It’s a fresh semester! New classes and old friends, new experiences and old haunts. You’re glad to be back, it’s nice to see everyone...and eventually you realize that you’re swamped, overcommitted, and pulled in forty-four different directions.
You’re still glad to be back at college, but a little peace and quiet would be nice. You’d love to have a chunk of time in a quiet place to collect yourself, get shit done, and possibly even recooperate. The difficulty is getting the friends that you know and love to leave you alone.
This is not as impossible as it might sound. If you know where to look, the are plenty of spots on campus for you to catch your breath.
1. Your Dorm
The option that sounds the most obvious tends to be the most complicated.
Unless you’re one of the folks who ended up with a single, you have to share your space. Therefore, make sure your alone time isn’t intruding on your roommate’s alone time. Find a time when they’re in class and you’re not so you can study, read, binge-watch, or nap in a comfortable space without regular disturbance.
2. Between the Shelves
Your college library is chock full of spaces to read, write, and study. They have comfy chairs, sizeable tables, convenient outlets...and lots of people. Though these are ideally the perfect places to study, medium-to-large groups of people sitting together in silence can feel eerie, and sometimes becomes a distraction itself.
That’s not to say the library is a bad place for quiet, alone time. On the contrary, the library is great for silence, if you know where not to look.
Let me explain. The odd parts of the library that no one ever visits aren’t visited. So if you study between shelves in a less-frequented section of the library you get all the peace and quiet of the library at the cost of the large squishy chairs.
3. A Fast Food Joint at a Normal Time
A campus fast food restaurant does not exist for students getting breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They’re there for the weird hours. That Taco Bell down the block from your dorm is a safe haven for the night owls, the all-hours partiers, the late studiers, and the ravenous stoners.
So what if you went there during the day?
Your friends are probably in class or eating elsewhere. You get a lunch to yourself.
4. That One Place Where You’re Probably Not Supposed to Be
It’s shifty, for sure. If Security found you, they might have a thing or two to say. But no one ever goes there. So chances are, if you went there, no one would find you, right?
I mean, you’ve never seen anyone there before, so would anyone actually see you if you went there?
Maybe you’ll leave after you finish tonight’s assignment...like immediately after…
5. A Practice Room
As every music nerd knows, the practice rooms are simultaneously the most stressful and the most peaceful places on campus.
On one hand, you spend hour after hour hashing out piece after piece, rudiment after rudiment, scale after scale, dreading the next time you have to face your professor. On the other hand, all of the other people in the building know your pain and will never disturb you.
It’s just you and your instrument, locked together for better or for worse.
6. The Toilet
For the master people-avoiders, look no farther than the toilet.
You’re gonna go there at some point at some time almost every day, so why not take your sweet little time about it? With your phone in your hand and a locked door between you and the rest of the world, nothing’s stopping you from taking a moment to yourself.
Download an ebook for easy transport bathroom reading, catch up on your emails, scroll through your Twitter feed, tumble down Tumblr, get an online subscription to The Washington Post, check your grades, read a webcomic...anything to numb your mind for the duration of your stay.
If you’re reading this article in the bathroom--mad props to you! You’ve already mastered the art of person evasion. If not...I believe the quiet is calling. Answer it.
