College is a four-year journey meant to make you a more marketable and productive member of society. College is by no means cheap, and, for most students, it usually involves taking out loans to afford an education.
Tuition for West Chester University is about $25,000 a year (including room and board), but there is a cost most students don’t realize until they’ve already graduated.
While graduating from college gets you a degree, you lose your personal chef and have to fend for yourself. This transition comes as a shock for people who have no experience cooking. This lack of experience can be contributed to the lack of a student’s need to cook in order to eat.
In grade school, most students have parents who regularly cook them dinner and once you head off to college, all of your meals are made for you.
The sad fact is, most of us probably can’t cook. With all our access to fast food, premade meals and wonderful apps like GrubHub, it’s pretty easy to see why a majority of on-campus college students don’t cook.
Upon graduation, you will land a job and, depending on where you end up, you may just be making minimum wage initially. As fun as eating out and getting delivery can be now, once you are paying off all of these student loans, it isn’t going to be quite as financially viable.
Fortunately, there are time and resources available for you to learn! If you live on campus in one of the dorms, you have access to a kitchen you may not even know about.
In most dorm buildings, the kitchen is on the same floor as the lobby, and in traditional housing can be accessed by acquiring the key from a desk assistant (affiliated housing has open kitchens so you don’t need to worry about having your ID).
Renting out the kitchen is a pretty easy process, but you may find that the kitchen utensils are incredibly sparse. It’s okay! As frustrating as this can seem, there are ways around it. Sticking to simple one-pan/pot meals can save you a lot of trouble both during the cooking and cleaning up after.
Obviously, one of the biggest parts of cooking is getting the ingredients. Buying a wide variety of ingredients can definitely be costly.
The average cost of a week’s worth of meals for a single person between the ages of 19-50 is between $60-70, which averages out to nearly $8.50 to $10 a day. This may not seem high at first, but considering all of the other costs a new grad is likely to have (such as gas, insurance and loans for a car, college loan repayments and rent expenses), it can definitely add up.
There are a few ways to stretch that $10 a day and get the biggest bang for your buck.
One way I would suggest stretching your dollar is to buy foods that can be used for a wide variety of meals. This would include things like white rice, potatoes, pasta, beans and chicken. All of these ingredients can be used in different types of cuisines and, in many cases, are incredibly filling.
Not only will buying the right ingredients help save you money, but planning out meals in advance will also help you stay on track with spending.
This brings us back to cooking on campus. There are a bunch of websites like allrecipes.com and foodnetwork.com that provide easy recipes for beginners. Mastering easy recipes now will be a huge relief later when you finally have your own home and kitchen space.
Knowing how to cook, in the long run, will save you about $3 a day for every fast food meal you could have ordered. Over a year-long period, cooking instead of buying premade meals will save you $1,092—that’s a lot of cash.
So, next time you have a hankering for some home-cooked food, give your dorm kitchen a chance and cook yourself something delicious.
Caroline Remelius is a first-year student majoring in marketing. She can be reached at CR862734@wcupa.edu.