As the Campbell Library still has ongoing renovations, we, as Rowan students, find ourselves in a weird transitional period without a dedicated space to study silently. Across campus, there are many different spaces where theoretically we could study, but they don’t have the same utility as a library would.

While some have their own living spaces on or near campus and the study areas they provide, I commute anywhere from a half hour to an hour to and from campus. My work ethic is most effective when I knock everything out all at once. To drive to my local library from campus means that there’d be a significant gap between wanting to get work done and actually being able to do it. At that point, I’d just drive home and clock out for the night.

For me I want to separate my school life and personal life in order to preserve my emotional well-being and have downtime to recover from the stress of being a full-time student. I don’t want to have my room become the place I spend hours nightly trying to catch up with my work overload. I want to maximize my time on campus, the time between classes, and the time I spend before a club meeting. Yet it feels like I have to pick my poison in choosing one of the many alternatives to the Campbell Library.

There are many outdoor seating options, which are usually open, mostly because it’s November and we’re at freezing temperatures. Working in the Chamberlain Student Center’s patio was viable once the summer heat started to cool down in September. However, now in November, the frost makes it unbearable to do anything in these areas except walk past them.

Moving inside the student center is possible, yet that is a common sentiment amongst students, given how crowded the place is at any given time when classes are running. The student center acts as a hub of every setting a student could find themselves in: club meeting spaces, a dining hall, study rooms, and social areas. It’s an amalgamation of so many things that it can’t possibly do all of them successfully, and acting as a study space is sadly where it falls short.

I’m not saying that it isn’t a space to study, but it’s too loud to do anything beyond mindless work for me. Top 40 hits are blasted from the speakers while students talk to one another, all distracting me from my work. I’m not advocating for total silence in the area, because that’s not what the building was created for, but it can’t act as a substitute for the library as a result of that.

What this has actually done is make me become more mindful of my surroundings and maximize the time I have without any distractions. I now tend to work in James Hall before and after classes, as it’s closest to where I park my car and where I end my classes on most days.

However, working in James Hall is like spinning a wheel on whether it’ll actually be an effective studying space or not. The long hallways of the second floor are typically packed during the day until the 3:30 p.m. classes start, so I have to capitalize on open space whenever it’s available. I am the type of person who wants to inconvenience people as little as possible, so even then, any seat that’s too close to anybody else is one that I won’t be sitting at.

Even more than that, the behavior of others in these spaces is the biggest wildcard factor on whether or not I’ll be productive. Much like the Student Center, the seating in academic buildings is not specifically for quiet study; I just co-opt them to be, given that there isn’t a library on campus to act as one. People talking as they leave class is not an issue, because that’s a given for any building with classes. The main problem stems from people without headphones blasting sounds from their devices or yelling from their seats, but again, this area is not intended to act as a pseudo-library. Sound carries in this hallway, and it even makes me self-conscious to take a sip out of my water bottle.

Overall, the inconsistency of the quality of our academic spaces has made me work harder when the stars align for a productive work environment. On the off chance that there is available quiet space, I work so much harder knowing that it’s uncommon. I take these fleeting moments of productive work environments and try to get the most out of them. But these inconsistencies have also made me more flexible when it comes to working and have given me a greater understanding of my surroundings. I am overwhelmed with work as a full-time student, and I don’t want to carry that burden to my home life, even if it means staying hours after my classes end.

Without a dedicated space to study, students have to adapt and dedicate their own space to study. For me, I’ve had to find so many different spots across different buildings as my own dedicated study spaces. They’re not quiet study spaces, and they’re certainly not perfect ones, yet they’re the ones where I’ve worked the hardest. I still really want the library to be open, for the record.

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