The student center of University of California Los Angeles has a barbershop and a CD store. The University of Minnesota's student center has a bowling alley. Granted, Macalester is not nearly as large as either one of these schools but what does our Campus Center have to offer?

We don't deny the fact that it is a beautiful building. We don't deny that it has a great dining hall. We don't deny that it has a high-tech lecture hall. We do wonder, though, what the Campus Center has that makes it more than a campus center and an actual student center. We're not asking for a barbershop or a bowling alley, we just want a place for students to get together and hang out.

True, there is the dining hall, but who wants to pay $7 to hang out with friends every night? It is even harder for people who live off campus and don't have a meal plan to motivate them to eat at Café Mac. There is the second floor open space, which is usually filled with people studying, and … well, there's the SPOs. But there's not really anywhere to sit there. You kind of have to stand, unless you want to sit on the stools provided for short students to reach their boxes. This all adds up to a student center that does not provide an informal, recreational space for those who it should serve first and foremost: the students.

MCSG has recently released a Student Lounge Survey to come up with a solution to the lack of student common space on campus. Some of the suggestions from which students can choose are a pool table, ping pong table, foosball, arcade/video games, a pinball machine, a karaoke machine and darts.

We believe that a student lounge is a stupendous idea. As students at Macalester, where, if we may be frank, we probably study more on average than students at the U of M or at UCLA, we probably need recreational activities even more to keep us from going insane in a place where it's winter for at least 75 percent of the school year. And since many of us have been kicked off campus due to lack of on-campus housing, we also need a place to reunite with our long-lost first-year roommates or to finally meet that good-looking guy in our Statistics class. A lounge space is a great idea—it would help students relax and unwind with friends, and help the student center live up to its name.