Favorite Duke study spots: Rubenstein library and Gothic Reading Room
A school is a place of study. In certain places, of course. I’ve always found my dorm desk too close to my bed, and my bed too close to comfort for me to get anything done. The common room isn’t much better. For all I struggle at making conversation with new people, I have no issue chatting there all day. In the end, I have to leave and go outside. Over the last few years, I’ve explored Duke’s campus for the perfect study spots, which I’ll be sharing in this guide.
This week’s location is the Rubenstein library. I’ll begin with my thoughts and then cover pros and cons at the bottom of this article.
Thoughts
Rubenstein re-opened Fall 2015 after a couple years of renovation. The first floor has galleries and a rare books library that you can’t enter unless you’re important or researching a book in their collection. All my textbooks are pirated PDFs and no one at the front desk thinks I’m important so it’s off limits for me.
The third floor is peaceful due to lack of visitors. But the desks there are not much taller than a coffee table and have oval tabletops the size of one and a half dinner plates. There’s never enough room for my stuff and within twenty minutes I can feel my back hurt and hear my mother scolding me for my posture.
All that’s left is the second floor, which centers around the Gothic Reading Room. It’s built with a high ceiling to fit arched windows, bookshelves, chandeliers, and portraits of once-important Duke men all around. The floor is hardwood because no proper art display would have its visitors shuffle around on carpet. As if only realizing the room’s advertised purpose after, the furnishers placed long tables down with rugs scattered about. Not enough, though. If I’m not careful and scooch my seat back on the bare floor, it squeaks and earns me looks from my neighbors. Yet even with occasional sounds and disturbances, the room has this self-repairing stillness. The air is still, the mood is still, and the students are still, staring at their highlighted readings, books, and notes. I could do that too, for up to thirty minutes. I did not survive. Their studiousness would get to my curiosity and the stillness, my patience, tearing both apart and driving my mind to drift, because something in me had to move now or I’d boil under the pressure. It felt like my piano recitals from when I was eight, except the audience didn’t pop glares when I scooched my seat back.
That’s how I’d end up in the hallway, along with all the other things that didn’t belong in the Gothic Reading Room: trash cans and water fountains, TVs and leftover tables. It’s almost entirely carpeted, as if inviting me to take off my shoes and walk around in my socks. So I do. There’s people eating Panda express and sleeping on the armchairs so I can’t be the most embarrassing being here. The tables seat four with two chairs on each side. If it’s not finals or midterms, it’s custom to seat just two. If I’m the first to a table, I sit wherever. If I’m person number two, I sit diagonal, as if part of a weird game of library-table tic-tac-toe. This way we each get an entire half of the table to spread our stuff and I don’t accidentally make eye contact when looking up from my miserable page of substitution reaction mechanisms. It’s a great place, though. Reminds me of the living room after dinner — everyone’s in their own spot, doing their own thing. No pressure other than deadlines.
Pros and Cons (as a study spot)
Pros
Location — right on main quad and less than five minutes from West Campus dorms unless you made poor life decisions and live in Edens
Quiet — you get to choose between extreme quiet in the Gothic Reading Room and what I’d call ‘living room quiet’ in the hallway outside.
Food — obviously, you’re not in your room, the Bryan Center, or West Union, but you can walk (indoors!) to Vondy for some coffee and snacks
Bathrooms — among the best on campus, the men’s ones at least. Miles above The Edge and the rest of Perkins
Water bottle fillers — makes filling up your Nalgene, Blender Bottle, or S’well bottle so much easier and visible to your classmates
Lots of power outlets —both on the wall and floor next to each table
Cons
Hours — like the rest of Perkins and Bostock, Rubenstein closes at midnight on Friday and Saturday nights
Bottom line
Rubenstein used to be my favorite study place on campus until West Union came along this year. West Union has all the same pros but also tons of restaurants and is even closer to my dorm. I literally just walk out the door and cross the quad, which takes no more than a minute. I still go back to Rubenstein for things that require a lot of concentration — like writing papers or studying for midterms — whereas West Union is more for coding assignments and day-to-day homework.
If you want a very quiet place though, this is perfect since West Union’s study floor gets especially noisy around lunch and dinner time.
If you live in Edens, there’s closer places to checkout, which I will cover later.
