There is one thing that most college students try to avoid if possible, and that is having 8 am classes. The thing that is odd, is that high school started around 7 am (I believe it was 7:10 to be specific) every day, so after enduring that for 4 years, 8 am's don't sound nearly as bad. The thing is, being on a college campus, people are staying up later than they would during the weeknights while they lived at home with their parents, in most cases at least.

One of the reasons why people are up later when they are in college, is because they have this newfound freedom to determine when they can go out with friends and how late they can be out without having to answer to anyone. Another reason is that some of the majors in college are very demanding and falling behind in work can be costly and cause one to stay up until the early hours of the morning getting all of their work done.

Sometimes I had to choose between staying up late to study more for an exam or go to bed at a reasonable time to be sharp the next day. This choice could be tough when some exams could be worth a third of your overall grade in the class. I would usually choose not to sacrifice too much sleep. If it got to be after midnight, I would not be able to retain much of what I was reviewing or reading anyways.

I endured having 8 am classes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays this past semester. When signing up for my schedule I chose this because I like to have my classes done early in the day. Plus, after having 8 am classes two days each week in the spring I thought it wouldn't be too much different.

In reality, having to wake up before 8 on Mondays and Fridays was a real struggle. Part of the struggle was that I didn't go to bed or fall asleep when I planned. Being of age, I would also sometimes go out with my friends on Thursday nights to the bar. On those nights I wouldn't even get home until 1 in the morning.

What usually happened was I would keep hitting the snooze and delaying my wake-up time, which would cause me to rush and barely have enough time to shower and get ready. I don't like to admit it, but sometimes I wouldn't shower in the morning to get that extra 15 minutes of sleep. I would almost always have to skip breakfast and then have to wait until at least 10 am or even until lunch. I'm not the type of person to skip classes, even though sometimes staying in bed and getting some extra sleep seems so appealing after a rough night's sleep.

Luckily, next semester my earliest class isn't until 9 am. I will still not compromise my schedule of getting most of my classes out of the way early in the day, rather than sleep in until my first class if it was later in the morning.