Junior slums should have better study spaces

For as long as this Board can remember, addressing the absence of a "24-hour study space" has been a top priority of the USG. But upperclassmen who live in the junior slums have a much more basic complaint. Residents of Foulke, Henry, 1901/Laughlin, Lockhart and Pyne don't have access to any nearby study space at all. For these students, the pressing question isn't, "where can I study at three in the morning?" but rather, "where can I study after dinner?"

If you live in the junior slums, you commute to a public study area.

To be sure, we are not talking about vast distances. But the problem isn't with the walking distance — on that score, at least, Forbes dwellers and engineers have it much worse than slummers. A nice brisk walk or two during the day can't do us much harm; but there is something peculiarly frustrating about a midnight expedition to find a study space. Of all the amenities that we, in our decadence, occasionally demand, there is none quite so convenient as the ability to study within a stone's throw of our dorms.

The stretch between the end of dinner and 2 a.m. is a time for multitasking. During those six hours, most of us try to achieve some balanced combination of productivity and relaxation. But in the junior slums, if you want to study outside your room, you have to remove yourself entirely from the sphere of relaxed sociability until you've completed your work and returned home. If you want to take a short study break, you cannot simply pop back into your room or drop in on a neighbor. When the nearest library is a 20-minute round trip from your dorm, you need to minimize the number of times you go back and forth.

It may be that we have been spoiled by the conveniences of the residential colleges. As underclassmen, we take it for granted that our "home base" and our study space are part of an integrated living area. We become accustomed to reading in a library where pjs and slippers are the norm.

Some upperclass halls — for example Scully and the Ellipse — do make provisions for dorm-based study space. The junior slums is really the only residential zone on campus where studying "at home" is not a real possibility.

Potential remedies seem simple enough: in the short term it might just be a matter of introducing some couches into the 1901 basement and furnishing the hallway area around the Foulke print station. When the slums are next renovated, it might make sense to incorporate small alcoves with study carrels and armchairs into each entryway.

With a little more attention to common space, juniors would have one fewer reason to call their digs "the slums."