For those brave enough to face the a.m. hours, they’re experiencing a whole different side of campus

A student crosses Midway Drive on his way to the bus stop early yesterday morning. ELIZABETH MYERS | DAILY KENT STATER

Credit: DKS Editors

As the sun begins to chase away the night’s shadows, few students can be found around Kent State’s usually bustling campus.

The few that are awake, some finally ending their days, others just beginning, experience a side of campus different than the students who are still snuggled in bed, hitting the snooze button don’t see

“There’s nobody around on campus. It’s dead,” junior architecture major Catherine Ceraolo said. “There’s no cars, no people.”

Ceraolo gets up at 5:15 a.m. two or three days a week to lifeguard at the Student Recreation and Wellness Center. Other days, she gets up at 6 a.m. for a 7:15 a.m. class.

“When I’m staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning for school projects, getting up for work is difficult,” she said. “I’m not as alert in class as I’d like to be and (not sleeping) catches up with you after a while.”

Ceraolo said she still prefers getting up early because sleeping late wastes the day. And, she sees animals students wouldn’t normally see during the day, she said.

Candy Black, a Campus Environment custodial worker, said she and co-worker Tina Jackson have seen fox, as well as bats, skunks, baby possums and groundhogs, on campus in the early morning.

“The foxes are very brave,” Black said. “They just sit in the parking lot and look at you. I also saw a whole family of skunks once, babies and everything.”

Both Black and Jackson, who work from 10:30 p.m. to 7 a.m. cleaning Satterfield Hall, have school-aged children. They said their work schedules allow them to spend more time with their children than other jobs would.

Jackson said when she gets home she sends her children to school, then sleeps until about 3:30 p.m.

Jackson said they don’t often see people during their shift, except for the occasional professor late at night or students who arrive early for class in the morning.

At 6:25 a.m., she said one professor had just left after working all night.

Lindsay Sovchik, a junior sport administration major, works the 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. shift as a student receptionist at the Tri-Towers desk Wednesday mornings. She said she mostly sees students who have locked themselves out of their rooms in the early morning hours.

“A lot of times, people from Rosie’s come and pass out on the couches,” she said, looking at a Rosie’s employee stretched face down on a sofa in the lounge area.

She also said people who don’t want to be recorded for lock-outs will sleep downstairs and wait for their roommates to wake up in the morning.

Sovchik only works the early shift one day a week, but said Wednesday is her longest day of classes. When the end of her shift nears, she can’t wait to get home to sleep.

“You can tell that a chunk of your sleep is missing,” she said.

At 7 a.m., the Hub was also mostly abandoned but for two Einstein’s employees and a few other early risers.

Among them was sophomore nursing major Stephanie Tate, who sat in the Hub eating breakfast before her 7:45 a.m. human physiology class.

“You do see some things that other people don’t. Like (Wednesday) morning, there were all the people sleeping in boxes outside,” she said, referring to some Habitat for Humanity demonstrators. “Sometimes there’s trash and stuff around or they’re setting up for events or cleaning up that you don’t normally know about.”

She said she considers herself a morning person, so having early classes every semester doesn’t bother her much. Still, she said she would prefer to get up around 7:30 a.m., instead of 6:20 a.m.

“As it gets darker though, it gets harder to get up and get moving so early in the morning,” Tate said.

Contact student life reporter Theresa Bruskin at [email protected].