When I was in college I found that I could not get things done during the day, not because of the noise level, but because of the social level. I was constantly distracted by friends coming by my room... and the library was no better. Luckily I am a night person and so when things started to quiet down around 1am I was able to get work done. This, of course, hinged on the fact that I had a single - which was not always the case. But my best grades were earned the semesters where I lived alone and could work the ridiculous hours that I did.^*

Now that I work in a cubicle farm I find that I am again hampered by people coming in to my cube to ask questions, check on my progress, and socialize. These are the plagues of the work place... and I doubt that offices would help me much on that. Although having an office would reduce the neck cramp I get from glancing around every time someone walks by. Lately I've ben trying to ignore the people behind me until I am spoken too... but that doesn't help: My head snaps around even faster when I'm surprised to hear a voice. On the other hand I get more sleep these days. :-)

^*Absense of people was by no means equivalent to absense of noise. I often worked with the radio on or some movie playing on the tube. I especially like having HBO at the time because they played they same movies over and over again during a given week. This reduced what could have been a distraction to an interesting sort of white-noise. It had the interesting side effect of distracting friends who had come by to distract me, often buying me an hour of daytime work while my friend sat entranced by a movie I had seen 3 or 4 times in the last 3 or 4 days. But I digress.