Every evening on campus, students in physical and artistic activities work up an appetite after practicing or rehearsing for hours on end. However, Gerber Dining Center is normally closed or very close to closing right at the end of these events, often leaving students having to settle for insubstantial meals elsewhere and left with wasted meal swipes.

On weekdays, the dining hall closes at 8 p.m., except for Fridays when it closes even earlier at 7 p.m.This timing frequently aligns right at the end of students’ extracurricular activities, forcing members to rush out of practice in hopes of getting a chance to eat.

Even before practice, students often do not have an opportunity to eat, with classes running until 4 p.m., many have no free time to go to the dining hall. This results in a lot of athletes and other activity participants feeling cheated out of their meal swipe usage. For First-Year Track and Field athlete, Nathan Barry, missing the opportunity to have dinner is detrimental to his livelihood.

“The time I have to eat is only during that specific meal period, and I have not eaten all day,” Barry said. “I wish somewhere like Gus’s was open longer, because it can be annoying to walk all the way to Wersterlin for a meal.”

For Barry and many other students, this issue can not only be an inconvenience but a major issue towards their overall performance in the activity and academically. With such an inconsistent amount of time to eat, students often have to stress their schedule in order to fit in time to eat. This not only affects their time to practice, but also potentially keeps them up late in order to do their schoolwork.

Consequently, some athletes resort to piling up meal swipes at the Westerlin Market, most commonly known as the C-store. These meals can be unbalanced and unproportioned for what a growing adult needs throughout the day. 

In addition, this also exhausts many of the students’ allotted meal swipes. During a given day, students can use their specific meal package to purchase a meal; however, they only get two swipes per meal period: morning, afternoon, and evening. To get enough food, the students need to spend more money and waste meal swipes because they cannot get a full meal with just one swipe at Gerber.

Despite the detrimental impact this issue has on students, the dining hall staff does have their reasoning for this unpopular policy. According to Fred Kurt, the director of auxiliary services, the dining staff have tried to change the hours, but through experience, the change did not work.

“At Gerber, for an hour of being open later than our normal closing time, we would waste time by getting maybe ten people,” Kurt said. “Also, for our staff at the C-store, it is hard to manage a store with people who are given unlimited meal swipes at any given period.”

Unfortunately, Kurt said the Gerber dining hall and C-store can not logistically uphold these conveniences. Therefore, to alleviate issues like wasted meal swipes, dining services and students need to work together to find a solution that both suits the students’ needs and logistically works for the dining service workers, who work hard to provide students with the meals they need.