Bay State Dining Hall: What’s all the fuss about?

If you ask anyone on campus which dining hall is the best, their answer will probably be Bay State.

It is by far the most hyped dining hall on campus boasting two floors, an excessive amount of flat screen televisions and hundreds of screaming students wandering around aimlessly.

Sounds great, right?

Completely unnecessary use of a flat screen TV

Wrong…so so wrong.

First of all, the trip from West Campus to Bay State is unnecessarily long just for me to grab dinner. Why would I even bother going? There is a perfectly good dining hall right underneath my building. West Dining Hall isn’t absolutely terrible, and there is literally a zero minute walk separating me from hot food. But for the sake of this article, I put on my big girl pants and decided to travel eastward.

Taking the bus to Bay State seemed like my best option because it was unseasonably cold. I was also not about to walk 40 minutes to a dining hall, no matter how “dope” it is supposed to be.

That was truly a lapse of judgment on my part. The bus is never on time when you need it to be. I waited outside of StuVi 2 for a solid 20 minutes before it showed up and at that point I think I was suffering from acute hypothermia.

Bay State Dining Hall

Once I arrived, I noticed my palms were sweating. All things unfamiliar make me ridiculously nervous and I hate surprises. As dumb as it sounds, the whole experience was an anxiety attack waiting to happen. Thankfully, I was not alone. I dragged my poor roommate out with me (shout out to you Mara), and even though she was no seasoned veteran in the world of Bay State, she had at least eaten there once before.

Swiping in was traumatizing at best. The whole fingerprint thing seems a little out of hand, but maybe I’m just incompetent. I had to redo my fingerprint twice, which was pretty embarrassing. Also, no one waits his or her turn entering or exiting. At least three people rushed through the kiosk trying to get out while I was struggling to get in.

When I got inside, I was immediately overwhelmed. I had absolutely no idea where anything was and quite honestly I still don’t. I looked over at my roommate and whispered, “Help…” like a small child lost in the grocery store.

She directed me upstairs to the gluten-free station, since we both have allergies. The night’s selection was no different than any dinner I’ve eaten at West: another variation of chicken and rice.

It was good, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t necessarily worth taking a bus ride and walking up a flight of stairs.

Stairs leading up to the second floor of dining hall madness

Another overwhelming obstacle was finding a place to sit.

Any dining hall is packed between the hours of 6 to 8, but this was unbelievable. We probably circled the area five times before finding a small table in a corner. Once we were finally settled, our meals were lukewarm. That was more my fault than Bay State’s, so I let it slide.

Some weird decoration that probably is the reason our tuition is so high

While I was eating my disappointingly predictable chicken and rice, I noticed that I could not hear my roommate from across the table. Hundreds of kids in a tall, echo prone building just isn’t the right setting for deep conversation, or any conversation at all for that matter.

I missed the dull roar of West.

The meal I managed to find

I think my most serious complaint, however, is the lack of eye candy.

It’s an unspoken fact that West has the highest concentration of hotties, and it’s something I’ve gotten used to seeing every night. It’s become a major source of entertainment for me to gaze from afar at the cute guys fueling their #gains after an intense workout at FitRec.

At Bay State I only saw a total of three cute boys and honestly it was devastating.

Me trying to hide the fact that I’m crying inside

As great as it was to get out of West Campus and try something new, I don’t think I’ll go back to Bay State unless I need to. The whole experience was a little more trouble than it was worth. If I had to rate my experience, I’d give it a 6 out of 10. I really don’t get the hype. It is a beautiful building with a lot of choices but when it came down to it, it all seemed very unnecessary.