By Haunani Tomas, Editor-in-Chief
In attempting to complete a 10-page group paper the night before it was due, I ask myself the question any student asks themselves at three o’clock in the morning: how did I even get here?
Umpteen cups of Folgers medium roast later, I look out of my kitchen window: the beams signifying a new day, as well as the hourly approach of my deadline, shone down on the red doors of the Whitesell Townhouses as my eyes adjust to something other than my computer screen.
So after staying up for upwards of 36 consecutive hours to complete this report worth 60 percent of our final grade, our professor emails us to inform us of two things: first, to cancel class and second, to move the due date of our 10-pager to next week.
After making another cup of coffee, I slouch back down in front of my laptop screen, defeated and exhausted. My phone begins ringing. Mom.
“Hey, baby girl! Did I wake you up?” she asks. She greets me between sips of her first coffee of the morning. Maxwell House.
“Yeah, something like that,” I say as I close my laptop screen and rub my eyes. and curl up on the couch.
As the capstone course to complete an undergraduate business degree, students are required to enroll in strategic management. Among completing various case studies and reading Harvard Business Review articles, we are assigned a group project consisting of four separate 8-10 page papers that analyze a publicly-owned business of our choosing.
Aside from being a royal pain in my you-know-what, group papers and projects test one’s ability to collaborate with peers to work toward one goal: submitting something that doesn’t look or sound like it was done during the wee hours of the morning, around the same time as your roommates and their boyfriends are stumbling on home from the bar.
This strategic management group project is one of three groups I am involved in this term, courtesy of the remaining upper-division level classes required to graduate. So, in attempting to, for lack of a better phrase, get it over with, I parked my rear-end on our kitchen counter around nine in the evening and proceeded to analyze in great detail the generic strategy of Cabela’s and yield in-depth coverage on potential strategic options Cabela’s could pursue in their endeavor to substantiate themselves as the World’s Foremost Outfitter. Fun stuff really.
At this point in the school year, a squirrel has what seems like an endless attention span compared to mental capacity I have going on upstairs. There exists no limit to the things that hinder my ability to focus on anything academic.
The limit does not exist!
Anyway, 10 pages of single-spaced Cabela’s strategic implications later and, oh! Good morning sunshine! Literally!
Staying coherent enough to see the light of a new day is something I giddily partook in during the ages of 10 through 14. The last time I remember staying up for the entirety of the Earth’s 360-degree rotation was way back in what seems like Nam.
In my Gatsby-esque “younger and more vulnerable years,” if you will, I rejoiced in disobeying my mother’s orders to go to sleep at the reasonable hour of ten o’clock. Particularly during slumber parties, my friends and I prided ourselves in withstanding the allure of a good night’s rest. If you were anything like a normal adolescent en route to puberty, you understand.
It was implicitly understood that whoever fell asleep first would most likely end up with Sharpie tattoos, which would be drawn on bodily parts unforeseen by one’s own eye and would read something similar to “owned” or “[insert name] was here.”
Regardless of how I remember all-nighters as a child, they do not presently merit the same amusing recollections. There is no sound rationale I can think up that would gladly incline me forego an eight-hour REM cycle.
Similar to running around on the playground, summoning the energy to stay awake all night does not come as easily as it once did, nor does it occur because of the reasons it once did.
So, I concluded that my all-nighters can be attributed to a lack of proper time management.
It’s difficult to believe my mother when she tried to convince me that these days are the best of my life when I wish she would pester me to get a great night’s rest far before midnight.
