After this last exam week some of us may already have vacation while others still have four weeks of exciting fieldwork ahead of them. While physical teaching is slowly starting to pickup again, it’s come to late to be of any real meaning. I can’t exactly say that the whole campus experience is a thing after only having had two on-site tutorials through the entire year. Therefore I’ll give you a little introduction to the most important place on Roeterseiland: SEC’s Association room.
Thanks to the UvA’s marketing department, student numbers keep rising each year, and so the campus, that was only built a few years ago, is already too small for the amount of students. Normally, if you would arrive between 10:00 and 15:00 on a regular weekday, the entire building would be packed. There would not be an empty seat left at the library, the cafeteria and the hallways and every café in the surrounding streets. If you arrived during this time, it was either to go to class, or to walk an endless amount of circles through the building, hoping to catch somebody just before they left, so you could stare at them from a distance and then sprint to take their place the moment they stood up.
For those still unfamiliar with the maze that makes up our faculty; the Association Room, more commonly knows as ‘de bk’, is located at the start of a hallway in the B-wing on the first floor of the ABC building. Even though it’s only a small room, with a couch and a few desk chairs, it has been the common denominator through most of the countless hours I have spent at Roeterseiland. It’s nice to have a space which is yours in a building filled by people you don’t know and where the hallways almost feel like you’re walking through a hospital. The bk is a space where you can chill, hangout and ‘study’ (which is a bad excuse to start drinking beer at 12 AM). When I used to have class in a normal lecture hall, I would head there before to drop off my things, get some free coffee and see my friends. This is also where the danger of the room lies, my friends from sociology and I where so used to seeing each other at there, that, once Corona hit and the university closed, we didn’t really know how to meetup without it. And while we have learned how to do this after a year of being banned from this holy sanctum, meeting up outside of uni never really felt the same way.
Now that the year is almost over, and the amount of times I get to write a shitty column that gets force fed into your email feed are coming to a close, it seems hard to realize that I’ll also have to let the go of the association room sometime soon. So I hope that I’ll be able to entrust it to whoever actually reads this.
P.S. there’s still half a whisky bottle hidden somewhere near the ceiling for when you can’t figure out how to begin a paper and need a little artificial inspiration.