The best way to add miles to your journey would to go east MSN-ORD-IAD-SFO. You could try something like MSN-DEN-IAD-SFO, but that looks like it will become too expensive. Since you're a student like myself I would imagine you could be slightly flexible on some of your travel dates and know them in advance. Start looking early on using ITA http://itasoftware.com/ and then track routings using a softwate like YAPTA. With ITA you can do a search where you force extra segments. To do this for, enter "MSN :: UA UA UA UA" in the "from" and this will add two segments; reduce by one "UA" to only add one segment. You can do this both ways. Good Luck.