South Dakota State University is known as a “back pack” campus referring to the idea that students never really move in, they just have to bring a backpack with the necessary things, and then they go home on the weekends. In all honesty, I do not blame the students that go home to get quality meals, or do their laundry for free. SDSU at least has better weekend dining options than the degenerates at USD, but that is not saying much. The weekends are a different story here on campus, and it looks as if everyone that thought that the zombie apocalypse was coming, and that they all needed to abandon campus at once. A weekend dining at SDSU is complete by rotating between Panda, Chick-Fil-A, and Extreme Pita, and sometimes Einstein’s if you feel like getting out of bed before 2pm. There is also a choice of Weary Wil’s but, that would require them to have food in stock. 

I’m not going to lie, the food isn’t terrible, but if you are ever trying to “watch” what you eat; Good luck with that. The food isn’t necessarily the healthiest food out there, unless you are constantly eating salad for every meal… Yuck. You just get so tired of eating the same food over and over everyday, breakfast, lunch and dinner, day after day. Sorry to break it to ya, but the freshman 15 is a real thing, and it’s hard to avoid with the lack of healthy choices, and the non-healthy choices all over campus. 

On the weekends we don’t have much to choose from, for example the market closes Friday afternoon, and doesn’t open for dinner. Starbucks and Java are not open on Saturday; Students need their coffee on Saturday. Weary Wil’s is only open after 4pm, while Chick-Fil-A is closed on Sundays. The weekend hours for dining services do not fit well with a college student’s schedule. I mean, the One Stop Rabbit Shop (The “C” Store) below Larson Commons is open for a whopping 3 hours Saturday afternoons, how realistic is that?

While some students are lucky enough to pack up and head home every Friday after they get out of class, others are stuck here on campus, starving. Even during the week the eating facilities on campus have the most odd hours that are not conclusive to the students needs. An example is the fact that Papa John’s closes at two, but opens three hours later at five to serve dinner, are you really losing that much money between those few hours that you must close? I feel as if the food places on campus while over charging us up the ying yang, are becoming even cheaper by closing business’ for three hours just to save another penny. As I explained earlier, a lot of the companies on campus seem to be continuously running out of products, such as Weary Wil’s out of chicken wings, Chick-Fil-A out of salads, and Panda out of sweet and sour sauce. We are paying big bucks just to have these business’ here the least they could do is carry the product we are craving. The biggest sales product for Chick-Fil-A is their chicken nugget combo’s, but it seems like every week, they run out of nuggets by Thursday. This far in to the year, they should know how many nuggets we need here at SDSU.

In the end, how can you blame the students who can travel home to those delicious home cooked meals? The SDSU campus on the weekends is as dead as a deer on the side of I-29. On the plus side, we have a full union and don’t have to deal much with construction. With all the choices we have, we just need to improve the options for the lonely students on the weekends, and maybe the hours the restaurants are open, for students to eat. 

Destinie Marshall is majoring in Business Economics. She can be reached at [email protected]