When I made this campus my permanent home two weeks ago, I was a lost freshman who knew nothing about this university, its traditions or what fraternities had iffy reputations and were the ones I should probably avoid.
Now, after two weeks on the job, I still may not know anything about the former three aspects of this university, but there is one thing I have learned here: Everything is extremely inconvenient.
Living on North Campus, you learn to love the so-called “Incon,” a name given to the North Campus Snack ‘n’ Shop in regards to its alleged inconvenient hours. However, it may just be that the most convenient service on this entire campus is the food mart with the title of Incon — and the place is not even open on Saturdays.
From the general perspective of a freshman, there are a few things that really grind our gears when it comes to campus inconvenience. For starters, who decided that, when building a campus for over 26,000 undergraduates with close to half of them living on the campus, it would be a good idea to have only two large, full-service dining halls?
Try going to eat at 6 p.m. at The Diner. It makes more sense either to skip your meal or buy something from the not-so-inconvenient-by-comparison Incon.
The University of Connecticut, for contrast, apparently knew what they were doing when they built their campus. The school has four large dining halls that can serve up to 1,000 people at a time and another small dining hall designed to fit 450 people, all for a total undergraduate population of just under 17,000. That’s five dining halls for a school two-thirds the size of this university.
When traveling in large clusters with my other inexperienced freshman friends on the way to the Stamp Student Union, as we are wont to do, I often find it somewhat odd that the Taco Bell Express is only open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Adele’s Restaurant is not even open on the weekends.
But at least the evening Shuttle-UM buses begin service at 5:30, so even when we spend all day wallowing in misery because we cannot take a bus to our class across the campus, we can cheer ourselves up by taking the formerly-inconvenient-but-now-somewhat-convenient-when-you-think-about-it shuttle to the bars on Route 1.
So as amazing as this place is, the reality of the freshman experience is that we must learn to cope with the inconvenience of this entire campus. Yes, the hours of the dining services on the campus are terrible and, well, inconvenient. Yes, the campus is beyond huge. And yes, all the buildings do look exactly the same.
But it’s not too bad, really. It’s just part of the fun of finding your place in this massive red, black and gold sea of inconvenience.
Jeremy Granoff is a freshman journalism major. He can be reached at jgranoff09 at gmail dot com.
