Students who are neophytes to the whole college experience eventually find out how difficult it is to decide which classes to sign up for. When a person has a complete lack of experience, the only deciding factor of which class to take is whether a class will allow him or her to sleep past noon.

But say a student of the freshman persuasion wishes to select classes based on a more telling frame of reference than what time the class starts. Let’s say a freshman student who’s thinking about majoring in something like philosophy or history wants to sign up for a class that will fulfill a general education requirement. Thus, this student might decide to take a lab science course.

But which lab science course to take? There’s such a wide variety of courses that all sound so appealing: biology, chemistry, physics, geology and astronomy. How can you decide on just one when you want to take them all?

You could pick the course with the best professor, but if you’ve only spent a few months at this school there’s a good chance you won’t know any of them.

As a last resort one might consider making a decision based on the lecture halls where these classes are taught. Granted, a lot of people don’t like the idea of teaching a class to a couple hundred students and evaluating them based solely on their performances on four Scantron exams; but maybe picking a class mostly because of the room it’s taught in is at least slightly better than deciding to take a class because the person teaching it has the funniest name.

But a freshman thinking about majoring in something like philosophy or history might have never even been inside Halsey Science Center, in which case seeing that the lecture is held in room “Halsey 106” means absolutely nothing. Ergo, one takes the location that the class is to be held in for granted and ends up choosing the class held in the building that is within the shortest possible walking distance.

While walking distance should always be a highly scrutinized part of the decision, it is also possible that the classroom or lecture hall a class is held in is an oft-overlooked part of the decision-making process. Although that probably sounds like a completely insane statement, I make it with the fullest confidence and backing of science.

Well, at least a science. That one science is ergonomics, which is the study of equipment design intended to maximize productivity by reducing operator fatigue and discomfort. Whenever a quarter-inch of padding is added to the back of a chair in an office in an attempt to get someone to work more by making them comfortable, that’s ergonomics.

Ergonomics is also called biotechnology, human engineering and human factors engineering, which all sound like labels for the thing Dr. Frankenstein did. Ergonomics is divided into physical ergonomics and cognitive ergonomics, with the former dealing more with human physiology and the latter dealing more with human psychology.

And if your interest in anatomy and the scientific design of chairs has not yet been peaked, you can go to one of four universities in New Zealand and get a degree in ergonomics. And even if you don’t want to drop out of school so you can emigrate to a faraway country and get a degree in chair-padding, you can still use ergonomics to your advantage.

Assuming there’s some truth behind the concept of ergonomics, and four schools in Oceania can’t be all that wrong, then you’re more likely to pay attention, take better notes and thus get better grades if you’re sitting in a chair that has been maximized for optimum productivity. But if at this point in your college career you’re taking classes where the professor is speaking to over 200 people, then you probably haven’t been a student for a very long time and therefore might not be completely familiar with every building on campus.

Therefore, as a public service to the unappreciated student body here at UW-Oshkosh, we here at the Advance-Titan would like to present an evaluation of the different lecture halls and large-sized classrooms where many introductory and general-education courses are held.

Although this may seem to be frivolous and completely lacking focus, whether your 9 a.m. class is held in an auditorium with padded seats might be the deciding factor in whether you get out of bed to attend, and whether or not you attend that class period might be the difference between passing intro to sociology and taking an intro to anthropology course next semester to fulfill that credit requirement.



Halsey 106

Halsey 106 is the large lecture pit right in the front of the Halsey Science Center. It can seat up to 210 students yet appears to be similar in size to many other lecture halls on campus that can seat far less because Halsey 106 is very, very steep.

Other lecture halls, such as Halsey room 107 (located conveniently across from Halsey 106) descend into the bottom of the room at a much lower angle than room 106. The result is that these rooms don’t seat as many people and walking down the steps produces that awkward feeling of needing to take two steps forward before one can take one step down. This also happens when one is at a stadium for some sort of sporting or music event, so that might mean that this would be considered a stadium.

Although Halsey 106, the pit in question, could also be considered to have stadium seating, if the requirement to be considered that is whether the room produces a similar feeling to sitting in the absolute top row of a large stadium, some 800 feet above the ground.

It is not difficult to see someone suffering from vertigo while standing at the top of this lecture pit. I’m not afraid of heights or anything at all like that, but when I stand at the top of Halsey 106, I’m afraid that if I trip and fall down the stairs, I would land at the bottom of the room and not hit a single stair. This is a very steep room.

I imagine that the reason this room is so steep might be because it needs to be in order to fit so many chairs in it. And here’s a fun fact: there are only six and a half inches between the edge of the folded-down seat and the back of the seat in the next row down

For us with long, dancer-like legs it is quite annoying to sit through class when both our shins have fallen asleep and blood is pooling in our knees. That’s why before classes in this room with the maximum possible enrollment, it is not uncommon to see people lining up on the outside of the room before class so they can get either a seat in the front or a seat on the aisle.

As this lecture pit is located in the Halsey Science Center, most of the lectures that occur here are for science classes. Many of the natural science intro courses have lectures in this room. For example, I had geology and astronomy courses here. However, that doesn’t mean you can only live the Halsey 106 experience if you’re willing to take a science class. I, for example, took Appreciation of Drama in this room, and I don’t think that was a lab science class.

Overall: This lecture pit is comfortable, and thus maximizes your output potential, if you have very short legs and you aren’t afraid of heights. This room can also be comfortable if the number of people in the class is dramatically lower than the number of seats in the room, allowing you to place your big, honking feet over the seats in front of you instead of jammed underneath your own.



Clow Pits (rooms 101, 102 and 103)

Unlike Halsey 106, the three, near-identical lecture pits in the Clow Social Science Center are not covered with a thin layer of padding. Because this little bit of thigh and lower-back padding might be viewed as a welcome change from classrooms and their unforgiving wooden desk-chairs, it is an ergonomic benefit.

Clow rooms 101, 102 and 103, which seat 230 students give or take a few desks that are missing key components required for any functional chair, don’t have the extra cushioning that the seats in Halsey 106 have. However, there is more leg room in the seats of these pits, and it’s not much of a trade-off to give up some seat cushions so your head isn’t stuck between the shins of the person sitting behind you.

These chairs may not be padded, but they are molded plastic which is still certainly more comfortable than those hard, rigid, wooden desks. Plus, the plastic seats remind me of the tiny, molded plastic seats I remember sitting in from kindergarten to third grade, which is a pleasant flash of a nostalgia, or a “blast from the past,” if you will.

But of course the most telling attribute of a lecture hall, and I hope my professors all realize that I do not condone this practice, is how well one can sleep during a lecture. Between Halsey 106 and the three Clow pits, it would be easier to sleep in one of the three lecture pits in Clow.

The key problem with Halsey 106 is that it’s impossible to get comfortable enough to sleep when your knees are being pressed into your neck. Or, if you need leg room to sleep, you can try sitting in the very front row or on an aisle seat, but then the professor is guaranteed to see you sleeping and stop class to wake you up by dropping a book on your desk.

Nobody wants to be that person any more than anybody wants to be the person whose cell phone goes off in class and the professor answers the call, initiating a very awkward conversation.

Overall: The three Clow lecture pits provide much more personal space for each individual seated while still providing enough seating for over 200 people. All three pits have technology similar to that in the Halsey pit, such as computer and slide projectors, which means your professor will be able to amplify your learning experience with a Power Point presentation or a slide show with complicated diagrams of the anatomy of an atom.

Obviously, there are more important deciding factors when signing up for a class than what room the class is scheduled to be held in. For example, if you really love rocks and you hate math, then it would be silly to sign up for physics instead of geology for the sole reason that physics is going to be held in a room with seats like a movie theater’s.

Then again, if you don’t feel particularly strong toward either rocks or math, there are worse things you can base your decision on.