I was awe-struck. The ceiling stretched fifteen feet above my head and it had to be as long as half a football field. Upon the walls were cream-colored paint and the ceiling was stenciled with red and orange spirals. After a morning of exploring our beautiful Penn State Campus, I found myself standing in the Humanities Reading Room on the second floor of the Paterno side of the library. The grand room was perfectly symmetrical. To my right were fourteen large wooden tables adorned with bright green overhead lamps. An identical scene was laid out to my left. At each table, students sat with laptops and ear-buds, staring at their computers and textbooks with intense concentration. The atmosphere was calm and the only noises were that of hushed voices and the flipping of crisp new book pages. In the center of the room, by the entrance, yellow, green, and red lounge chairs lined either side of the wall. Their softness was evident as each chair held sleeping students, exhausted from a late night out. Along the walls surrounding the entire room were beautiful dark wooden bookcases filled with volumes upon volumes of reference books. Everything about this room was scholarly, and yet the air was warm and comforting like a small common room. This place was a studier’s heaven.
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