People always say that college will be the best four years of your life. While I knew that college would be fun, I never was quite ready to try and overcome my introverted personality to go out and meet new people. Eventually, I decided to attend Augustana with one of my best friends. We concocted a plan early in our junior year of high school to go to the same college and tear it up, both in academics and in life. I never thought I would end up at Augie but when I did, I knew it was the right place for me.
We knew we wanted to live in Solberg Hall for the room size and layout. We were given a room on the first floor of Solberg and were ecstatic. We didn’t have to go upstairs, we were right by the vending machines, and our room was the first door in the hall. It was the perfect spot. However, there was only one thing in Solberg that would make the biggest impact on me: the lobby.
At one point during the end of my first semester, my friends were hanging out in the lobby with other people that they knew from sports. I decided I would go out and see what was going on. We ended up hanging out in the lobby, talking and watching Vines, for close to three hours. This was really my first memorable experience in the Solberg lobby. While I didn’t get any homework done, I met some great new friends that night. The new people that I met always studied in the lobby, eventually, I brought my homework too and we all hung out and studied together. That became our daily routine until the end of the year when we all said goodbye to each other in, none other than, the Solberg lobby.
As I talk to more people, I have found that it wasn’t just me and my friends that were impacted by the Solberg lobby. It seems more like a rite of passage if you were lucky enough to live in Solberg. If you never studied or hung out in the lobby, then did you even live there? The lobby has a way of suckng you in due to its location. You walk past it to go upstairs, to go to class, to go to your car. No matter where you go you will always see the lobby. It has big windows that look out onto the rest of campus. You can see the Froiland, the Madsen, the Humanities. When you sit in the lobby, you can see people playing on the green. The lobby is a place that brings focus, but also gives you things to break that focus.
Coming into college, I never thought the lobby of my dorm would have such a huge impact on my first year, however, I am grateful that it did. Without the Solberg lobby, I may have never become close with the people that I consider to be my best friends now. Now, in a different dorm, I miss that lobby every day.
By Jameson Cosgrove, a sophomore biology major from Sibley, IA.