After being away for this year, common time is set to return to Winthrop’s campus next fall for the 2022-2023 school year. Common time is a set amount of time in the day where no classes are held so students can hold club meetings, do homework, or just hang out with friends.
It was also a time for many on-campus organizations to table on Scholar’s Walk and Campus Green. Tabling is when some organization members go out to popular campus spots and talk to students about what their organization is in order to recruit more students.
For some, seeing this at Winthrop helped them decide whether or not to attend Winthrop. “When I toured Winthrop as a junior in high school (before COVID started), my tour was during common time, and I loved seeing all the organizations’ tablings and everyone in Digs spending that together. Seeing the Winthrop community during that time solidified my decision to come to Winthrop,” said sophomore psychology major Savannah Brown.
Some students haven’t been able to know what common time is and what it holds due to it being taken away these past two years. “I haven’t really experienced common time before because of COVID, so I don’t really have anything to compare to it,” said sophomore human development and family studies major Grace Corbett.
Having common time would benefit many on-campus organizations and help increase membership levels. “As a member of Greek Life and other campus organizations, I think it would be incredibly beneficial to this campus community to have common time return,” Brown said.
Students would still like to see events held during common time even if it is possibly prevented from occurring next year. “If common time doesn’t come back next year, I think that there still should be events that would happen during common time but on the weekends, as everyone pretty much goes home on the weekends,” Corbett said.
It is also important to tell students about events occurring during common time. “It should also be noted that the school should be holding events during common time that people actually want to attend, so it’s important to have good communication with the student body,” Corbett said.
Overall, common time would be extremely beneficial to students on campus. “It was a time every week that people knew they could spend together and about half of current students have never experienced it,” Brown said.
