Temporary Accomodation

General Information

The Association of Indian Students at USC is starting to process temporary accommodation requests. We are processing requests in the order of your arrival to USC - so please be patient.

• Please do NOT apply twice. If you do, then we wouldnt accept your temporary accomodation form under any cirumstances.
• Since we have a limited set of volunteers, chances are that we may not be able to find you a place until the last week. Please be patient!
• This is a volunteer effort. We do not charge money. However, if we cannot find you temp accommodation, we'll point you to people who are looking for temporary roommates to share their rent for a small period of time. This will be made explicit before you land here.
• If you are arriving in less than a week and have not yet found temporary accommodation send us an email at the above address with the subject Immediate Temporary Accommodation and we'll look into placing you immediately.
• We do NOT arrange for pickups at the airport. Every year 600-700 new students come in and it is logistically impossible for 3-5 volunteers to arrange for everybody to be picked up. However, getting to campus is easy using Prime Time Shuttle. It costs you around $20 and they will drop you to the address you give them.

General Etiquette and Terms

Once we've paired you up with one of the volunteers, please communicate with the volunteers directly. It might be useful for you to provide the volunteers with the following information:

• Your address in India/wherever you are flying from
• A local guardian/relative/family friend's contact number (if possible)
• All the information above (just in case)

Things to keep in mind once you arrive at your temporary accommodation.

• The host is volunteering out of his/her own will and with no obligation. Please be considerate of this fact. You are not at home anymore and the host is not your Mom/Dad. What this means is that he/she is not there to take care of you. Please be clean and unobtrusive.
• Most students here share their tasks here. So should you. If the host is cooking, volunteer to do the dishes. If the host is cleaning his/her apartment, volunteer to help out. This not only comforts the host, but also gets you acclamatized with the day-to-day chores in the US. Its also a nice way of making friends.
• One thing I see a lot of incoming students do is flood the host with questions - everything from course counseling to housing to on-campus jobs etc. Not everybody is interested in answering questions as others. So, please do not overburden the hosts with questions. The Association of Indian Students is tentatively planning an orientation in the first week of August and all your questions will be answered there. The mailing lists are always there for this purpose also.
• We usually have a limited pool of volunteers. Once you land here, kindly start looking for housing asap. Once you move out, we will probably schedule more incoming students to the host's place. Usually, temporary accommodation is for about two to three days. Dont get too stressed if you dont find housing by then, but just keep it at the back of your mind.

Though we are here to help you,AIS cannot be held responsible for your temporary or permanent accommodation. We highly encourage you to be as prepared as possible.