For anyone who likes to eat a lot of food, the meal plan will start to get really hard to stay on course with. By the end of each quarter, there probably will not be enough points to get a meal from. When I checked out most of the food at the food hall, a sandwich was about 11 meal points ($1=1 meal point). The cards are reloadable but are costly to add more points onto the card. There is a larger meal plan that is more advanced than the basic one but it is about 2 thousand more. So looking for more affordable food might be a smart plan to save some money. Luckily, there are some other options that are close by that might save you a couple bucks. 

Firstly, across campus, there is Pizza My Heart which accepts meal points and the salads there are HUGE and could last someone for 2 lunches. Obviously, there is also pizza but, it is super good and you would want to eat it all for one lunch. 

Next, just next to Pizza My Heart is Safeways. Opening up a Safeways rewards card will give you store wide discounts that can easily save you up to $10 on groceries. The rewards program also gives you one reward every $100 you spend. The rewards are either 10 cents off the gas price. The other reward is the ability to get a couple free grocery items or more discounts. Since the card is free, I don’t see a reason not to get the card. But, the only thing that is not amazing about the card is that the points each month get reset. 
Other grocery stores that are nearby include, Smart and Final, Trader Joe’s, and if you want to travel a little further than the other stores, there is a Walmart that is a 20 minute drive away. 

I finally made my second purchase for college which was the housing deposit! The price was $450, but that money will come off of my first housing payment in the fall. The deposit was necessary to open up the housing application. Within the application there are many different sections that you have to fill out. The first one is a general tab about which major you are doing and the department you will be in. The next the tab is asking for your housing preferences and you have to put nine choices down. After the housing, you choose which meal plan that you want. Then you are required to take a survey about yourself with questions asking about your cleanliness and sleeping schedule. One of the only optional sections of the application is about choosing a roommate but in order to pick a roommate you need to know their Santa Clara ID number and they also have to choose you. Hopefully that makes the application process a little easier for you!

Once I started to look into the costs for Santa Clara, I started to notice some small fees that I never heard of before. I am not an expert at what happens at other Universities across the United States so I don’t know if these are typical expenses.

• Firstly, there is a $636 University Enhancement fee for the entire year. This is to keep the campus looking beautiful and clean, however, over the four year time span, that is about $2,500 extra! Each quarter, (there are three for the typical student) you will need to pay $212.
• Next, for any Incoming Freshman, there is a mandatory orientation that you have to go on. There are a total of seven different times where the University allows you attend. From what I have discussed with other people planning their orientations, there is no price to attend. However, the base price for ONLY the Incoming Freshman to attend the orientation, is $305. The price for one parent to attend is an extra $135. The justification for the price is, “Fall 2020: the registration fee covers the costs of both Orientation and Welcome Weekend; this fee covers meals, materials, publications, activities, and administrative costs” (SCU.edu)
• Now this isn’t a untypical expense but, it definitely can be misleading. On the SCU Cost of Attendance page, it is listed that the housing and food plan cost will be about $15,507 but, when looking at the individual prices of the basic food plan with any housing, the average price is actually, $200 more. The average that I calculated is based solely on the double and triple room accommodations.
• Finally, there are a couple different parking permits that you can get (I will not be bringing a car to University with me to try and save money). There are different types of parking permits that you can get based on the locations of the parking lots and based on what time period you want the permit for. On the SCU website, they sell parking permits for yearly, semi-annual, quarterly, monthly, and daily (there is another price for motorcycles). The image below is a photo from their website breaking down the prices: