Emerson's Ginny makes hall feel like home
Amy Dumont '09
Issue date: 4/4/07 Section: Features
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"How…" she begins to mumble. How did Ginny know the student had forgotten her ID? Ginny just laughs and says, "You have that look in your eye."
Students pass by Ginny every day and hand over their ID cards to swipe as they enter the hall. For the past three years, five days a week, from 2 in the afternoon til 8:30 that evening, Ginny has been working at Emerson Dining Hall.
"I love the kids and the people I work with," Ginny says. "They're like family." And with the amount of time Ginny spends inside the dining hall, it's no wonder.
A college dining hall is a social Mecca for most students. Most tend to make their visits in relatively predictable cycles. At 2:30 in the afternoon, it's usually a calm and peaceful place to grab a hot cup of tea while doing some reading before class. But just two hours earlier, you'd be lucky to hear what the person sitting across the table from you is saying over the noise of hungry lunch-goers.
While the quality of food may vary from campus to campus, it's safe to say that a dining hall is an experience that becomes more than just a nutritional jaunt.
"Hiya," she says to a boy as she gets up to take his card.
"Hey darling, you are you doing?" he replies. They chat for a minute or so before he continues down to the salad bar. Ginny then leaves her post, and walks into the kitchen, only to return a few seconds later with a box of coffee cups to stash under the pots.
Throughout the course of her day, Ginny does a variety of tasks. She not only has to monitor the flow of students entering the room, but she also has to keep an eye on the food being served and refill platters when necessary.
Often, when she is in the middle of refilling an empty salad bowl or checking to make sure that the chicken isn't burning, a student will catch her and request a plastic spoon or more ketchup or a new flavor of ice cream. She'll stop what she's doing to make sure that whatever the student needs is readily available.
Ginny takes her job seriously. "It's a boring job, but I love it!" she jokes.
She said that she has the best opportunities to meet and chat with students during the winter and summer months. The college is on break, but some students stay to live and work on campus. "You really get attached to a few of them," she says.
It's often said that the kitchen is the heart of a home. It's where families and friends congregate for meals, where we converse and share each other's company. It's where good grades and bad drawings are posted on the refrigerator. It's where birthday cakes and cookies are baked.
Colleges don't have that same sort of kitchen.
Architects design dining halls to try and establish a comfortable place for meals, but nothing can ever come close to a home's kitchen. What we've grown up with could never be replaced, and Ginny knows that.
Yet she proves that while students can't sit down to the family dinner table every night, they can still feel at home. Just like she's done everyday for the past three years, she will cheerfully greet students as they enter the dining hall.
Whether we realize it or not, Ginny extends her family into ours every day.
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