late bc I couldn't find parking as compared to a bus running late. I usually relaxed on the way in (e.g. podcasts or music) and then read/studied on the way home. To encourage public transit/ride sharing (and in response to non-existant parking), the hospital subsidized use…so the bus cost me $0. The only real downside I found was needing to be somewhere right after work because I wasn't the best about being on time for the exact bus i wanted…

 

[psychgirl77]

I am starting internship in the fall and my commute time by public transit will be about an hour each way. It's long, but typical for the city my internship is in.

 

[AcronymAllergy]

I lived ridiculously close to my internship site (<2 miles), and our parking garage was about 6 blocks from the hospital. All told, I'd imagine it took about 15 minutes between driving and walking/riding the shuttle to get to work.

Just for a frame of reference, the postdoc commute was about 20 minutes (no parking garage involved), and my current job takes about 30 minutes.

As with T4C, our internship site subsized public transit, and also offered access to ride sharing (i.e., van/car pools). Since I lived so close, though, I never participated.

 

[PsychPhDone]

25 minutes. Most or all of it walking (in daylight). I think it's a nice "transition" from work/home.

 

[OneNeuroDoctor]

I commuted 60 minutes one-way as my internship was in a rural area with a high unemployment rate and high rate of poverty and crime. Housing options were not good. I knew I would only be there one year. Most of the staff live in areas outside the city. Other interns opted to live in the city and regretted this. One was living in a house that apparently was a drug house before and she had strange people knocking on her door all times of the night. She broke her lease and moved in with her aunt 120 miles away for a two-hour commute one way.

 

[BuckeyeLove]

This year on fellowship I'm approx. .7 miles from my hospital. It's amazing and I'm taking soaking it up. Going to be driving all over once I move back home I have a feeling.

 

[AcronymAllergy]

This year on fellowship I'm approx. .7 miles from my hospital. It's amazing and I'm taking soaking it up. Going to be driving all over once I move back home I have a feeling.

Given that you're in SEC country, I think the more important question in your case might be--how far are you from the football stadium?

 

[smalltownpsych]

Less than 5 minutes. That's what made me fall in love with working in small towns.

 

[Therapist4Chnge]

My current commute…7-8 minutes. I also have reserved parking, which was probably the best perk I asked for when I negotiated.

 

[calimich]

Currently interning in SF Bay Area. I use public transportation and have a ~15 min drive to my home station, ~50 min train ride, then ~10 minute walk from the work station to my building. I drive every now and then and much prefer the public transport route as sitting in traffic going home is much more tiring, imo, than sitting on a train reading, listening to music, or playing clash of clans on my phone

 

[tpink]

10 minutes tops, thats with stopping at traffic lights.

 

[CBTFTW]

15-25 minutes walking, depending on which of two sites I'm going to. I'm also in a pretty dangerous city, but I've figured out a route that feels reasonably safe.

 

[AcronymAllergy]

Less than 5 minutes. That's what made me fall in love with working in small towns.

Ditto. Unfortunately, even though I also live in a small town, there's really no viable residential options within about 30 minutes of my current work site.

On the plus side, the weather's great, and "traffic" here pales in comparison to both my home town and the city where I completed my postdoc.

 

[Ollie123]

We have an odd setup and I would love to have "one" location that I commute to on a daily basis. I have four offices at present in separate locations (Clinic, Community Center, Courthouse, State Institute) and then 2 other buildings I'm in for seminars or meetings but don't have an office in. None of these things are realistically walkable from one another, save for the two meeting/seminar locations and most days I'm traveling between sites at some point. My commute ranges from 20 minutes to 1 hour (1.5 hours if traffic/snow) depending on where I'm going. An hour each way every day is probably the max I could have handled this year, but I'm glad most days its not that much.

It isn't really as bad as it sounds, though I get frustrated during those occasional windows where I may have 30 minutes free but the things I want to do are half a state away. Or worse - when I'm eating lunch sitting on the floor in the hallway in the building where I don't have an office. Just two more months til post-doc!

 

[Therapist4Chnge]

Wow Ollie123 that sounds frustrating. I lucked out on internship by getting a (tiny) office, but it let me hole up and write my reports in peace. On fellowship (4 offices, all shared space…for two years). We regularly had to bounce between shared space, resident "fishbowl", random float computers, etc. Amazing training experience, but it was two years of semi-controlled chaos. The travel between three different physical locations complicated matters because parking was non-existant. Good times!

 

[AcronymAllergy]

Wow Ollie123 that sounds frustrating. I lucked out on internship by getting a (tiny) office, but it let me hole up and write my reports in peace. On fellowship (4 offices, all shared space…for two years). We regularly had to bounce between shared space, resident "fishbowl", random float computers, etc. Amazing training experience, but it was two years of semi-controlled chaos. The travel between three different physical locations complicated matters because parking was non-existant. Good times!

Just to add my own experiences to this string--my internship was a VA and AMC consortium, so we had multiple different physical sites depending on the particular location. Fortunately, all of said sites were within walking distance, at least for me (some of the kiddo folks had to drive to a couple of their clinics).

And to add on to what T4C said--I don't know that I can overstate how nice it was to have my own office on fellowship. That and pay factored more heavily into my decision-making than I'd ever initially anticipated, in part because so much else was very similar across my top choices (e.g., training quality and opportunities, support and availability of supervisors, etc.). In some ways, I saw it as a proxy for how valued neuropsychology (and the fellowship in particular) was by the hospital as a whole, and how willing/able they were to provide resources for training. Obviously not a perfect 1:1 relationship, but it was fairly accurate with respect to the site at which I ended up.

 

[psychgirl77]

One of the places I interviewed at had 8 people stuck together in an office - all interns and psychometrists. I have no idea how they were able to write reports! I ended up ranking the site pretty low, also considering it a proxy for how valued neuropsychology was.

 

[AcronymAllergy]

One of the places I interviewed at had 8 people stuck together in an office - all interns and psychometrists. I have no idea how they were able to write reports! I ended up ranking the site pretty low, also considering it a proxy for how valued neuropsychology was.

I've seen large shared offices as well. Sometimes it can work and sometimes not, depending on how available other resources might be (e.g., office space on individual rotations).

On internship, I honestly wouldn't have been bothered by it quite so much. But by the time I got to fellowship, I felt like I could spoil myself a bit by prioritizing having my own office space.

 

[smalltownpsych]

During practicum at times I was doing therapy literally under a stairwell. During internship, I had an office that was in the admin building, but never really went there since all the work occurred in other buildings where I had to struggle to find rooms for testing and therapy. Post-doc was better but had a row of cubicles like a telemarketer and shared therapy offices. Since I have been licensed, I have had nicely appointed offices with new furniture and lots of windows and two of them with a mountain view. So my experience is that it does get better!