Work Culture: On Nights

It is 11:30pm.

I am the only one left at my 6-person table in the library. Extend this to be the average occupancy of the library: currently ~17% full. Give it another 30 minutes and I will feel almost uncomfortably-out-of-place-in-the-library-at-this-"late"-hour enough to leave. (Alternatives being dorm room, the bar, or clubbing .. but for most people on a non-significantly-eventful night, their room.) ... we are at university, right? ... What a culture.

At MIT, any given night, walk into the reading room at 11:30pm and you will not find a single open seat. Wait until maybe 3am and the seats will maybe start freeing up ...




--------------------elaboration.

Thing is, check out my college library or the engineering library here (at Cambridge) during the day ... especially 2-8pm. FULL.
Scope out MIT's reading room or Hayden Library in the early afternoon. Mediocre presence, people sparsely scattered around ... go between 5-7pm (which is King's library high tide) and you'll see the tiny population of people who aren't at varsity sports practice or in one of 29387 extracurricular meetings of that day.

Independent study is a huge focus at Cambridge, since theory > application, and there are many more people majoring in humanities - so, naturally, people camp out in the library during the bulk of the day. It seems there is less priority placed on extracurricular commitments [(a) I'm doing just as many activities here, or actually, even more than I did at MIT; yet the collective time commitment definitely falls short of that in the states. (b) just a general conclusion based on my awareness of other students' extracurricular involvement both here and at MIT], so as a result, people have the time of day to spend in the library. At Cam, lectures are shorter, there's no such thing as office hours, and recitations are limited to once-every-2-to-3-weeks 1-hour meetings ... = more time to spend in the library. At MIT, people are so caught up in the massively diverse whirlwind of activities they do around campus that we rarely start doing work for CLASS (problem sets) until 10pm, maybe 8pm tops. At which point we then crack open Red Bull, stock up on candy, and hammer out our psets til 4, 5, 6am. To be fair, MIT is the night culture if there ever was one, but then again, this isn't an uncommon at American universities.

Yet another culture shock.