Best Place to work and study

There's this scene in Inception, where the Dom Cobb (the DiCaprio guy), visits his father in law, an architecture professor. Dom finds him working in an empty lecture hall.

Cobb: "Never did like your office, did you?"

Prof: "No space to think in that broom cupboard..."

I think I share the basic sentiment. If you placed me in a white room, with nothing on the walls, and deafening silence, I would get nothing done. It's not natural. There's no stimulation, either visual or auditory. One might think that this would help me get stuff done–after all, there's nothing to do but work and there aren't any distractions– but paradoxically, it doesn't work for me. It's the same reason I could never study or work facing a blank wall in my dorm room at my desk or on my bed. Small and cramped dorm common study rooms don't work for me either.

The library is a good place to study, but it can get crowded during finals, when everybody's working on that final project, paper, or outline. There are well lit tables and hard-backed chairs, which allow me to spread out and shuffle my (disorganized) notes all over the place. There are some comfortable couches, and the food is never far away. It can get somewhat quiet, though, and I sometimes find myself skipping the library in favor of my favorite study space: the cafe.

My school recently opened a beautiful cafe in the middle of campus. An outside company runs it, but accepts college meal plan money. The atmosphere is like Starbucks–comfortable chairs and generous tables, the aroma of coffee and soft yellow lighting. It has become my favorite study space, instead of the other campus run cafe that was always crowded, noisy, and bustling with traffic. I need a bit of white noise and an attractive environment, and this cafe seems to fit the bill perfectly. I can order a latte and just start writing without the normal fears of taking up valuable table space in a Starbucks. Not many people have discovered this cafe's virtues yet, but I'll indulge in a selfish moment: here's to hoping that not a lot of people do...