By Justin Lynch
In college students are very busy, whether it’s getting to their classes, researching and reading for classes, or socializing with their friends. Camden County College’s campus, in Blackwood, has a cyber café that helps all of the campus’s students with these tasks.
Students have found the Cyber Café to be the best place to congregate with friends and get some basic class work done, and kill a few hours on Facebook and other time consuming sites while waiting for their next class to start. Students spending time on computers has caused the computers in the café to have rules made for using them, for example: users can only spend a maximum of thirty minutes on a computer, but rules like these are rarely followed or enforced. One way to cope with the shortage of computers on campus is to have many students bring their laptops to campus. Some students also play video games on their laptops, in what has been known as the gamer group, among the students.
A growing problem with the café is the limited seating caused by the influx in students attending the community college. Jackie Tenuto, assistant to the Dean of Students, says, “There needs to be more room for the increase of students.” She also thinks they need to serve all types of students and not just some, of which she refers to the group of students that occupy large sections of the café with their video games and other activities. Jackie Tenuto also suggested that the café would be more pleasant if brighter lights were added, the high computer desks in the back corner should be removed, and that there needs to be more seats for eating.
The increase of foot traffic through the café has Richard Levine, the kitchen’s general manager, working harder to supply food to the faculty, students, and visitors at the college. He has been working at the college for the past six years to feed the hungry students with all their nutrition, caffeine, and sugar filled foods that all college students need to study for test and write their papers. Levine said he gets most of the food from Sysco, which supplies many schools and businesses with good quality fresh food.
Although Sysco provides the campus with quality food, Richard has some things he can’t change, like the pricing on some of the food. One of the items he admits he would like to sell for less are the chicken fingers because they are the most overly priced item on the menu, but they still sell, he said.
Reid Dawson, a 21-year-old student from Magnolia, NJ and has been attending CCC for three and a half years, agrees and said that the food is good and enjoys the environment of the café. Reid, like other students, goes off campus for food or brings food from home often enough because food at a local fast-food restaurant or from home is just as good and doesn’t eat away at their wallets as much.
Levine admits he doesn’t like the kitchen the way it is now, and has a few changes he would like to make. One of his ideas is to close down the entrée station, between the grill and pizza oven, and open a hot sandwich serving station instead because the entrée station isn’t very popular among customers. This is a plan Levine has, and is very hopeful of bringing his plan to fruition because he just wants to give the students at Camden County College better quality food and both parties would win with the changes that could be made to the cyber café as well as the kitchen’s menu.