I got together with my best friend from high school yesterday, and she’s about to start her third and final year at Cambridge University. She gave me three pieces of advice which I think we’d all benefit from, so I thought I’d post them here:
1. The website http://www.studentbeans.com/ apparently is a discount site geared towards UK students. She says she hasn’t paid full price for meals from chain restaurants (like Pizza Express etc) for ages, since you can print useful coupons and vouchers from this site. I have yet to really explore it, but it looks useful!
2. I’m not sure if this is part of what we receive from Dickinson as part of tuition, but she mentioned getting a “Young Persons Rail Card,” which will get us discounted train tickets throughout England as students. This site seems to have all the information about it: http://www.16-25railcard.co.uk/.
3. On an earlier post about cell/mobile phones, I added my (long) two cents and said I thought I was going to go with a plan from O2 which would occasionally provide me with free international call minutes. My friend told me to look into TalkMobile, since you can apparently call America with your regular cell phone for only 4p a minute! I found out from my other British friends that http://www.carphonewarehouse.com/ is the best place to compare deals, and they (the Carphone Warehouse) have stores where you can buy your phone in person and talk over deals with a real person. She also told me that every carrier will have cheap/free phones in the actual stores that they’re not advertising online, so they might not be as expensive as they appear.
Anyway, I just thought I’d share my new intel…I have quite a few British/expat friends, so if people find this stuff useful I can probably post more as I find it out :).
