May heralds sunshine and roses for most, but not us students… exam season is here! It’s stressful for everyone. We’ve all prepared for the grinding 12-hour stints in the library, filled with procrastination and despair as we hopelessly look over the incomprehensible notes written throughout the past semester. Or perhaps that’s just me…
Personally, my least favourite part of exam season is the library. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great place to work, but the problem is everyone else thinks so too. Completely packed from 10-6, I’m sure we’ve all trudged around Morrell – up and down, round and round – but there’s never a seat to spare. It feels like some sort of strange humiliation ritual as you’re slowly forced to admit defeat and leave to find space in another building.
As a second year, I’m deeply committed to my academic studies… (motivated solely by looming deadlines and a dwindling word count on my essays.) Surprisingly, this exam season, I’ve been able to pull my sleep schedule forward a couple of hours. I wake up early and head over to campus because at 9, you’re actually in with a chance of finding a seat.
Today I settled down to study in Morrell, the hours tick on, and I’m making progress, until I’m tapped on the shoulder and politely told by another student that they’ve booked my seat. Initially I’m just surprised, I’m not in a study room, do people actually book individual seats? I pack up my stuff and go to hunt for another place to work, but my optimism quickly drains as I realise EVERY SINGLE SEAT is gone, Fairhurst, Morrell, Burton… even The Kitchen! It’s hopeless.
I’m writing this mainly to suggest that the library change its current system. It works perfectly for study rooms and pods, but hardly anyone uses it for individual seats, meaning the system doesn’t function fairly. Instead of impartially distributing seats, it privileges the tiny minority of students using the system. It takes nerve (that I don’t think many of us have) to approach someone and tell them to leave their seat. So even though it’s an established system, most students will never use it for individual seats, making it defective.
This doesn’t mean to come across as an attack on anyone who does book individual seats; it’s just a warning to those who do get to the library early… when you find a seat BOOK IT! In an ideal world there would be infinite space in the library and therefore no need to book seats but, for now, a first-come-first-serve system seems like the fairest way to settle seating.
In a time as hectic as exam season, the last thing anyone needs is to be evicted from their seat and forced to traipse around the library. As a disgruntled student journalist, this has been great fuel for a trivial opinion piece but apart from that, it’s just a pretty annoying system.