Bad acoustics and a sore butt
The worst classrooms
Door Tim van de Vendel
By Tim van de Vendel
Tim van de Vendel
Stadskerk
The Stadskerk is located at the Friesestraatweg, a five-minute bike ride from the Zernike campus. The building used to be a factory and a hardware store, and it shows.
The room is enormous and has high ceilings. It may look impressive, but the acoustics suck. If you don’t manage to snag a spot in one of the first couple of rows, it’ll be difficult to hear what the lecturer is saying.
Having class here is a challenge on other fronts, too, as there are no tables. Instead, there is just row after row of uncomfortable chairs. The floor is level, so you’d better hope a tall person doesn’t take the spot in front of you.
Physics student Gerbrand Bontekoe had to prepare mentally for discomfort when he had a class at the Stadskerk on a Friday. But things didn’t go according to plan: just when he’d walked in, a man approached the students to ask them why they were there. ‘He said that classes were only allowed on Mondays and Tuesdays.’
The man told the students to leave. ‘There was no sign anywhere saying this was a UG classroom’, Gerbrand says. ‘We literally just walked into a church.’ No unintelligible class for him that day. In fact, no class at all.
‘If your class is scheduled on any other day than Monday or Tuesday you should probably double-check the location’, Gerbrand says. You can bring a cushion to sit on and your laptop to put on your lap, but above all, make sure you’re on time. You definitely don’t want to be sitting in the back.
Pathé
Many students are familiar with the red velvet seats at the Pathé cinema at the Zuiderdiep. The UG has been moving lectures there for years since the large rooms are perfect for programmes that have many students.
You might think the fancy audio equipment and comfortable chairs make Pathé one of the more popular classrooms, but you’d be wrong.
Students complain that they’re having trouble staying awake, not to mention paying attention. It’s no surprise, since the rooms don’t have windows and therefore no daylight. Add to this the lecturer’s monotonous voice and before you know it, you’re asleep.
Even if you do manage to pay attention to the class, taking notes presents another challenge, since there are no tables to put your notebook on.
To prevent yourself from nodding off, make sure to stock up on coffee, energy drinks, or something else that’s caffeinated. Bring your laptop for notes. To reward yourself for your discipline, hang around after class; you might just be able to sneak into a movie for free.
Heymanszaal
This classroom is in the Academy building and to be fair, it is beautiful. The wooden panelling and gorgeous ceilings are the stuff of your dark academia dreams.
But that’s exactly the problem: besides the panelling, the seats are also made out of wood. They’re hard and uncomfortable. Try paying attention to what the lecturer is saying when all you can think about is how much your butt hurts.
Most of the time, the number of students in a class exceeds the number of seats. If you’re late, you’ll have to sit on the windowsill, the only place less comfortable than the wooden benches.
Make sure you bring a cushion to sit on. If your fellow students make fun of you, remind them that Nobel Prize winner Ben Feringa apparently does the same. He who laughs last, laughs longest.
Use your time in class to take a lot of pictures of the room. It won’t help your poor butt, but posting them online will get you a bunch of likes, which might dull the pain a little.
U building
The U building is really nothing more than a bunch of shipping containers all the way in the back at Zernike. The UG took over the building from the Hanze University of Applied Sciences because the Faculty of Science and Engineering was running out of space.
Once you’ve made the long trek across campus, the building’s sight isn’t particularly welcoming. ‘It’s just not a building that inspires joy; it’s entirely bland’, says mathematics student Levi Moes. The walls are bare and thin, and there’s just one coffee machine for the whole building. ‘When it’s busy, there’s a line throughout the whole building.’
The classrooms themselves are spartan as well. There are no chalkboards, just small whiteboards. You have to bring your own markers. There’s no cafeteria to take a break between classes and the elevator is often out of order. ‘Every time I take the stairs I’m scared they’ll collapse’, says Levi. ‘That’s how rickety they are.’
Levi has a tip for students when they see the U building appear on their schedule: ‘Go to the reception desk at another building and beg them for a different room.’ It worked a few times for him last year. But make sure you’re on time: ‘Otherwise you’ll have to join a long line of people who had the same idea.’