As much as college students would like to eat out at cool and trendy restaurants with their friends every night, that is simply not an option. Enter Brandeis, Creighton’s main dining hall.

While cafeteria food may not be as good as a mother’s home-cooking or a professional chef’s culinary work, Brandeis has been doing its best to fill those shoes, however slow the progress might be.

Considering the busy schedules of college students, Brandeis could do better to improve their operational efficiency. While the grilled cheese may be mouth-watering and delicious, I could have probably milked a cow and processed my own cheese all before it was ready to be taken off the grill.

At the other food stations, lines will quickly begin to wrap around the dining hall as the workers hurry to meet the stampedes of college kids. The stations are understaffed and the nightmare of battling it out in Manhattan’s SoHo shopping district on Black Friday comes screaming back to me as I shuffle into line. We should not have to spend our time waiting in lines because honestly, we’re young and waiting in lines is not time well spent.

Once students are actually served, it is a toss up whether the food will either be so dry it could dislocate your jaw and be absent in any taste whatsoever or served tender, juicy and salty enough to put us on a lifetime of diuretics.

I never know what to expect when I take my first bite of food from Brandeis, but when I do I am grateful I have health insurance and that there’s a hospital so close to campus.

Being one of the Asians living in the Midwest, I have an appreciation for Brandeis’ efforts to incorporate more diverse types of food to choose from. Instead of being faced with the same turkey breast, tomato sauce and pasta or mashed potatoes, ethnic cuisine days have certainly helped to break the bonds of monotony.

Though my ancestors are probably rolling in their graves laughing at the lack of authenticity in the Asian dishes, Brandeis tries. Occasionally, the dining hall will host specialty chef exhibitions so that students have a chance to try a legitimate cuisine and not some Americanized version.

With the health craze going on, I would have assumed Creighton would have tried to incorporate more fruit options for students. I’ll admit the salad bar is quite impressive with an extensive amount of vegetables to choose from. Seeing that we pay nearly $40,000 in tuition, though, I would hope the money could have gone to bring in an occasional fresh strawberry, blueberry, grape or watermelon instead of the same kind of canned fruits that were served during the Great Depression.

A constant irk of mine during every meal at Brandeis is the serving size distribution of food for each student. Just because I am not a 7-foot basketball player doesn’t mean I don’t need to be fed. I understand that the school would not like us to waste food, but I did not come to college to major in modeling and I would prefer to not feel the pangs of hunger resounding in my stomach during my physics lectures.

We all have a full plate of classes and extra-curricular activities we’re involved in – is it possible to also get a full plate of food around here so I don’t have to get back in line? Though their progress might be slow, Brandeis is trying to do its best to cater to its students and become a placeholder for our parents’ cooking.

Despite how busy Brandeis cam be, they manage the hundreds of students that pass through their doors with a smile. It’s nice to know that even though we’re not sitting with our family at the dining room table, the Brandeis staff is just as supportive of the students as any parent would be and wants to make us feel just like we’re at home.