My place

TU Delft’s Building 28 is next to the brand new Echo, behind Civil Engineering. It is a building with a lot of different names. VMB (Van Mourik Broekmanweg), Twee-WI (Tweede EWI), the ugly grey cube with the small windows behind Civil Engineering. From the outside it is the ugly duckling, but inside it is quite a comfortable office block. It’s my place. If you go into the VMB and go to the second floor, you will see a rather soulless group of work spaces.

Advantages: the desks are big and can be adjusted in height, there are kettles, and the chairs are comfortable. Disadvantages: the building is noisy. While it is less dark than in the Library, it is not a concentration of daylight. There are no second screens or partitions between the desks to give a sense of privacy. And there are those foldable sockets from hell which my laptop charger does not fit into without having to bend the charger and the socket a little bit. All in all, I could list five work spaces on campus where I could get more done.

There is rarely much studying done at home

And some people can study well at home. They try to convince you of the advantages of working from home by saying things like “you don’t have to commute”, “I have my own desk there” and “you can  make tasty toasted sandwiches for lunch”. I don’t trust those people. How do they do it?

Home to me means my bed and the thought that if I do not need to commute, I can spend that half hour in bed. Home means my sofa and films like I Built a Chicken Out of Junk Wood and Frank Sinatra but it’s Giant Steps and Would I Lie to You S15 E8. Home means not having another student looking at me out of the corner of her eye judging my computer tabs with the Brightspace, WhatsApp, YouTube, Google Scholar, Reddit, another WhatsApp, another Reddit, four Google Scholars, and YouTube icons.

There is rarely much studying done at home. And so I have a fixed spot here. It is not perfect, but it is ‘my’ spot and I return to it time and time again. It became ‘my’ spot because it was the place where my study mates came together. I knew that if I went to sit there to study, there would be a big chance that there would be people around me who I knew and who were even working on the same subjects as me. So I accepted all the disadvantages of the space. But I am taking my time for my study, so my study mates have either graduated already or have left. If there are people that I know, they are working on different things to me.

Still, I keep coming back. This is partly because of nostalgia – going back to the time when most of my friends were still studying. Party because of habit – this is simply the place where I go to study, so I go there to study. And partly because of hope – my study mates graduated in this building, so I can do so too.