By Lucas Ngai
“I was too engrossed in my lunch, but at least I’m going to make it on time to my Intro to Logic Class on time!” I thought triumphantly, as I happily aligned the room number to the one listed on my calendar.
I sheepishly knocked on the bright blue door, only to feel the imminent shame and dread as I just realised I was standing in front of a professor’s office (of Social Policy, no less). My friend happened to walk past, also puzzled by the labyrinth of hallways and classrooms.
“Is this Kingsway?” I asked.
“No, it’s the Old Building…” he replies, trailing off.
I heave a sigh of frustration as the initials “KSW” on my screen taunt me, laugh at me mistaking the Kingsway Building entrance image on the website for a virtually identical Old Building door up the street.
The LSE fresher’s plight – acclimating to living costs in London, sifting through the avalanche of welcome information, enduring the shoving of GIAG events at one’s face at the Welcome fair (not to mention the hard tap water, ick…), and now, being late to class for no good reason? Must the sighs of frustration from three initials add to this harrowing list as well?
Don’t get me wrong, I genuinely enjoy spending time on the LSE campus; the buildings here emanate an air of modernity that brilliantly juxtaposes the Gothic architecture of Lincoln’s Inn. However, I am most indignant about this travesty: such rich culture and history in each and every building on campus, reduced by the bureaucracy, to three letter initials and grey rectangles on a tacky, red cube. Could they at least have added some landmarks on the map to help people orient themselves, like the Globe in front of the Student Union Building (SAW)? But no, in the name of aesthetic, minimalistic graphic design, the burden falls on the poor freshers (many of whom whose first language is not English) to decode the cryptic image.
“Well, just gotta suck it up, innit?” you may think. After all, the finance bros are too busy toiling away at their spring week applications (into the wide, heathen gates of corporate slavery before term’s even started, what?!) to be bothered by this senseless drivel. To my pitifully ignorant readers, there is ample evidence to suggest that this issue is anything but trivial. During fresher’s week alone, the phrase “lse ckk” has been googled a grand total of 184 times. Worse even, on October 2, the phrase “lse sal” has been googled 90 times at 2 in the morning (I couldn’t make these statistics up even if I tried)! If building codes are able to keep students up at night two weeks after Welcome Week at the time of writing, something clearly needs to be done – and just when you think it couldn’t be worse, this problem also leads to significant financial losses, which I will explain below.
Before we begin, I will elaborate on our hypothetical LSE student: based on conservative estimates, school fees will be £23,330 (reflective of LSE’s international student majority), and the average first year will only miss class for the first two weeks. Within those two weeks, I will assume the student has four modules composed of 2 periods that are 50 minutes long: 1 lecture + 1 seminar a week, as well as an LSE100 seminar (can’t forget about that!).
Within these two weeks, the student would be late to only ¼ of classes, or 4 periods, due to building mix-ups, each mix-up costing ten minutes of (productive) class time. For the purposes of this experiment, time is quantified into money – after all, the knowledge learned in lectures and seminars is what you paid for!
To quantify potential losses to the student, I will calculate the total cost of each school week at LSE (discounting reading weeks and Spring Term). To account for full days off, the cost of each week will be divided into cost per period, rather than per day. As a history student, I apologise in advance for my rudimentary math skills, but the numbers are outlined below for your scrutiny:
£23330÷20=£1166.5
£23330÷20=£1166.5
£1166.5∗2=£2333
£1166.5∗2=£2333
£2333÷17≈£137.24
£2333÷17≈£137.24
(cost per period)
£137.24÷50≈£2.74
£137.24÷50≈£2.74
(cost per minute)
£2.74∗10∗4=£109.6
£2.74∗10∗4=£109.6
(total losses)
Oh, to think that for each minute one sits idly in lecture, they squander not one, but two lovely Greggs sausage rolls! On a more serious note, if even by the “cheapest” Tier 1 overseas fees and rounding down the numbers, the fresher still loses over £100 from getting buildings mixed up. One can only imagine the losses for overseas students in Tier 2-3 fee courses! To think that such first-world inefficiencies can have such far-reaching financial consequences…
Yet as I sit in deep thought, thinking about how to continue articulating this opinion, I cannot help but respect why this system is necessary. Think about it – how would “Pankhurst House and Fawcett House, Ground Floor” fit on my tiny little calendar tile? Truly, imagine the power of communicating a precise location in a handful of characters – so streamlined and precise (when I can get used to it, that is)! If we can write complex essays and solve complicated equations as students here, surely this simple skill is within our grasp. On second thought, perhaps seeing the locations for all my classes and meetings for my societies without any ellipses is quite satisfying. Perhaps it’s just a necessary evil, transitioning from a simple 3-digit room location system from high school to this building code system at LSE. Perhaps this “necessary evil” can just be… “necessary”.
In my humble opinion, I think that the solution to this problem was under our noses all along – the pre-enrolment form. We all have to do this anyway, right? Picking the LSE100 topic, filling in the questionnaire for the Careers team, and getting the email account sorted are all very important tasks, but is getting to know the campus you’ll be spending the next 3-4 years on any less important? What if, as a part of this form, is a set of flashcards, followed by a quiz or test requiring students to match building codes, their names, and appearances (the easiest test at LSE, I’m sure)? Intuitively enough, adding this segment to the pre-enrolment process will surely decrease the odds of freshers getting lost significantly and help students make the most of their tuition.
Imagine a world where you sit in front of your computer, one month before start of term at the LSE. You eagerly open your pre-enrolment email (which still takes a millennium to arrive), not knowing what to expect. As you carefully match the “building with the glass box sandwiched in the middle” to “SAL” and the “mosaic in the concave quarter dome” to “KGS”, you sit in your plush swivel chair, enlightened: your feelings of foreboding, dread, fear of financial loss, begin to fade away into the wind as the drab map on your screen springs to life. And when Week 1 starts, you proudly sit in your seat 10 minutes before each of your lectures start, knowing full well you earned those sausage rolls you’re going to get at that Greggs down the street once the clock hits 5 minutes to the hour.
Now, that’s a world you should want to live in.
