The worst part about Escalante Hall is not the trek to the third floor, but the fact that it is one of the many buildings on campus with no sort of food and beverage service in it. If you have classes in Dominguez, the Maverick Center, or Houston it can be simple to run to the coffee shop in the building and grab a snack or a coffee; but in Escalante, life is not as simple. If you wanted to grab a snack or a drink between classes in Escalante, you couldn’t.
Escalante, Wubben, Confluence, the Fine Arts Building, the Health Sciences building, and Moss Performing Arts Center all don’t have some form of a coffee shop in their midst. Several of these, like the Health Sciences building, Wubben, and Confluence may be justified because of their lab settings, and any music or theater major knows that you don’t want to be munching coffee cake and sipping iced coffee while trying to sing or play the saxophone.
The Fine Arts Building is debatable because its space is used in several versatile ways because you certainly can’t eat while painting, welding or sculpting, but maybe you could sip coffee while using the graphic design computers.
What does this mean for students with classes in these buildings with no food service? Well, on a basic note, it means you bring your own snacks and enough coffee to get you through classes.
Certainly, if you tried walking across campus to the University Center to grab a Starbucks or a snack from Rowdy’s between classes, you would be late to your next class. The line at Starbucks can be as long as a 20-minute wait during the 10 to 15 minutes between the end of one class and the start of the next. Plus, the time it takes to walk back and forth between the buildings.
It speaks volumes that even Houston, one of the oldest buildings on campus, has food service inside and Escalante doesn’t. I’m sure that fellow English and Mass Comm majors would agree that, to us anyways, the students in our department need accessible coffee the most. Furthermore, as a professor, it would be fairly annoying to have to leave the building during office hours or during breaks just to get coffee.
Perhaps faculty doesn’t want coffee and snacks in Escalante because of the technology on the first floor or some issue with Sodexo regulations that I don’t know about prevents the school from implementing additional coffee shops, but it’s pretty irritating when you forget snacks or run out of coffee between classes.
It’s also annoying having to plan ahead and get to Starbucks or Einstein’s 30 minutes before you class even starts just to make sure you have enough time to get your coffee or food and make it to class without being late because, regardless of what our high school teachers told us, some professors on campus do count tardies and absences.
We all know, the simple solution would be to suck it up and make our own coffee and bring our own snacks, but, as I’ve already said, what if we forget a snack? Or we wake up late and don’t have time to make coffee or pack a lunch and throw a snack in our backpacks? What if our professors don’t allow you to eat food during their lectures? What if we have to meet with a professor or a classmate at 10 a.m., and have class from 11 a.m.-1 p.m.? By 11 a.m. our coffee is gone, and a snack does not curb hunger for more than three hours, and if you’re like most of us and don’t eat breakfast in the morning, a snack doesn’t exactly do a whole lot.
I hope that other students on campus relate, and dislike how inconvenient it can be to walk across campus to get coffee and food. While I can’t offer an immediate solution to this problem because let’s face it, my immediate solution is to have coffee or food carts that function across campus like in Zoey 101. My further lack of knowledge on the regulations of Sodexo and the costs to implement food services into existing buildings prevents me from presenting a more knowledgeable solution, however, I think we can all agree that this is a need that should be accommodated.
