Ways to make quick cash as a student
How to get money fast without doing any, you know, work
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That hottie from your comparative lit class is angling for a date, and you’d like to show you’re capable of being a bit swankier than a “picnic” of ramen and old beer. Or maybe that marathon phone call to your BFF back home has your cell phone bill looking like the receipt from your last round of textbook purchases. No matter what the reason, the fact is that extra money is good, and empty wallets are bad. So, how to keep the financial balance in an expensive world? Here are a few ideas that don’t involve working too hard, because that should always be the very last option.
Volunteer for medical experiments
Are you a healthy male or female between the ages of 18 and 22 who’s been a smoker for longer than six months and wants to quit? Or a woman of childbearing age who’s tried to lose weight in the past without success? Then get ready to cash in, baby. As demonstrated by the flyers that seem so ubiquitous on every campus, plenty of clinical trials need warm bodies, and they tend to skew toward younger, healthy people such as yourself. These types of trials need to be done to make sure that new drugs or treatments are safe for the general populace, and although that might sound kind of frightening in terms of skewing your system, the FDA sets down guidelines for proper treatment of human guinea pigs. If ingesting unfamiliar substances isn’t your thing—but really, isn’t that half the reason you came to college in the first place?—then there are other types of studies that offer volunteers compensation, such as sleep studies. Getting hooked up to electrodes and having people watch you sleep might be preferable to dealing with that chirpy new roommate anyway, so sign up and get some quick funding.
Donate plasma
Giving blood is a fairly quick process, and often involves cookies and juice as a reward, leaving you in a nostalgic haze for kindergarten. But to get cash, you need to go for the plasma option. The process is somewhat similar, in that a tube is sucking something out of you, but the whole shebang takes much longer—about two hours for your first visit—and there’s the added, weird benefit of having part of your blood returned at the same time, through the same needle. DCI Biologicals has a nice, long explanation about red blood cells and plasma, and how plasma is needed in therapies involving severe burns, hemophilia, and blah blah blah. Let’s face it, you get the humanitarian angle, and you’re not interested in the science anyway, right? The point is that you get cash on the spot (DCI doesn’t articulate how much, but it does say that repeat and new donors are offered bonuses), and you can donate much more often than with whole blood. Some people can go in up to twice a week. So, stay healthy, open that vein, and cash in.
Sell other people’s stuff
Your friend is planning on moving, and you offer to pitch in and haul boxes on the big day. You fool. That’s no way to make quick money, only a trade of labor for some pizza and beer, if you’re lucky. Instead, offer to help pack—during the moving process, everyone gets weary of playing Tetris with their stuff, trying to fit it into the couple of cardboard boxes they scored in the back of HEB. That’s when you move in for the kill, cheerily suggesting that you can take stuff off their hands, like furniture that won’t fit in the new place, old comic books that they’ve outgrown, and knickknacks that were funny once but now seem tired. Then it’s off to Craigslist and eBay you go, where you can turn your altruism into actual dollars. Furniture is especially good, since Craigslist is lousy with people looking for deals, and your friends will be too busy unpacking to notice that bookshelf photo looks awfully familiar. As an extension of this strategy, offer to help clean your parents’ basement, which wins total points for good kid behavior. Maybe they’ll even fork over a bit extra in appreciation.
Temp
Okay, maybe sometimes it really does pay to work, but the hassle of a full-time job is just too much to tolerate. So, don’t do it—there are plenty of temp services in Austin, and you can sign up to do a few days of filing, light construction, overnight security detail, or any of dozens of jobs that seem really odd or dreadfully boring but don’t tie you down. Plus, it gives you an opportunity to network with people who might have basements that need cleaning out, or know of medical studies that need a strapping, healthy young lad or lass like yourself. Ka-ching!
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