Among the criteria Ken Ilgunas used when deciding where to go to graduate school: Would the local climate allow him to sleep in his van?
Yep, that's right. Ken Ilgunas lives in a van. In a parking lot. At Duke. That's as specific as Ilgunas gets. See, he's living in a parking space, in a van, in order to get through graduate school without debt.
Which means he's keeping a low profile. Or at least he was until he blew his own cover this week in this story featured prominently on the salon.com website.
Oh, and he has his own blog where the 26-year-old, who is enrolled in Duke's liberal studies graduate program, has chronicled his adventures.
Ilgunas grew up in a suburban, middle class family in Niagara Falls, NY. Mom's a nurse, dad's a factory worker. It was a good life but left Ilgunas wanting something more.
"I felt there was something vapid about the suburban lifestyle," he told me this week. "People work 40 hours a week and come home and watch TV. There's no beauty or poetry or adventure in that sort of life. I recognized I wasn't getting something out of that lifestyle."
Perhaps not surprisingly, Ilgunas is inspired by Henry David Thoreau and his "Walden," classic, a tale of solitude and inner peace.
"He's my guy," Ilgunas said of the offer he dressed up as this past Halloween. "I have a nasty man-crush on him."
So Ilgunas has spent much of the year in his 1994 Ford Econoline he bought on Craigslist for $1,500. He "retrofitted" it by pulling some seats out and putting down a bed.
Cozy!
He gets his mail at a campus post box, and he stays connected to the world using his laptop at the library or elsewhere on the totally-wired campus.
By the time you read this, Ilgunas will have left the parking space he has called home for four months to head to the North Carolina mountains for some outdoorsy winter-break adventures.
But he'll return to Duke next semester and hopes the campus cops won't crack down on him, now that his story is out there.
I talked with him at length this week. Here are highlights:
