McMahon, the residence hall I live in, has North Tower and South Tower. There are seven floors in each tower and each floor has one study lounge. Including the lounge which is located on the main floor, there are 15 lounges total in McMahon. Also, McMahon has a famous learning community: Global House. This learning community contributes to the diversity of the people who live here. 30 percent of students are the exchange students from all over the world like Australia, Singapore and European countries. 20 percent of students are international students who will stay here for 4 years and most of them are Chinese. There are 40~50 percent of student are local students from Connecticut and another 10 percent of students come from other parts of America. Because this diversity of people who have different study habits lives here, the study lounge becomes a small community.
During the day time, approximately 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., most of the students have class to attend and there are few people in all of the study lounges. Only 1-2 people were staying here and devoting themselves doing their homework or reading. At that time, the efficiency is very high and I’d like to study in there too. “I spent about 70% of my time doing Physics homework and reading stuff, and another 30% watching TV shows on my laptop like How I Met Your Mother and Arrow.”
After 4:00 p.m. and before the night is coming, the study lounge on the third floor becomes a little bit busy. The study group becomes bigger and there are 3-4 people staying there and trying to do homework. I used the word ‘trying’ because although they want to do their assignments, there is always something distracting them. For example, because the study lounge is located in front of the elevator, it is the place that cannot avoid others get in and get out of the elevator to grab some food or just came back from dining hall downstairs. When they are waiting for the elevator, just say “hello, how’s going?” seems like too normal, so the people in the study lounge always put down their work and have a small chat with others. Someone told me that they spent about 40 percent of their time chatting with different people and joking around. They like gossiping with or about others. The most interesting part is that they spent about 40 present of their time doing nothing meaningful at all. Maybe just staring at their mobile phone and doing nothing. For example, someone told me that he sometimes just picked up his cell phone, unlocked it, and checked if there is was a text. However, most of the time the inbox was empty. He also didn’t know what exactly he wanted to do. Then he just locked it again. Sometimes it probably happens twice per five minutes. Also they might just do nothing at all, curling up just like a ball in the corner chair, staring at an unknown point and be in a daze.
At night, the study lounge is always busy. The parties start at Thursday night and won’t stop until Sunday in 3 out of 4 corner rooms which are 60 ft larger than normal rooms. I can still hear electronic music from upstairs now and it’s almost 11 o’clock. It might be because 30% of our residents are the exchange students, who will stay here for only one or two semesters. As a result, the GPA here at UConn is not so important for them. Some of them never showed up in learning community course because they think that course is boring and only have one credit and that’s useless for exchange students like them. Because they are just here for about four months, they planned all their free time, spending virtually all their weekend visiting other cities like New York and Boston. Instead, most international students, like me, don’t always know what to do during weekends. For example, the only activity I have on weekends is watching movies with my friends in the evening. We spend all the morning to sleep and won’t get up until the afternoon. At the same time, local students go home twice per month so the study lounge seems like a little bit lonely during weekends. –Yuting, English 1003, fall 2013