Moving to SF for an internship. First time moving. Very nervous. What to do? | Hacker News Reader

Moving to SF for an internship. First time moving. Very nervous. What to do?

5 pointsintern20139 comments

I've been offered an internship at a Silicon Valley company and will be moving in a couple weeks. This is the first time I'm moving out of my parents house, I'm only 17.

I will be living with a couple folks in Mountain View. I'm nervous and sometimes have anxiety issues and home sickness. What do I do? How can I cure my home sickness/anxiety problems?

The internship will last three months, and I have a possibility of moving on full time if all goes well.<p>Any tips/advice? Has anyone gone through this type of issue before?

View on HN

First off, you should be really thankful that you have your living situation figured out already. I moved to the Bay Area myself many years ago, without fully realizing what a pain it is. I'd say finding a place to rent was about 70 percent of the hassle.

Second, you should have plenty of options to communicate with your loved ones back home: skype, google hangouts, instant messaging, and so on.

So I would say, just do it, and hope for the best. Making a big change like this almost can't help but broaden your horizons.

Having lived in the Bay Area for a while in the past I can assure you that moving there will probably make your anxiety much worse.

Being on the edge of a big shaky bathtub surrounded by clueless narcissists made me very uncomfortable. And I am not prone to anxiety.

The cost of living makes being there pretty pointless unless you have an executive level job.

As someone who might move there, I would appreciate to hear about your experiences. The cost of living in SF already worries me.

Are you looking to live in SF proper, or more generally the Bay Area? Living in SF proper is a bit complex, not only in terms of cost, but in terms of how to find a place at all. But living in the Valley is not all that complex. It's a bit pricey, but not absurdly so if you have a salaried job and are looking to rent an apartment rather than buy a house. You can even find a place remotely in a number of cases, if you rent from a big corporate-owned apartment unit in places like San Jose or Santa Clara. Downside is that it's a vast expanse of suburbia, and a car is nearly mandatory.

Congratulations! A way to get rid of anxiety is to meet people your age and have activities outside of work. Shoot me an email(in my profile) when you are in the Bay Area and we can meet up.

Center your adopted world at Red Rock Coffee http://www.redrockcoffee.org/

Have fun. Party a lot. Learna lot and overcome your fears. Enjoy your internship.

"a couple [of] folks"

"a couple folks" makes absolutely no sense grammatically. Seriously - show me a parse tree that makes sense of "a couple folks".

I don't think this would be the most useful reply to the post even if correct, but both "a couple X" and "a couple of X" are pretty common constructions. I would use "of" in the case of "folks", but I think it's a pretty subtle usage preference rather than an issue of parsing; with other words, like "days", I wouldn't use the "of". Here is some HN usage: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com