Bad news befell the SRU community last week as we found out that for the first time in forever, Bailey Library will not be open 24/7 during finals week this semester. Club Bailey will follow its usual schedule of closing at midnight and reopening at 7:30 a.m. but what are we supposed to do for those seven and a half hours? Where can we go overnight to cram for that cumulative, 100 question physics final that we have to take for some reason, or where are we going to go at 3:00 a.m. to write that 50 page paper that is due at 8? Luckily for you, here are, in no particular order, my top five places to pull an all-nighter during finals week while Bailey is closed.
1. The easy answer to this conundrum is to go to one of the university-designated study rooms in Spotts that are going to be open until 6:00 a.m. but we are college students, we are not supposed to go with the easy answer. So my first all-nighter location recommendation is Sheetz. Sheetz is open 24/7, offers free WiFi and, if we are being honest, you would probably end up at Sheetz at some point during an all-nighter anyway so you might as well just start off there. Plus, what better way is there to watch the sunrise than eating two for one hotdogs with drinking a coffee/Monster-hybrid to keep you awake while crying over your laptop and re-evaluating all of your life choices.
2. Like the idea of being able to get food at all hours of the night at Sheetz, but you want to stay on campus? Well I have the answer for you, spend what might be the most stressful night of your life in the lobby at Boozel. The Boozel Express counter is open 24/7 and they probably will not kick you out if you are sitting there with five Boozel Express meals. The only problem here is that the Boozel employees working the counter might give you some weird looks, but as long as you are at the point in your life where you could not care less about what other people think of you, you will be fine.
3. Want to take the pathetic element element from the first two places, but with an added bit of self-loathing? Of course you do, we are in college. To really just hate yourself you can just sit in your car in one of the on-campus parking lots all night. Sure you might not get any work done and you might be going slightly insane, but at least you will have a good parking spot tomorrow morning. And hey, all of those negative things you think about yourself will probably go away after you graduate, right?
4. Okay, no more sad places, let’s go somewhere where we can be happy and have fun before we have to take that economics final that is going to ruin our lives. How about…Eat’n Park in Grove City, they are open 24 hours and we can get some actually good food. Maybe that will make us feel better. In fact, I am not even going to take any work with me. I have deserved some time off, I work hard and school is like super unfair and stressful. What is the worst that could happen? As long as I get above a 60 percent I will probably pass the class.
5. You know what? I do not even care if I pass this class. It is not in my major should why should I even have to take it in the first place? It is just a way for the university to suck even more money out of us. The fifth place on this list to pull an all-nighter is Ginger Hill. Let’s be honest, without Bailey Library we were not going to get any work done anyway, so we might as well go have some fun before our lives are ruined. Ginger Hill is open until 2:00 a.m. so we can stay at Bailey until midnight and then go to Ginger Hill until two which gives us just enough time to sleep, recuperate and come to terms with our many lapses in judgement before that final that is inexplicably scheduled at 8:00 in the morning. What could possibly go wrong?
No, but in all seriousness it is kind of a bummer that the library is not going to be open 24 hours, but at least the university has a backup plan and opened up extra rooms in Spotts so that we could still have a place to work, even if it is not as good as the library. I hope you all can find that perfect balance between stress and productivity and that we all pass our finals and finish off the semester on the best note possible.
