Dining Halls: The Solution to Socialisation

Whether you have only just made it through your first few days of Freshers’ Week or you are well into your career as a student at St Andrews, you have most likely posed or received the question, “Do you want to get coffee sometime?” The allure of a coffee date comes from its flexibility: it can be however long you want. Additionally, coffee dates serve as educational experiences. Getting coffee with someone feels intimate; whether seated across the table or walking alongside your date, you can share a casual conversation or a formal discussion. People not only tell you about what is going on in their lives, but they also reveal their coffee preferences and some of their mannerisms when ordering from a barista. Given how frequent coffee dates are among St Andrews students, I believe that students would benefit from university-wide dining halls.

My family appreciates having dinner together almost every night. The meal acts as a lull in the chaos of the day, suspending all the busyness for a few moments and allowing us to reflect collectively. This routine provides me with a sense of ease when I’m home, and I find comfort in knowing that I have a guaranteed break in the day for a meal and a conversation. I felt the same way about meals at school: no matter how much work overwhelmed me, I had to go to lunch with my friends, which typically improved my mood. I found myself in a similar routine during my first year at St Andrews. I tried to go to every meal in the dining hall, enjoying the stability of sitting at the same table with the same people almost every day.

Now, as a second-year living in private accommodation, I subdue my cravings with a home-cooked meal in the company of my flatmate, but I miss the convenience of the dining hall. Cooking a meal for myself often feels like a chore rather than a break, which urges me to reflect on how lucky I was to have dinner cooked by my mum and meals from various dining halls for the first nineteen years of my life. Specifically, I am grateful that I was able to find a community in the people with whom I would habitually eat meals.

In the same way that St Andrews students ask each other to get coffee, I wish we could ask each other to go to the dining hall together. During my first year, I often found myself walking out of a lecture with someone I had just met, and our conversation would end abruptly as we headed our separate ways for lunch. For someone who generally finds social interactions challenging, asking someone to accompany me to the dining hall does not seem too daunting. Meeting someone new in an unfamiliar place can be frightening, but the prospect of a dining hall eliminates one of those variables. The comfort that I established in meals at home, primary, and secondary school would allow me to dedicate my attention to engaging with my acquaintances without the worry of having to adjust to a new environment. Dining hall meals also provide the same flexibility as getting coffee with someone: you can stay for as long as you want, and you can fill awkward moments by getting up to refill your glass of water or taking a bite of food.

Most importantly, food is a wonderful conversation starter, allowing people who share a meal to learn more about each other. You may learn that you and your acquaintance share a love for tomato soup or that they like to add pepper to all of their dishes because that’s what they did growing up. The seemingly small but valuable information you gain about someone when sharing a meal would be hard to discover otherwise, and it helps you connect with them beyond surface-level conversation. Dining halls accessible to the entire student population of St Andrews would ultimately create more unity between the students, resisting the subtle separations that exist between members of different halls and between different years. 

Illustration by Aoife White