‘The Poor Student’ Knows How to Get By in JP

Jamaica Plain is home to a variety of people, but the neighborhood is hopping with students.

Undergraduates, graduates, law students, medical students, art students, whatever you study, Jamaica Plain has a home for you.

One thing most students have in common is living on a minimal income. One resident who lives somewhere between Doyle's and Franklin Park has a Youtube channel devoted to helping those who live with modest means.

Opal Leung is “The Poor Student.” She is working on a PhD in organizational behavior at Bentley University, and this is on top of the multiple degrees she holds already.

Videos on her channel involve cheap techniques for cooking and transportation, and affords her public with a glimpse into the life of…a poor student.

Jamaica Plain Patch reached out to ask Leung about her videos, and she wrote replied with the following email:

The story behind "The Poor Student" is just me making fun of myself for having multiple degrees (U of Toronto, Berklee, BC, Harvard Extension School) and still being poor. And, I'm still a student. Some might call me a professional student. Eventually, I hope to be a professor (of organizational behavior), somewhere in the world. 

The channel started out with a video (in 2009) on how to make a bike basket for around $7, just to test out the whole youtube thing. It was just a Keynote (Apple's power point) presentation with narration, so it wasn't even a real video! About two years later, I started making cooking videos because I took a year off between leaving Boston College and starting at Bentley. During that year, I had to really live on very little money and thought other people might benefit from the things I learned along that interesting journey. That's where the baking bread in a toaster oven idea came from. By the way, that's my biggest "hit" (>12,000 views, as of yesterday). People in Southeast Asia (e.g. Philippines, India) seem to really dig that one.

"Scootin' in Boston" started when I bought a helmet cam for filming my rides. I needed a scooter because Bentley is pretty far and it's not especially convenient for taking the T. So, I took the motorcycle safety course and bought a Buddy 125 scooter. I still take the T if there's snow on the ground. Initially, the videos were just for me because I'm not the best with directions and I had never driven around Boston. I thought the videos were a good way to remind myself how to get from point A to point B and about where the pot holes are. Then I noticed that there are quite a few people on youtube posting ride videos. Also, there aren't very many videos of Boston tours. If I need help getting around Boston, surely new students and tourists might need the same thing, right? So, that's where the Scootin' series came from. It hasn't been as popular as the cooking series though. However, I only started the Scootin' series last summer.