Senior year without a carrel

For many humanities and social science majors, the long hours spent in tiny metal carrels below ground in Firestone Library come to define much of the senior thesis experience. Many seniors work in their carrels from winter until April, surrounded by books, notes and the occasional contraband coffeemaker.

Math and science majors, though, have long done without carrel privileges. That briefly changed with the opening of Lewis Library in September 2008, when seniors majoring in the sciences could apply for one of the 44 carrels available in Lewis and Fine. This year, however, the University has opted to leave those carrels unassigned.

“Due to the limited supply of carrels in the library and the fact that assigned carrels in previous years have been notably underutilized, the Library received many requests from students to keep the carrels open to all,” Keith Gresham, an associate University librarian for research and instructional services, said in an e-mail.

Student reactions to the policy change were mixed. Andrew Li ’11, a molecular biology major, said he was unaffected. “If you’re doing a lab thesis, you have your own space,” he said. “I have my own desk and lab, so it doesn’t matter.”

Li added that this is not the case for all members of his department. “For [students not working in a lab], I think it’s unfair, because in the end they’re doing a lot of research and trying to manage it. That’s more or less what a history major would do, and they probably want library space.”

Some science majors who were assigned carrels and lockers last year said that their assigned spaces were not particularly useful anyway, compared to the locked carrels located in Firestone.

Elaine Bigelow ’10 said she was assigned a carrel on the third floor of Lewis Library, but the locker she was given to secure her belongings was in the basement of Fine Hall. Because of the locker’s inconvenient location, she rarely used either the locker or her carrel.

“It was essentially a desk,” she said. “I think that my friends in the humanities did benefit from having a locked carrel in Firestone where they could leave their stuff and outline their thoughts on a white board — really use it as a thesis space. When your carrel is a desk that you can’t leave things at, it doesn’t give you the same focus.”

But some current seniors were still a little disappointed by the news.

David Tsao ’11, a physics major, said he was surprised to hear about the policy change. “I’m slightly disappointed, but I don’t think it’s going to have a huge impact on my thesis writing,” he said. “I think that’s a pretty good policy, because they were usually empty anyway.”

Lisa Carmona ’11, an ecology and evolutionary biology major, completed her thesis research over the summer in Kenya and said she was disappointed to learn that the Lewis carrels were not available for assignment this year. “It would be cool to have a carrel like the other kids, but I guess I’m not going to have one now,” she said.