A Tough Initiation to D.C.

Erin O'Brien, 28, is coming from Madison, Wis., to get a master's degree in museum studies at George Washington University. She won't have a stipend, and she plans to work as a barista while she studies. "I'm going to be going deep into debt with the schooling," she said. "It's really obscene, the amount of debt I'm going to incur. At least $50,000."

O'Brien, who returned from teaching English in South Korea less than a year ago, pays $400 a month in Wisconsin for her room in a shared house. She wants to pay less than $600 a month in rent here but live no farther from D.C. than in Arlington or Takoma Park.

"I've been told, 'You really won't get anything less than $600,' " O'Brien said. But she keeps hoping the right place will come open. "I don't want to live in a hovel," she said.

Even though she can't leave the Midwest until mid-May, she's been looking at Craigslist ads almost every day since early March. But most houses are looking for someone to move in a few weeks, or maybe the next month.

"I guess I'll just have to bide my time a little bit," she said. "It's nerve-wracking." She will be making a trip here at the end of April to go on house interviews, she said.

Many students' and recent graduates' salaries don't match up with even shared-housing rents, so they rely on help from their families.

Andy Wright, 20, is a University of Southern California student coming to Washington for a summer job with the Shakespeare Theatre Company. A theater major, he'll be a camp counselor for acting students. He will be paid $140 a week.

He responded to about 50 ads for roommates and heard back from about 10, he said. He also looked into intern housing in dorms. But Georgetown University doesn't have intern housing this year, except for units its own students, because of construction projects. And American University wanted $850 a month for a shared room, he said.

There were rooms in the $600s that were unfurnished, but because he's here for only 10 weeks, he needs a furnished room. Even $600 is far out of the reach of his paycheck; a grant and his parents in Tampa will have to cover the rest.

Wright was flying blind. He wasn't sure which neighborhoods were a convenient commute to the Chinatown theater, and the sublets he expected to see from fellow students never appeared.

Ultimately, he placed a housing-wanted ad and mentioned the Shakespeare job. That got him sympathy from other performers: An opera singer who owns a house in Chinatown offered him a spot for $750 a month. "I talked to the guy for a half-hour," Wright said, adding that he thinks it will come through. "He's going to talk to my roommates from last year and make sure I'm not a serial killer."

Matthew McWilliams, 29, knew the terrain much better. McWilliams left Washington last May to travel the world. He spent five months in Egypt, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Ethiopia, India, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, and then another several months traveling the southwestern United States.