Somerville is an incubator for young alums adjusting to the real world, says Swita Charansomboon '04, standing in Davis Square near a familiar mass-transit symbol. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

It’s 8:15, and I’m on the MBTA’s Red Line doing the morning-commute thing into Boston from Somerville, Mass. Half-asleep in my wrinkled business-casual clothes, I’m on autopilot, mouthing the conductor’s words: “Daaavis”…”Porter”…”Hahvahd”…”Doors open on the right.” I plug into my iPod, and the Deansmen’s “Fliptop Twister” transports me back to Bates, to my fourth-floor room in Adams where I can hear the Deansmen singing on Olin’s terrace.

Suddenly, one face among the morning commuters strikes a clear note in my head. The Patagonia jacket, the messy bun, the glasses — she was in one of my psychology classes. Jacky? Janet? Our eyes meet across the heads of other riders, and after two seconds of recognition we both look away.

I didn’t feel much like a Batesie that morning. Neither did she, apparently.

But why not? I always miss Bates during my morning commute. It starts with the small wish to enjoy just one more long breakfast in Commons with friends. That starts a domino effect, as I recall when the guy upstairs ate seven hot peppers on a dare during Junk Food Night at Commons, walks to Dairy Joy during Short Term with all my hallmates, and the happy feeling of finding a slip for a package in my mailbox.

When the Bates campus tips at graduation and spills 450 or so graduates into the real world, many young alums (not to mention grads from other NESCAC schools) end up about in and around Somerville. According to College records, around 150 so-called BOLD alums (Bobcats of the Last Decade) live in the three Somerville zip codes — probably more if you count the usual number of “undocumented” young Batesies.

It’s small wonder that the “Batesies in Somerville” Facebook group says that you can’t go to a bar in Davis Square and not run into a Batesie.”

If we chose to attend Bates for high-minded reasons, we choose to live in Somerville and similar neighborhoods for more prosaic ones, like cheap rent or access to the T and I-93. Like college admissions, there’s a legacy effect, too. For example, Sherika Blevins ’05 moved to Somerville because a Bates friend, now her current roommate, had preceded her, settling in Magoun Square.

Beyond convenience, Somerville is also an incubator, its comfortable, laid-back atmosphere helping young alums adjust to city life. “The typical Batesie is usually not the city type,” suggests Mihoko Maru ’05. “So it makes sense for us to live in Somerville. It has an off-campus housing feel, which I appreciate since I always lived in houses at Bates.”

Last night, as I walked down Holland Avenue toward Teele Square for a Bates gathering, I moved among Tufts students with backpacks and young professionals toting logoed messenger bags. Even the pace felt the same as walking the Quad.

Somerville is also where new challenges accelerate our sense of personal change (which is part of the reason we might feel ambivalent about our Batesie identity on the T). These common challenges are the same for everybody, says Blevins. “It’s hard to find a job, and the starting pay for college grads is pretty sad. It’s a hard, big dose of reality.”

The new post-Bates reality can make us question choices we made at Bates. A gathering at a friend’s house under the pretense of “catching up” might instead focus on feeling trapped in a job we took just to pay off student loans. Or we might envy business or engineering graduates from major universities who seem to have their entire careers mapped out. We fret about not choosing a job in our major field and losing touch with our passion — or we question whether it was our passion in the first place. We worry about running out of time to figure it all out. “Scared” is a word I hear a lot during our gatherings.

Katie Harris ’04 runs the Interlibrary Borrowing Office at MIT. “I had no idea what I wanted to do after Bates,” she says. “I only knew that I wanted to avoid working in a corporate atmosphere.” After a short stint in a bookstore, she found the MIT job. Now with a better sense of her strengths, she hopes to go to graduate school. “I can take what was a practical career move and infuse it with something I love, like studying art, cultures, and history,” she says.

Real-world pressures get personal, too. A college romance fails the test of distance, or good friends drift apart. “Sadly, it’s been very hard to stay in touch with those who moved elsewhere,” says Harris. ”Facebook helps, though.”

One recent grad talked about how his friendship with another grad tensed up after they shared an apartment. “We both needed to save money and we were friends at Bates, so I thought it would be more of the same fun. But we were on very different schedules, so we couldn’t hang out after work. It was just completely different from Bates.” They each found their own place after their lease expired.

Asked what they missed about Bates, these young alums listed a number of specifics — like running into friends at the library on late nights or adventures in Maine — that complement my own memories. Taken together, they create both a wistful longing for Bates community and a hope to find it in the real world.

“The Bates community gives students emotional well-being,” Maru says. At BU, where she just completed a one-year master’s program in psychology, “I really had to plan if I wanted to see people.” This contradiction — missing Bates, finding a bit of it in Somerville, yet needing to move on — fuels the conflicting emotions in recent grads who pass by each other in Somerville.

The future? The indie band Modest Mouse sings, “We’ll all float on OK.” And secretly, we suspect that when we eventually figure out what we really want to do, we will do better than OK.

By Swita Charanasomboon ’04
A summa cum laude major in French and psychology, Swita Charanasomboon ’04 was a research analyst for McKinsey and Co. after graduation and is now studying at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Even on the busiest days in the old Commons, said Marty Laurita ’08, there’d often be empty seats.

Those chairs were unoccupied — but not unused, Laurita explained. They had a vital function as buffer zones between student groups at the table.

It was a turf thing. “Once we knit ourselves together with certain people, group space becomes a factor,” said Laurita, of Camden, Maine.

No casual observer of seating habits in the now-closed Memorial Commons, Laurita based his anthropology thesis on a perception study of student cliques and their table choices. He asked some 20 students to map the dining areas and where distinct groups habitually sat.

“Whether those groups actually exist isn’t the point,” he explained. “It’s the perception we’re looking for.”

While the thesis was still under way at press time, Laurita could share a few common perceptions. It was thought, for example, that athletes tended to sit next to the salad bar in the so-called Big Room — a room that, in fact, seemed to serve generally as a venue for social display.

“People there seemed to subscribe to the concept of status and hierarchy,” explained Laurita, himself a denizen of the Back Room. “So there are opposing ideas of what it is to be a Batesie. Does that identity call for being part of a hierarchy, or not?”

Given the demise of Memorial Commons, Laurita was proud to have captured this snapshot of a passing piece of College history. In a January interview, he was also glad he’d be around for the new dining hall’s “soft opening” during February break.

“Friends of mine are going to be here,” he said. “We’re going to go stake it out and see where we’re comfortable.”

If the schedule holds, in about 10 weeks Dining Services will serve the first meals in the new Commons.

“It’s going to be a fabulous facility,” Dining Services director Christine Schwartz told Campus Construction Update during a conversation about the transition from old to new. Her office, just inside from the loading dock at the old Memorial Commons, was a jumble of cardboard boxes packed, stacked and labeled for the move.

“I can’t tell you what an experience it is to have something start on paper” — she waved a hand at a tall carton bulging with rolled-up building plans — “see the outline of it in the foundation, and then see the walls go up, and then the equipment goes in.

“To see it actually come to life and start to breathe is a once-in-a lifetime experience.”

While some moving could begin as early as Dec. 26, Dining Services expects to take possession of the facility in late January, with training slated for two or three weeks thereafter.

The bulk of the move comes next, from Feb. 15 through 17, the beginning of Bates’ winter recess. Once the health inspector has looked things over, Schwartz anticipates that by Feb. 20 or so the facility will be ready to dish up. It will be a “soft opening,” with most students and many staff and faculty away.

“We’ll be inviting people as we — as I like to say — burn and learn,” she said. “So it’ll give us time to amp up and give everybody some level of comfort before we go to the full board plan.”

Show time is slated for the evening of Sunday, Feb. 24, as students return from break and take their first board plan meal in the new Commons.

How much stuff will Dining Services bring from Memorial Commons to the new one? A lot. Tables and chairs are now being refurbished for use in the new dining hall. Tableware, flatware and serving pieces, all the catering equipment and a lot of office furniture will also go over.

With one major exception, however, the current kitchen equipment has outlived its usefulness to Bates. The equipment is still serviceable, Schwartz noted, just not at the high level of production needed in the new facility. She’s seeking new homes for the old appliances.

The one item in the culinary arsenal that will go to the new facility is the 2-year-old dishwashing machine. To transfer it, Bates will have to remove an interior wall and a window to the outdoors, lower the machine from the second floor of old Commons by crane, haul it to the new building and wall it in at its new location. The move will take about a day, plus disconnecting and reconnecting.

For Schwartz and her staff, the single biggest issue in the transition is training. That’s partly because of new technology. But also, Schwartz noted, coming with the new space is “a whole different approach to what we’re doing.”

In the present Commons, a large proportion of the staff is tasked with serving food that has been prepared behind the scenes. In the new Commons, most cooking will be done to order, in view of the diners. Because of that shift, Schwartz explained, “we’ve had to change the profile of our dining staff, so we have more production people than service people.”

Restructuring the organization has been effected through attrition and retraining during the past 18 months, she said. “I actually sat down with every employee and asked, ‘What is it you want to be doing?’ So they got, for the most part, to pick what they wanted to do, and I’d say 99 times out of 100 it was a good fit.”

For instance, several people on the service side wanted to move into production. “They’re really, really excited about this, because not only do they get to keep the interaction with students, but then they get to do something with food. It’s been a great growth experience for the staff.”

Schwartz emphasized that her staff numbers will not increase, with the payroll remaining steady at 96 benefited employees and 50 or so on-call workers.

In the next edition of Campus Construction Update, Schwartz reveals her favorite new pieces of kitchen gear and explains what the new Commons experience will be like for diners. Watch for it the week of Jan. 7, 2008.

Meanwhile, on the construction front, project manager Paul Farnsworth reported that during the week of Dec. 10 the long-awaited skylight was installed in the ventilation monitor — that big box on the Commons roof. In the coming days, the monitor will be sheathed in purely cosmetic louvers. The scaffolding that’s been up there for months will finally disappear and the last of the roofing slate will be laid.

Inside the building, a couple of steps that we reported on previously are nearly complete. The room where the Commons’ computer equipment will live has been finished, so that gear will soon be installed and the building hooked into the campus computer net.

In the kitchen and servery areas, the ceiling grid has been hung, a procession of inspectors have made their inspections, and the ceiling tiles are about to go in. In that same part of the facility, Farnsworth added, “our first batch of countertops showed up on Dec. 8,” with another shipment due by the 14th.

In the dining area, the ceiling made of recycled wood slats has been punch-listed — that is, inspected for defects — the overhead lights are all in place, and gray zinc trim is being installed around the windows.

Speaking of zinc, we asked about the green membrane underlying the zinc that’s being applied around the west entrance. Because wood and zinc expand and contract at different rates, that isolating barrier keeps them from damaging each other when the temperature changes, Farnsworth explained.

And when will the ugly plywood doors go away and the proper exterior doors be hung? Pretty soon, Farnsworth said. “We’re holding off with those doors because that’s the way we’re taking out the larger lifts” — the scissor lifts that allow workers to reach high ceilings and walls.

General contractor Consigli Construction “has put out an edict for the next couple of weeks — ‘You’ve got to get your work done, because we’re going to be closing up the front door and the lifts have to go.’ ”

Readers write: Monthe Kofos ’11 wondered what the many small, shiny projections on the new Commons roof are. They’re snow guards, Farnsworth responded.

“These are intended to hold the snow pack and prevent it from sliding off as one large block of snow, as happens on Underhill and Merrill.”

Kofos also asked if the fireplace lounge will have a piano, as is indicated by an artist’s rendering of the space. No piano has been selected yet for the lounge, Farnsworth replied.

An image in the previous update, which depicted the three major Alumni Walk pathways that approach the Commons, evoked a question from other readers: Why does the middle pathway stop short? Answer: The grassy expanse between that path and the building will accommodate the large tents that Bates erects for special occasions.

Alumni Walk: Finally, is the Outing Club camping out under two blue plastic tarps on Alumni Walk? Nope. Those tarps are protecting the concrete bases for two granite installations, of which one will display the college’s name and the other will honor generations of Bates alums. The concrete needs to be kept warm while it cures.

Farnsworth explained that a search is continuing for the appropriate granite for the installations, and they will be completed as soon as that stone is found.

Can we talk? What do you think about the campus improvements process?What would you like to know about it? What do you know that we don’t? We want to hear from you. Please e-mail your questions and comments to Doug Hubley, with “Construction Update” in the subject line.

Our back pages: Campus Construction Update returns the week of Jan. 7, 2008. If you just can’t do without until then, visit the index of earlier Campus Construction Updates.