Tony Cantu, Staff Writer, Patch / Apps help mitigate stress levels for young adults leaving home for the first time to attend college, including locally inspired uShip. / Moving away from home to embark on college can be a stressful, and even traumatic, time for a young adult — particularly for those who have lived their whole lives up to that point with their parents.
How to help mitigate this stress? Well, there’s an app for that — several in fact:
- uShip, based in Austin, is for parents who aren’t able to move their kids’ stuff all the way from home to college. It’s dubbed the “Uber for shipping app,” and performs all of the moving hassle for parents at a negotiable price point. This means that college-bound kids can be ensured they’ll be surrounded by the comforts of home, including, perhaps, their favorite, stress-relieving stuffed animals (we won’t tell).
- Uber Family enables parents to add their kids to a single-family Uber profile with one payment method. The aim is to ensure parents their children always have a safe method of transportation in case their college-bound kids’ monthly personal budget has run out for whatever reason.
- Instacart is useful for kids who “have run out of money for food” that month (we’ve all heard that one before, am I right parents?) but whose parents are skeptical they’re just asking for more money for booze. Instacart lets parents instantly deliver food, not booze, right to their kids’ doorstep.
- BloomThat is designed for the truly traumatized college student in the throes of homesickness. It alllows a parent to send a housewarming gift of sorts to their kids at the touch of a button to help alleviate their stress levels while simultaneously alerting them they’re in their loved ones’ thoughts.
These apps can come in handy, particularly at college campuses experiencing enrollment spurts via facilitated enrollment. At the University of Texas at Austin, for example, more than 8,500 freshmen joined the ranks last year — the biggest influx of new students in the history of the school.
The bolstered numbers were attributed partially to more UT-Austin freshmen qualifying for automatic admission in 2016 than in previous years, the student-run newspaper The Daily Texan reported.
St. Edward’s University also is experiencing increased demand, prompting construction of the 133-unit The Pavilion, a dormitory complex being built for students wanting to live on campus.
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