Hypothesis Update

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a large campus that can require a great deal of traveling to get to classes. The campus is spread out over North, South, and Middle campuses with approximately a mile’s walk between North and South campus. Many of the students, especially freshman, are housed on South campus and have to travel up the “hill” everyday. To help this problem, the university has the option of the Chapel Hill Transit bus system that runs from roughly 7am to 8 pm. This system, involving many different routes, helps the students to travel across campus.

After riding the bus and observing the students who chose to take it, I made some observations. For instance, when the bus is on North campus, the bus is rarely full; but when the bus begins to head towards South campus, the bus becomes full to its capacity. Therefore, I conclude that the students housed on South campus choose to ride the bus more often than students housed on North or even Middle campus. Also, I observed that the bus rides are extremely quite; no one talks to each other. Being a freshman student who frequently rides the bus, I constantly come into contact with this problem and at times those behaviors seem snobbish. However, this quietness is probably because the students ride the bus without their friends; and since they are by themselves, they would rather sit quietly than to talk to a stranger. Since most of the bus riders are reluctant to talk to strangers, they avert eyes their eyes to avoid making any contact.

An experiment addressing the norms and behaviors of bus riders would be beneficial to the UNC campus as a whole because it would allow for more insight into the university’s students. After further exploration, one might be able to understand why the students act the way they do and find that the reason has nothing to do with snobbish behavior. In conclusion, I propose that the majority of students who ride the bus are housed on south campus and probably freshman. These students ride the bus by themselves, which accounts for the bus rides being so quite.