• by Amanda , May 15, 2008

I am moving in a few months to a new school in a new state. Moving is always a stressful experience, but moving to a place you’ve visited once, and to a larger city makes the process that much more nerve-racking. Luckily I’ve started early enough to leave several months for apartment and furniture shopping, but it seems like the more I plan, and the more I search, the more anxious I get.

This week I have been planning a long weekend trip to this new city to check out the apartments and talk to law school advisors, so much of my plotting has been condensed into a marathon of internet searches and intermittent breakdowns. Technology has been surprisingly helpful, and stressful. I have searched every apartment listing for my future city, on every leasing web page offered on the internet. No matter how annoying this can be, I will say that searching through websites of apartments is much easier with 360 tour of the apartment, extra pictures, floor plans and price breakdowns than it might be with a newspaper. I can’t imagine what it would be like to sit down with a newspaper and a highlighter, circling the places I like to check out later. I would have given up a while ago!

As always, Google has been the biggest help in this process. I have to say one of the most useful tools, pointed out by a colleague, has been Google Map’s “My Map” application. I can map out the 10-15 apartments I want to search on one handy map to take with me in the car as I get lost in this new city, while also allowing me to add comments and important information (phone numbers, business hours, etc.) under the map itself. Another wonderful feature of Google is searching through aggregated reviews of these apartments. Comments here inevitably lead to panic attacks, though, because it seems every apartment building in the state is mold infested with a horrible office staff. It’s also fun (creepy) to look at the satellite images of my potential, future homes.

Though technology has been very useful, I sometimes feel like I’m on information overload; ironically, I also feel like I will never find out enough information about these places before I visit them. I guess we will see how the weekend goes, and if the plotting was worth it.