After spending some time in the recently renovated North Dining Hall, it has become apparent that not everything is in its final form ... hopefully. I traveled around North yesterday, taking photos for a column that ran; whilst doing this I had a series of students come up and talk to me. The students seemed to notice my camera and assumed they knew what I was doing. From there the complaints began to flood in.
I cannot vouch for each of these, but I decided to keep them in their entirety to give voice to those who wanted to come talk to me. The students living on North Quad have been waiting long enough for these renovations to start and end, but now what they are left with still feels like an unfinished project. Not only is the new North lacking the flow and form of old North, or even South, but it has become something of a scavenger hunt every day.
When headed to the dining hall one of the things people look for is consistency. Not consistency in the foods served, as students voiced their love of variety, but consistency of placement. Over the past couple of weeks that North has been open to the students they have been playing a game of hide and seek with the trays and cups, putting them in a multitude of different spots and keeping the students guessing. To add to that, there are now two versions of cups that students can choose from, which seems very trivial to add more variety to the cups and not the types of food being served.
However, that seems to be only the tip of the iceberg as the real problem becomes evident after you have picked out your tray and plate. The flow of the dining hall is more confused than a business major in an engineering class. With lines forming differently every day, it is simply just a guess as to whether you are in the right line until you begin to move. With little room to move around, crammed lines and a flustered flow, the dining hall has become more of a headache than anyone could have originally guessed.
That being said, it is getting harder and harder to claim that North is the top dining hall. Particularly because the cream cheese and bagels are on separate sides of the dining hall and the cups and cutlery are all strewn about all over the place. And don’t even mention the lack of Frank’s Red Hot Sauce. We can only hope that these first few weeks have been a “soft opening” of sorts for North, and that tweaks and changes will begin in the coming months.
