Silence. Discipline. Remorse.

[ouij]

I'm typing this in a large reading room in the main university library. Of roughly seventy available seats in this room, only five are occupied. This is a massive contrast to the law library. It's not really all that crowded in there, but one does get the sense that the place is being used fully. I guess we law students are only too aware of

Comments

[seishonagon]

Interesting. I had the exact opposite experience, but I think that may be because I did my undergrad at Bryn Mawr and my grad work at Boston University.

The library was always full at Bryn Mawr - women doing thesis work, research for classes, always in pursuit of the elusive 4.0 GPA. At BU, people did enough to pass, and sometimes more. In a day at Bryn Mawr, I was almost certain to run into a classmate in the library. At BU, I almost never ran into *anyone* who didn't work there. And I don't mean anyone I knew... I mean *anyone.*

[ouij]

Library use was pretty high in Cambridge. The college libraries were always packed. The individual Faculty/Department libraries varied: the Seeley (History Fac) and Marshall (Economics Fac) were always full; the Oriental Studies library wasn't nearly so. The UL was always busy--mostly graduate students there, but a lot of undergrads like me as well. The reading rooms were pleasant enough, but I liked working up in the stacks. It made me feel hardcore.

At the LSE, library occupancy was also very high--but this was because the BPLES was really all that we had. In fact, the BPLES (and the School, generally) was so overcrowded we were scuffling in there like lab rats on meth.

Here at CUA, the library seems less frequently used.

I'm tempted to attribute this kind of thing to the type of assessment. Undergrads here don't have the same kind of terminal assessment that we did in England and that the law school also imposes.

[seishonagon]

The reading rooms were pleasant enough, but I liked working up in the stacks. It made me feel hardcore.

I know exactly what you mean. I did the same thing, for the same reason. I love library stacks as a place to work.

And I think you're right. At Bryn Mawr, though we didn't have a terminal assessment per se, there was the ever-looming prospect of an undergraduate thesis, which is required of all students.

I was thinking about my thesis recently... that was a really awesome experience. It's something I can hold onto and be proud of, and it's also something I actually had a lot of fun doing. It's one of the ways I could tell I was in the right major and with the right thesis topic. I reveled in my thesis.