A Love Letter to the Dining Hall
Image Courtesy: Author
This Valentine’s Day, I sit here writing a love letter to the most stable thing in my life: the dining hall. Sad, right?
College creates this rare window of opportunity to have both the autonomy of adulthood and the reliance on a system for living, eating and school. The perfect example of this dichotomy is our dining halls.
I have spent countless meals weaving my way through a cafeteria-style line amongst hundreds of my peers. We experience the stress of finding the shortest wait, snagging a good table and going back to classes and life without a second thought. However, I realize now how unique it is as university students to have this space. Every person in the dining hall is one of our peers: classmates, exes to avoid, best friends and even my RA.
Image Courtesy: Instagram
Waking up on a Sunday morning might be my favorite time to go. As I make eye contact with girls wearing last night’s clothes, it is evident that they are looking for the perfect hangover cure in the form of a cheap bagel or some mediocre eggs. Sundays mean a corner table with my roommates, catching up on the degeneracy of the night before. The dining hall is the perfect public-yet-private place to gossip and fight off the Sunday scaries before returning to the reality of school, work and life.
Yes, the dining halls can be mundane, less than exceptional, and overwhelming. But part of being in college is living these shared experiences. The quality of food is overshadowed by getting to share a table with all of my friends, cramming before a quiz over Southwest Salads and getting way too excited when it is Korean Night for dinner. These moments are rare and fleeting. In just a few years, never again will we be in a place with so many people like us. We will probably have to buy our own groceries and eat alone most of the time.
With that in mind, show the dining hall experience some love. Take advantage of the chance to eat, not for the sake of putting food in your system, but for experiencing the camaraderie of being in college, of being a student for the last time and not needing to worry about much besides the wait time for a panini and the assignment due in an hour. Before long, we will wish to be right where we are now.
Strike out,
Maddie Schlehuber
Editors: Kimani Krienke, Natalie Daskal, Will Kennedy
University of Notre Dame
Writing Director: David Kramer
Blog Director: Helenna Xu
Notre Dame
