Most weekday evenings after dinner, around 7 PM, you can find me in Underhill Library. Underhill is my favorite library to study in during the week. Underhill is the music and dance library at Swarthmore, and it’s well located, taking up much of the bottom floor of the Lang Music Building. I have so many ensemble rehearsals in the music building, so it’s really convenient to spend the evening working in Underhill. Lots of dance, music, and theater students work, hang out, snack, and chat in Underhill late into the night, meaning that not only can I get a lot of work done, I can hang out with some of my favorite people, too.
Underhill’s main study area is a very open space, and when I’m working there, I often wonder what everyone else is working on. One of my favorite things about Swat is that no one ever does just one thing – everyone has multiple interests and passions. So one night I decided to bother all of my friends while they were trying to get work done and hear what they were working on that night. Each of these sections details a conversation with one of my friends, describing what they were working on that night and how I got to know them.
I met Eve through mutual friends, and we have gotten to know each other better in our modern dance class this semester. Tonight she was working on a collaborative website to annotate a reading about the bias in our data sets and data analysis and how that reinforces a power structure of oppression. It was a heavy assignment! The assignment is for a class called Virtual Bodies, Virtual Worlds taught by Lanetta Lacastra. ENGL 093A. She really likes the 15 person class, especially the projects.
Jing Jing is a fellow history major I met early on at Swat and have taken many seminars with, but they’re also an honors Arabic minor. They were writing an essay about a novel about Syrian immigrants in America in the early 20th century and their experience, particularly focused on a father and son. The book is called “Reclaiming Land from the Sea” by Rashid al-Daïf, but I’m told it doesn’t translate to English well. The essay is for a five-person class called Writing America in Arabic. They mostly like the class, but it requires a lot of writing, and they frequently have to present in class.
I’ve taken theater classes with Griffin for the past two years and we’ve worked on multiple projects together. Not only a genius lighting designer, dancer, and actor, Griffin is also a computer science student. He had just drafted an email to be sent to the drama board mailing list (drama board is our student-run theater club!), inviting people to Broadway Karaoke this weekend. After that he started working on a project proposal for his software engineering class, CS071. The proposal is for his semester-long group project. There are around 35 people in the class and 4 people in his group. The class meets for lecture 3 times a week and the lab meets once a week. The class is focused on one big project with the lecture running parallel to all the lab work, so he says it feels more like taking two half-credit courses than one one-credit course. While the lecture is run well, he enjoys lab when he gets to work on the larger project the most.
Simone I met through Intro to Environmental Studies, which we both took our freshman spring. She’s also an avid dancer, working on developing original choreography through the Dance Department’s Dance Lab II class. She was working on her second lab for Intro to Geographic Information System (GIS). The project in her lab assignment tracks median household income and different ways of distributing that income based on census data. It’s a really cool project, but she had just lost a bunch of her work and was redoing it. She’s really enjoying the class and looking specifically at Southeastern Pennsylvania because we go to school here. There are around 20 people in the class, which is taught at Bryn Mawr. There are some Haverford students, but she’s the only Swarthmore student in the class.
I was working on reading for my dramaturgy seminar, taught by Professor Wooden. Dramaturgy seminar is a double credit theater seminar with about 12 people in the class. We read three plays and a theoretical article every week and meet once a week for three hours to discuss the plays. Someone runs discussion for one of the plays every week, presenting historical background and dramaturgical questions to move the discussion along. That night I was reading Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov. I hadn’t read any Chekhov before, and I really liked Uncle Vanya! I love my dramaturgy seminar because it’s such a tight knit group of really enthusiastic and engaged students.
So that’s a night in Underhill.
