Dining Class Observation

As a freshman who has only been in college for a week I wanted to know what a college student life was like. I was interested in finding out how students socialize in the dining hall. For this reason, I wanted to know if they were influence by their race, age, physically reasons or personal relationships. I order to do these observations I went to the dining hall during lunch time. First of all, the students I observed were not aware of me taking notes of their behaviors. At first I just sat by myself in one of the tables that are in the center of the dining hall and observed people around me. However, since I wanted to observe more than those around me and I was looking for diversity I moved around a few times. I observed not only Caucasian …show more content…
Some of the groups were fairly large while other students were eating by themselves. One of the large groups had around eight students something very interesting about this groups was the way they communicate. The largest group I observed was one made of nine students they were all together talking about events going on the week. I am pretty sure that the students in this group were all from the same floor trying know each other a little bit more. There was one student who seemed to be the main person in the group because he was the one talking most of the time and the one starting conversations most of the time. Every time he stopped talking an awkward silence would invade the table. Also some of the students in the table seemed to be uncomfortable and at least two of them were on their cellphones not even paying attention to the conversation going on in the …show more content…
For example, there were two students sitting next to me. Both of them were Asian, sitting in different tables by themselves. Suddenly another girl who was Asian as well was looking for a place to sit. It was obvious she didn’t know anyone of the people around, so after a few seconds of looking around she went to the Asian student sitting next to me and sat with her. The started talking and after a few minutes they looked very happy with other. What I’m trying to say with this is that students lean to socialize with students who share things in common. Most of the time gender and race makes socializing easier and more uncomfortable. Diversity is a huge thing when it comes to people and it plays a big role in our behaviors and social relationships.
In conclusion, during this exercise I felt very intrigued to know more about the students I observed, I wanted to know what were they thinking about? why was it so hard for them to talk to those sitting in front of them? It made me realize that all of them were taught different and have different routines. It made me think how things changed, students take as long as they want to eat, they do homework and study while they eat if they want to. They can do what they want to do because this is college