Weekends at Mills are often quiet. By ‘quiet,’ I mean you might as well imagine tumbleweeds rolling down the hill from Founders Commons.
As you know, if you’ve ever spent a lazy weekend on campus, there’s not much for a student to do. Sure, you can hang out at your room and spend hours on the Internet, mindlessly clicking away on Facebook, but that seems like too much laziness to me.
I’ve been there many times. There’s only so much you can do before you find yourself reading a Wikipedia page “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” — a sentence in the English language that shows how homophones and homonyms can complicate language constructs. My first year at Mills were wasted doing nothing but staying in the dorms and reading the aforementioned page on numerous buffaloes. But what else was there to do? Everything on campus was closed and I was too introverted to venture out into surrounding cities, such as Berkeley, on my own.
It’s my second year living on campus and there aren’t many differences now that I know the area better. Founders still has inconvenient hours (closing at 1 PM on a Sunday? Codswallop! Lazy college students don’t even wake up until 1 PM on weekends!), the Tea Shop is only open on Sundays, and Café Suzie is no more.
I leave campus on weekends more often these days, but only because I have a car now. It has given me the freedom to go places, but even when I feel like staying on campus, I do not have a place to meet with friends to shoot the breeze.
It would be convenient if there was a place for students to go on weekends right on campus.
A good option for students would be an all-student lounge. There’s a commuter lounge, a resumer lounge, a parenting lounge — why not an all student lounge for, well, all students? The convenience of having an always-open gathering place would be important for a lot of students like myself. Going out can get expensive, and being a college student at a place like Mills, money’s already scarce.
This all student lounge I suggest doesn’t have to be fancied up or state of the art; simple is okay. A couple of couches, some vending machines, a TV set, recreational games and the like. And for the love of kittens, some food for those who sleep past Founders’ brunch hours!
It could be open 24 hours for the students who don’t want to go back to their dorms between long stretches of time between classes or for those night owls who want to play pool at 11 PM. Having a small store or café with open weekend hours in the lounge would also be appreciated by many. A place like this would benefit Mills greatly.
Until a lounge for students like me exists, I’ll be loitering around in a computer lab, reading up about more buffaloes on Wikipedia.
