Does anyone know where is a good place to live to attend UTMB?
I can sort of answer this question. I will try to be broad because 1. I don't want to accidentally dox myself and 2. I don't know the exact specifics and I am sure that current students such as
@chicandtoughness can answer in more depth.
Anyway, the good news is there are plenty of options.
I would first start by saying that the furthest that I (in my opinion) would even consider living in is League City. League City is like your typical suburb (for example, the UTMB League City campus is located right next to Victory Lakes, basically a subdivision of a bunch of homes). There are nearby stores for everything you might need including Best Buy which is not on the island. However, I-45 sucks. They have been working on construction for like 10 years now and sometimes it can be annoying to drive to Galveston. It might take like 35-45 minutes to drive one way from League City to Galveston and vice versa. In my opinion, living that far out is not really worth it (especially for the pre-clinical years), but it is an option.
Then there are communities that are closer such as Dickinson, Texas City, Santa Fe, La Marque, Tiki Island, etc. Once again, most of these small cities have a lot of single-family homes.
Then you get to Galveston Island. On the island, there are many options. UTMB itself is located at the very eastern end of the island. There are several apartment complexes located near the campus. The grocery stores and other shops are kind of located near the center of the island, minus Arlan's (Kroger, Randalls, Target, and Walmart are located on or near 61st Street which is like 40 streets away from campus). Throughout the city, there are homes that the owners sometimes will rent out single rooms (or the house) to students, so that could be an option. As you go more westward (like past Moody Gardens), housing tends to increase in quality and increase in price. There are a lot of really big homes on the west side of the island and proper suburban-style homes (and apartments as well), but the downside is that it can take like 30-40 minutes by car to get to the east side.
As far as public transportation... Yeah, it's almost non-existent (at least from what I know). I would recommend getting a car if you plan to shop at Target, Walmart, Randalls, Kroger, etc, or do anything on the island farther away from campus (for example, the movie theater is on 89th street which is far). I may be wrong but I am pretty sure that UTMB has like shuttles between League City and Galveston campuses and between the west and east sides of Galveston.
Just learned that the movie theater (Galveston Primetime) finally got a bowling alley. Seems like a cool place.
But yeah. This is just a really broad overview based on my own experiences. I recommend all that read this to take it with a massive grain of salt and to do research about what might work best for you. I can say that Galveston is a really tight-knit community and is really caring of one another!
Hope this helps!
wish this day had panned out differently 
