For sophomore transfer student Alliey Laughy, rushing through Funger Hall to her 9:35 Abnormal Psychology lecture means leaving at 7:30 a.m., braving the rush hour traffic on Interstate 95 and leaving her two young children for the day.

Commuters like Laughy, a 26-year-old psychological and brain sciences major, make up the portion of GW students who rely on local transportation or brave the busy highways of the D.C. region and accident-prone streets of the District to get to campus. The commuting crew said they power through traffic accidents and culinary capers to make it to their lectures on time. 

As the mom of a 5- and 7-year-old in Woodbridge, Virginia, Laughy said she in part chose GW when deciding to go back to school because it was one of the only universities she applied to that allowed exemptions from living in University housing. This arrangement meant both her kids could get their own rooms in an off-campus house, which she couldn’t do in a cramped residence hall room, she said.

“They’re great roommates,” Laughy said. “But at the end of the day, I have nowhere that my kids could go.” 

Laughy moved with her partner and children to Woodbridge two months before her first semester after deciding that living in the District was too expensive. With traffic, she said the 45-minute drive down I-95 to Foggy Bottom sometimes makes her a couple minutes late to class. On days when she has 8 a.m. classes, Laughy said she leaves by 6:15 a.m.

She said she usually drives about 30 minutes to the Van Dorn Metro station and takes the Blue Line to Foggy Bottom — which takes another half hour barring delays — in order to avoid guzzling gas and paying the hourly price of $2.30 for limited street parking in the city.

The added commute and staying on campus all day to attend later classes means sacrificing extra time where she could “cuddle” and share snacks with her kids, Laughy said.

“I don’t get to see my kids in the mornings and with how long my commute is some evenings, I don’t get to see them for more than about 30 minutes before they’re getting baths and hopping into bed,” Laughy said. 

On the three days a week she has evening classes this semester, however, Laughy said she reluctantly elects to drive to campus and hunt for street parking to avoid taking the Metro alone at night.

Driving saves time compared to the stop-and-go Metro, she said, but navigating the streets of Foggy Bottom is a “nightmare,” pointing to the time she got rear-ended while trying to park outside the Elliott School of International Affairs this week. 

“I almost get into several accidents daily,” Laughy said.

Laughy said she’s also run into intra-commuter problems, with unknown culprits stealing food out of the collective fridge in the commuter student lounge in the University Student Center basement. 

“We were all talking in the group chat about wanting to put up like a camera,” she said.

Laughy said she feels lucky that her professors have been sympathetic to the circumstances that come with being a mother and commuter, like her occasional tardiness and class visits by her kids on rare occasions when their school was out for the day.

“Just yesterday I had to miss three classes because my daughter was stuck in the ER, and they were very understanding about that,” Laughy said.

Fatima Saleem, a senior studying public health, said she makes a daily commute from Pentagon City, where she lives with her mom, dad and three siblings. She said her mother drives her and her brother, a sophomore, to GW in the mornings, and in the evenings, they usually take the Metro during rush hour.

“The Metro itself in the afternoon, especially by the time I go home in the evening during rush hour, can get really busy, which can cause problems for a lot of people, especially if they need to go home and to get work done or have meetings online that they need to get to,” Saleem said.

Saleem said she arrives on campus at 9:30 or 11 a.m., depending on when her class starts, and leaves at 7 or 8 p.m. She spends her gaps of time in between classes doing homework and visiting the residence halls of her friends that live on campus, she said.

She said there wasn’t even a question of whether or not she’d commute because her parents are “strict” and insisted that she take the off-campus trek each day, which would save them a lot of money. Though she said she was still nervous about making friends as a commuter before entering her first year, the Commuter Student Association — which she has led as president since her first year — allowed her to cultivate friendships.

“It’s a great way to connect with the community,” she said. “A lot of people have the same concerns and stuff, so we put together a lot of resources for them.”

Saleem said she tries to use the commuter student lounge as a place to meet other commuters. She said they had a fridge theft problem in the past, but such issues have dissipated, and the lounge is now promoting grab-and-go Valentine’s cards and candy.

“So our next thing that we’re trying to plan is like these Valentine gift bags to just put in the lounge,” she said. “People can come in and grab one.”

First-year computer science major Ahn Henry said she and her brother, a junior at American University, moved to an apartment in Rockville from Haiti to attend high school in 2022 and stayed in the same unit when they later both went to college in the DMV. She said commuting to their respective campuses was the financially reasonable choice to make, considering that they already have an apartment that lets them be both close to class and one another.

Between the 10-minute walk from her apartment to the Rockville Metro station, transferring from the Red Line to either the Silver, Orange or Blue lines and walking to classes, Henry’s daily hourlong commute populates all colors of the WMATA rainbow. 

She said she runs into “pretty frequent” public transit delays — thankfully, often when she’s going home rather than coming to GW. She said she recently was stuck on the platform of Farragut North for about an hour on her way home due to a signaling problem from another station, and when she was finally able to squeeze onto a crowded train, it then stopped moving for about 20 minutes.

“It can get frustrating, especially if I’m going to school, so I’m most likely going to be late,” Henry said.