For such a beautiful campus with pretentiously well-dressed students, classrooms at King’s can be really awful. I’m not sure if it’s the uncomfortable chairs, fluorescent lighting or the annoying truck sounds every morning, but there is something that makes you question if you should even get out of bed for that 9:35 a.m. lecture.
How can the King’s community be so flamboyant, and yet our classrooms feel like soulless pits? (And I’m not talking about the KTS Pit. Pit, if you’re reading this, I love you.) Is it to tame our ambitious spirits? Take us down a notch? Make us really understand what Nietzsche means when he says God is dead? If so, the King’s interior has succeeded.
Being late for a lecture in Alumni Hall is the worst mistake every FYPer will inevitably make. You have to squeeze past rows of weary students, still fresh off their respective all-nighters — and yes, they’re all looking at you. You’re the most stimulating thing to happen since the lecturer put a half-hearted Gilmore Girls meme in the slides.
The oh-so flattering shade of dusty rose caking two-thirds of the room really livens the place up, too. I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to write notes from inside someone’s stomach lining. Even the drapes are the exact same shade of fleshy pink. Now that’s commitment.
And good luck trying to find an empty bathroom near Alumni Hall during the class break. Sometimes, late at night, you can still hear a desperate FYP student trying to find a place to pee. But seriously — why do I have to walk through the bookstore just to find an empty stall?
Still, credit to Alumni Hall — it is iconic. And it’s kind of metal to make your seminal lecture hall look like an unused set from Videodrome. Besides, there are greater evils lurking deeper in King’s echoey halls.
The KTS lecture hall is filled with single serve prisons. Getting up from those chairs gracefully is an odyssey destined for failure. You either have to half lift the desk and try not to drop everything you’ve ever owned or carefully swivel and pivot your way out. Either way, you’ll probably drop your 800 pound water bottle in the process — and yes, everybody will be looking at you again when it clangs against the tile floor. Embarrassing.
Even worse than that are the classrooms in the basement. If you somehow are able to find your classroom, be sure to bring a lamp because the miniscule windows won’t give you the necessary amount of sunlight to see your notes, nevermind curing your seasonal depression.
What’s really depressing are those pale yellow basement hallways. It’s like going through a labyrinth — and suddenly, just when you expect to see a minotaur lurking in the corner, you stumble into the Vroom Room. What even is a Vroom Room? A Hot Wheels racing track? President Bill’s personal parking space? We’ll never know …
To an untrained eye, the J-school may seem really nice, if you don’t mind going up, and up, the endless staircase. But with those giant desktop Macs, it feels like you’re just a miserable extra in a movie working in a boring, gray cubicle. The screens are like horse blinders. Want to see the board? The prof? Anything? Too bad. Didn’t you know journalism is just you and your uncomfortably large computer against the world?
All of that is to say: I love being a King’s student. I really do. But King’s, if you’re reading this: make your classrooms better.