We’ve all been there: Struggling for hours in the library, studying our hearts out. If you’re like me and are plagued by procrastination, you’ve been there until at least three, four, five in the morning, pushing yourself to finish a long paper or research presentation due the next day. You might have even spent the entire night in the library, walking back to your room as the sun rises so that you can change and go to class in an hour. Sometimes this even happens to people who don’t procrastinate. No matter your studying habits, the fact remains: most nights of the year, there are at least a few students in the library through the night, still doing work. The response to this phenomenon is strangely paradoxical; usually people will say, “Wow, that’s awful… But yeah, it happens.”
Most of my classmates have simply accepted that it’s a part of our culture as students: no matter how organized and on top of things you are as a student, it’s likely that at one point or another, you’ll end up in the library until the wee hours of the morning. True, you could be in your room instead, or a common room in your dorm building, but for the most part, students choose to do their last-minute work in the library. The main reason for this is that the library carries an atmosphere of productivity. My friends have told me that they like doing work in the library because it makes them feel like it’s really time to get it all done. So, students end up spending eight hours at a time in the library, studying or writing papers. It’s become normal for us.
The main floor of the library at my college is open 24 hours every day of the school year. Many other colleges around the U.S. do something like this too, including Boston College, UCLA, and Harvard. One night, while studying for an exam last semester at 2 a.m., I started to question this policy. Yes, it’s invaluably convenient that I have the library available to me this late at night, but why? There had to be enough students who needed to pull all-nighters in there for the 24-hour library policy to be born. Keeping the library open overnight costs the college money in electricity, and even risks students stealing things from the main floor (I don’t know if that has ever happened, but it’s possible). So, for what reason would they opt to keep it open overnight other than the fact that it’s almost guaranteed that someone will truly need it during those late hours?
What does it say about college culture if school officials expect multiple students to be up doing homework through the night? The fact is that the library is available all night and isn’t questioned by any of my fellow classmates, and was hardly even questioned by me at first, because we all needed it to be open that late. If it weren’t for the library’s hours, we would’ve been at our desks keeping our roommates awake, or in our beds falling asleep trying to do our homework. My question is, though, why is this such an undeniable fact? Staying up late to do work is an integral part of my life and the lives of nearly all my classmates. This is embedded in us.
Yes, college students should work hard. That’s the best way to get an education, and there’s nothing wrong with changing up our sleep schedule to put extra effort into schoolwork every once in a while. The problem, though, is the way that society expects us to go about doing this. According to social standards, we should lead well-rounded lives and spend our days studying, our evenings being social and fulfilling obligations, and our late nights studying some more. This balance is hard to achieve and usually results in an unhealthy level of stress and loss of sleep. Even when students work on their assignments during normal hours of the day, they’ll always find at the end of the night that they still have some. No one is saying they don’t want to work hard — in my experience, college students tend to get (most of) their homework done no matter what. It’s just that it’s very difficult. Depression and anxiety is rampant among college students, and what else would you expect from a society that keeps its college libraries open 24 hours so that students can stay up late and work?
Don’t get me wrong; I’m thankful that the library at my school is open 24 hours. That way, I know that if I need to get up early and study there’s always a space for me to do that, and if I forget about an assignment that’s due tomorrow and it’s 12 a.m., I can go and do that too. However, I think it says a lot about our culture that I’m thankful for the ability to go and do homework in the middle of the night. It says a lot about our culture that my friends and I have all accepted the need to write papers overnight, sometimes just so that we can keep our sanity during the day. Keep the college libraries open 24 hours a day in case of academic emergencies, but in the meantime, destroy the idea that it’s normal or healthy for students to be busy around the clock, including trips to the library that last through the sunrise.
