I know one thing every college student can agree on: College students love sleep. I, personally, am deeply in love with sleep. I love to go on nice, long 8 hour dates with sleep every night, and I really, really hate it when something disrupts my beloved dates.
Most of the time, the thing that tends to cut my dates an hour or two short is the N.C . State football parking pass distribution.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Parking passes for our football games are an excellent measure. I am glad we have a student lot and tailgating. Our parking pass distribution, however, warrants improvement.
Everyone knows that getting up early in the middle of the school week is beyond difficult. Students were likely up late the night before doing homework and still trying to catch up from the lack of sleep they failed to get over the weekend.
Plus, if a student lives off campus, they have to drive to campus, which tacks on another 15-30 minutes to their morning routine. As everyone knows, these precious minutes of sleep matter. If they didn’t, why would there be a snooze button on alarms?
Parking pass distribution for football games is always the Wednesday before the game, starting at 9 a.m . That hour doesn’t sound too bad, but when one factors in the minutes spent waiting in line, the hour becomes earlier and earlier.
If you don’t get to Reynold’s Coliseum by 8 a.m ., you risk waiting in line for more than an hour. I have found that if you get to Reynold’s by 8 a.m ., you end up waiting in line for an hour and 15 minutes. If you get to Reynold’s at 9 a.m ., the wait time becomes a whopping 2 hours due to the number of people in line.
Many students have 10:15 classes, so getting to Reynold’s by 8 a.m . cuts out about 2 hours of much-needed sleep. The worst part is, this is an unnecessary loss of sleep because there is an easy fix.
A new system for parking distribution should be created in order to make it easier and less tiring to acquire a parking pass for football games.
An online parking pass distribution would suit more students’ sleeping patterns. When students sign up for tickets, they should have the option to sign up for a parking pass. The parking passes should be given out based on loyalty just as the football tickets are.
The parking passes should then be printed out. Instead of hanging them from the rearview mirror, they could be placed on the dashboard of students’ cars. And, instead of tearing off the bottom of the pass, the student parking lot attendants could tear off a corner of the parking pass or make some sort of mark on the pass.
These measures would make the parking pass distribution system more efficient and greatly benefit students. Help students sleep; change the parking pass distribution system.
