The Coffee Shop

By Bilsana Bibic

Our school coffee shop was quite busy today. Since it’s Sunday, people were doing homework and preparing for Monday.

This photo shows one of the new January Freshman working on a Euclidian proposition. Since we present propositions to the rest of the class, preparation is always important. I have many fond memories of Freshman year and prep work for Euclid. I would usually get together with a few friends and we’d go through the assigned propositions together. The best thing is, our conversations usually took flight very easily so prep work always lasted longer that we expected. But there’s nowhere else where you get to compare Star Wars to ancient geometry.

As I mentioned already, seniors are on a writing period right now and are focusing on their senior thesis. Here is Barr, engaged in a dialogue with the book he’s writing on. I wonder what his question is. My class is writing on so many different books this year, I can’t wait to go and see the conversations that will develop out of everyone’s hard work in the orals. There will be a mixture of everything from Rilke and de Tocqueville to Kant and Plato.

The best part of the coffee shop is the random and spontaneous conversation that starts on its own when you share a table with other people. I had a really good conversation on competition just 15 minutes ago as I was taking a break from writing. I ran into a group of my classmates who just finished dinner so we sat down and talked about sports and the upcoming Croquet weekend. I love how the coffee shop is always filled with interesting people who are willing to have a conversation. I will miss that.