‘Good environment to be productive’: Coffee shops can serve as prime study hubs

When the school day’s final bell rang, teenagers of yesteryear may have headed for a malt shop or the arcade at the mall, with dimes for milkshakes or quarters for pinball.

Here in the 21st century, students are equipped with payment apps on their cellphones, ready to spend several dollars on a beverage and/or snack.

About a mile and a half up Route 19 from North Allegheny Senior High School is one of the region’s myriad locations for a certain Seattle-based chain of coffee purveyors, a prime place for, say, journalists to schedule appointments with interview subjects.

If the appointments are in the afternoon and the journalists arrive early, they’re likely to notice clusters of young people sitting at tables, sipping drinks and … hey, those are laptops and textbooks.

“We usually come after school, and we do our homework,” North Allegheny 12th grader Skyleigh Pieto said as she gathered with a few friends on a recent Tuesday. “We study. We collaborate with each other. We feel it’s a really good environment to be productive, without distractions at our house or something like that.”

Her focus du jour was on an economics project involving facts and figures for a hypothetical change to the school parking lot.

“We have to come up with solutions for, if we had to expand the building and take up parking, what we would do with the space we still have,” Skyleigh explained.

With graduation approaching fairly rapidly, she’s looking forward to what she has mapped out after high school: attending Penn State Behrend for two years to major in meteorology and then transferring to the main campus.

Joining her at the coffee-shop table were two fellow seniors, Olivia Carlson and student who identified herself as Rebecca, both concentrating on a biology test addressing “DNA replication, the transcription and translation for proteins.”

Whoa.

“I don’t think I’ll ace it, but I think I’ll do OK,” Olivia predicted, and as for the ambience of the coffee shop: “I like how it’s, most of the time, quiet, and you’re able to do stuff with your friends or without them. You could come to study, or you could come to hang out.”

She and Rebecca — who plan to study nursing and speech pathology, respectively — placed the day’s emphasis on the former, as did Callie Droe, a North Allegheny senior seated with friends at another table.

“It’s a really nice environment, and you can get a bite to eat or coffee while you work,” Callie said as she prepared for an astronomy test. “It’s not one of my favorite classes. I really enjoy space, but it’s more math and stuff like that. I didn’t realize.”

She will attend Duquesne University for early childhood education, and she already has experience along those lines:

“I work at a swim school, so I love that.”

At a nearby table sat North Allegheny students who have quite a while to go before graduation: ninth graders Ella Ward, Elisabeth Rosales and Gracie Lynch. They, too, were at the shop to study.

“I find it more productive to work around people than just at home by myself,” Gracie said. “If I have a question, I’ll ask them. They can help.”

Elisabeth agreed, saying that she enjoys studying with friends as she delved into a biology project and drank something called strawberry açaí.

Ella, who called the shop a good getaway from school, worked on developing a map for European history class, which might be interesting to some folks. Her perspective?

“Um … not really,” she admitted. “But you gotta do it.”