No Sleep Until Graduation

Today, I rolled out of bed around noon. When I say rolled, I don't mean to suggest that I lazily peeled back the covers, got dressed, and began my day. I mean I barrel-rolled onto the floor. I mean I wiped off last night's mascara, put on a cleaner pair of sweatpants, and started typing. It was ugly, but it was effective. Coming into my second semester of college, "ugly, but effective" has become my mantra. Staying up until 3 a.m. studying for a 10 a.m. test - it's not pretty, but it gets the job done. Sure, you hear the occasional horror story about a friend of a friend who slept through all his midterms...let's observe a moment of silence for his GPA. Between school, work and social life, college students pretty much live from one espresso shot to the next. This is routine for many students, an integral part of the college experience they don't tell you about in orientation: "Welcome to the University of Whatever, where the health of our students is among our...top 50 concerns?"

To an extent, it would be unfair to blame colleges for this. The mentality of secondary education today is not the same as it was in the past. We do not study for the sake of learning, but for the sake of career-building. We get good grades to justify getting absolutely wasted on the weekends. College is a series of all-nighters, interrupted by midnight booty calls ("U up?") and having all your papers due the same week. I do not place the blame on colleges for this - they did not create hormones, nor did they make analyzing Marx and Engels' "The German Ideology" so frustratingly dense. In that respect, it is not the fault of our colleges that students, frankly, are not sleeping.

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