Academic Life is Full of Ups and Downs

Attention students: Lamont Third Floor, Starbucks and Widener Reading Room are so passé. The new trend in studying: Thayer Elevator. At least that’s the hotspot for Penn B. Lawrence ’08. “I just get stuff done in there,” Lawrence says. “You just give yourself a rule that you can’t leave until you’re done.”

He rides up and down the elevator in the early morning hours when there isn’t much traffic, sitting on the floor, listening to his roommate’s iPod and doing his homework. “Normally I do my math,” says Lawrence, who is planning to joint concentrate in philosophy and math. His roommate, Christos Kaplanis ’08, and his Thayer neighbor, Robert D. Cecot ’08, have studied with him a few times. “It’s really cool,” Kaplanis says. “It’s like a little box.” Cecot adds, “Yeah, we sat with him a couple of times, it was fun.”

For Lawrence, however, this isn’t all fun and games. “I have serious ADHD,” he says, as well as a form of reading comprehension dyslexia. The elevator is like a stimulation/isolation chamber for him. “Sometimes,” Kaplanis says, “he gets really hyperactive,” which is why when people get on and off the elevator, Lawrence does not acknowledge them, but merely keeps his head in his books and his iPod in his ears, listening to a playlist which alternates between Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. “Zendrix,” Lawrence calls it, “my Zen-like playlist.”

This cutting-edge study ritual, however, might be fading fast. “My dad told me not to do it anymore because it would make me stand out too much and look like a freak,” Lawrence says. Soren J. Siebach ’08, Lawrence’s neighbor, has a different take: “Interesting people tend to have interesting study habits,” he says.

Fortunately for the intoxicated footballer who threatened Lawrence in the early morning hours last week as he rode up in Thayer, and perhaps more fortunately for Lawrence himself, his proctor agreed with his father, saying he should find a better place to study. The “too quiet” Lamont is obviously not the answer, but residents of New Quincy, Leverett Towers and other campus buildings with elevators beware: it seems this Thayer Player needs a new gig.