Up All Night
Anatomy of the Modern All-Nighter
By Charles Fountain
Oh, the things we talk ourselves into.
Like thinking way back when that there was no way Mom and Dad were ever
going to find out we skipped school and went to the beach. Or believing
in college that the philosophy prof would buy that story about the term
paper being in the back seat when the car got ripped off.
Or how about those grown-ups who believe they are possessed of bodies
that are still boyish and athletic? A bit more muscular nowadays maybe.
But, hey! It's nothing; just putting on that weight my old high school
football coach kept nagging me about. Hey coach! Look at me! I'm sturdy
enough to play linebacker now!
And what's so out-of-line about a $10,000 MasterCard balance? The payments
are only $169.30 a month. Anyone can handle that, and if you never look
at that interest/principal mumbo jumbo and keep paying the minimum, you'll
never know that it's going to take forty-three years to pay it off. So
sure, we can afford that winter trip to the Caribbean. We're nowhere near
the Gold Card limit and besides we'll both be getting a raise in July.
Rationalizations all-but nobody is any better at explaining away peculiar
behavior than a college student during final exam week.
On campuses all across America, the final days of each semester are
a mix of theories, advice, and experimentation on the best way to confront
the angst of final exams. So you test better when rested? Then, by all
means, pull up the covers after Conan O'Brien and maybe offer up a small
prayer that, come dawn, the jumble inside your head will all make sense.
Right now, if you could transfer your brain to floppy disk and print it
all out, it would look like one of those wacky documents you get when you
open a PC file on a Mac-page after page filled with boxes and triangles
and other gibberish, with just half-a-word here and half-a-sentence there
to let you know that: yes indeed, this was once my work. Right now, it's
all a little overwhelming. But in the morning, when I'm rested, I'll find
the simple yet magical combination of keystrokes and it will all sort itself
out.
But sleeping is not without risk, especially if the exam starts at 8
a.m. What if I oversleep? It's not like it's never happened. Maybe I'll
move the alarm from the nightstand to the dresser so I have to get out
of bed to shut it off. That'll work. Though it's failed me before. I'll
get Jennifer down the hall to make sure I'm up; she's got an eight o'clock
too. But what if she oversleeps? Oh, the thoughts that intrude upon those
few moments when mind and body are suspended between awake and asleep.
And never mind the damned nightmares. Like the one where you get up
in time but go to the wrong exam? But you don't realize it's the wrong
exam because it's a course you took last quarter, and the material's familiar
and you're actually doing quite well. You've just about filled up your
second blue book when you realize your mistake; but now there's just five
minutes left in the exam period and your real exam is all the way across
campus. And when you get outside, the campus is choked with people and
you have to fight your way through, and progress across the quad is tortuously
slow. You finally get to the right room and it's empty, of course, so you
race over to the professor's office. But he's gone and the grades are already
posted on his door. You check the list and there's one F but you're not
certain it's yours because you've forgotten your social security number.
Sometimes resting isn't all that restful.
So maybe it's time for an all-nighter. It actually can be the most restful
and least stressful way to cope with exam-week anxiety. Sometimes it's
just the best plan.
The all-nighter is a rite of passage, a campus tradition so venerable
that it's entered the language as a noun. No one "stays up all night
to study for an exam." You "pull an all-nighter" or "do
an all-nighter." The background music coming from the stereo is now
Crash Test Dummies instead of Buffalo Springfield or Glenn Miller or Paul
Whiteman. And sustenance comes in the form of pizza delivered to your dorm
door instead of chicken broth boiled on a roommate's hot plate. But the
purpose and habits of the all-nighter have not changed. It is still a time
of sweatshirts and baggy pants and stockinged feet. A time to atone for
a semester's sins and make up for lost nights and weekends with a dark-to-dawn
orgy of books, notes, term papers, and caffeine. Or maybe-for the fortunate
and industrious few-it's simply putting a punctuation mark on a quarter's
worth of sustained and concerted learning.
There is today a rather enlightened acknowledgment and facilitation
of the modern all-nighter on the part of the college itself. On the Sunday
night during December's exam week, the student activities office threw
open the doors to the Curry Student Center, ordered up some pizza and coffee,
and sponsored the first university-sanctioned all-nighter. The tables and
couches and soft chairs of the first- and second-floor lounge areas were
open, as was the ballroom-a "stress-free zone" with coffee and
munchies and videos. They called it a "Studypalooza" in their
fliers, a takeoff on the Lollapalooza alternative rock concert tours of
the last couple of summers. Whatever the name, this sort of thing represents
a marked change in a university's notion of in loco parentis. On the love-beads-and-bell-bottoms
campuses of their parents' day, or the crew-cut-and-sport-coat world of
their grandparents, a school did a good job of keeping the opposite sex
out of the dorms but made no acknowledgment of late-night studying beyond
keeping the library open until eleven or twelve.
At midnight on this December evening the Curry Student Center is jumping.
I arrive to find maybe 200 people in the place. Men in Black plays on the
VCR in the ballroom. The arcade room boings and pongs, and several dozen
conversations buzz in every corner of the vast lounge. It might be midday,
midweek, and midsemester for all the activity. It's impossible to tell
who of this throng is settling in for a night's studying and who is just
hanging around for the pizza. So I leave and take a walk.
It is a bracing December night, cold enough for a heavy coat and gloves,
but quite a pleasant evening nonetheless. Huntington Avenue and the brick
walks of campus are empty and peaceful. A city campus is many things, but
peaceful is seldom one of them. Yet, alone in the shadow of the lamps and
pathway lights beneath the dark gray buildings, a silent and cold Northeastern
has never been more serene or soothing-or more beautiful. (An aside to
the thousands of readers of this magazine whose vision of Northeastern
is still that of passionless rectangular-box buildings arranged around
parking spaces: Yes, I did say beautiful. Perhaps it's time you visited
campus again.) It occurs to me that if the development office could bring
alumni to campus one at a time, in the middle of the night, giving might
jump notably.
The dorms are in marked contrast to the dark and quiet of the main campus.
As one o'clock approaches, scarcely a light is out in Speare or Stetson;
Christmas lights twinkle from a half dozen windows in Willis. There are
stories to be reported in those wide-awake dorms, and were I simply a reporter
and not also a faculty member I would have certainly made arrangements
to visit. But I imagine it would be exceedingly awkward and unsettling
to run into one of your professors as you wander down the hallway in a
bathrobe or boxer shorts in the middle of the night. At least I know it
would unsettle the professor. So I limit my reporting on the dorms to counting
the lights in the windows, and as there are far too many to count now,
I make my way back to the center of campus.
At the police station on Forsyth, four or five students make small talk
to the desk cop as they wait for the escort service and a ride home. Their
studying is done for the evening, they tell me, and they're on their way
home to bed. At the library, however, a few dozen of their brethren are
still hunkered down with books and papers. The library has advertised a
three o'clock closing, but that doesn't give studiers the run of the building
until three. Closing comes in stages. The upper floors and computer labs
shut down at ten; reference and the reserve desk at eleven; circulation
and the downstairs computer lab at one. For the final two hours, all that's
open is a reading and study area at the front of the building. The effect
is not unlike a department store that's going out of business, where the
dwindling inventory is crowded into an ever smaller place near the front
of the store, the merchandise-like the students in Snell Library on this
night-looking increasingly weary and bedraggled as closing time approaches.
Back at the student center, nine pizzas arrive at about one o'clock
and are gone in a minute and a half. Victoria Perreault, a junior from
Worcester, saw the pizzas arrive, put her book down, got up, and walked
into the ballroom just a few steps behind the deliverer. She was too late.
The pizza marks a sort of line of demarcation in the evening. The place
begins to empty out and quiet down. The coffee runs out at 1:45. There
are no movies after Men in Black in the stress-free zone because, by 2
a.m., most of the three or four dozen students remaining are studying rather
earnestly.
They ran out of coffee?
Here and there students study alone, but most are in small groups. On
the second floor, beneath a sign that reads "quiet zone," Victoria
Perreault sits with Jennifer Murphy, Karen Hussey, and Alison Farwell.
They are all juniors, all physical therapy majors, all preparing for a
four-hour combined exam in "Neurological Assessment and Therapeutic
Exercise." They make their way through thick notebooks, calmly, with
no sense of panic or apprehension, enjoying the support system that the
others' company provides, and enjoying the fact that Northeastern has provided
this overnight study space. "This is great," says Farwell. "We
all live in different places and none of our roommates want us around all
night doing this. There's no place we can go. The library closes too early.
I wish they'd do this every night."
"I can't believe you've got this much energy," says Perreault
wearily to her animated friend.
"I had three cups of coffee," says Farwell. "I'm buzzed.
I couldn't get to sleep if I wanted to."
Farwell's energy is nowhere near as remarkable as Karen Hussey's ability
to concentrate on the task at hand. She had a backpack stolen a few hours
earlier in the library. The thieves got away with her money, wallet, and
credit cards but no notes or papers or schoolwork; for the moment at least,
that's left her counting her blessings instead of bemoaning her horrible
luck.
At 2:45 I take another walk across campus. Ten windows still have lights
on in Speare, twenty-three in Stetson East and West. Ten more in Willis.
The only faculty office that seems to have a light on is mine. I too have
an eight o'clock exam, and some work to do before it begins; so I sneak
in and do it now. Half the exam is composed of take-home questions that
came in last week, and I still have half a dozen to read and grade in the
next five hours. Like all teachers, I like to think that I have so inspired
my charges and so effectively communicated the material that I shall read
nothing but profound and moving prose by quarter's end. As always, reality
bites, and I am frustrated by the unevenness in these essays. Some of them
read as though the authors stayed up all night honing and focusing each
thought and polishing every syllable of the prose until it was perfect.
Others read as though they were written by someone who hadn't slept in
thirty hours.
Parents who have been cruelly forsaken by the energy of youth and haven't
been up past ten o'clock since Carson retired get the shakes at the thought
of losing a night's sleep, but a college student doesn't find the prospect
all that daunting. Bedtime for a lot of these folks is commonly 2:30 or
3 a.m. anyway. They aren't kidding when they insist that it's a lot easier
staying up for an early morning exam than going to bed and then getting
up for that same exam. Inside the student government offices on the third
floor of the student center is a core of students who are testament to
the lure of the night. Kristie Faller, a sophomore political science major,
is the only one working, writing a term paper for her class on the American
presidency. Her friends-sophomores Chris Roback, James Martin, and Matt
Bennett (an SGA senator and the chap who had the key to this inner sanctuary)-are
there apparently only to keep her company and prevent her from changing
the office radio to a country and western station. The World Wide Web is
a big diversion; the home page for a personals service is getting a workout.
The lot of them have turned their body clocks around; they're catching
their sleep during the day and staying up through the night. They're at
a loss to explain why; there are a lot of shrugs and "ya know"s
when pressed for an answer. So I'm left to my own theories, which I consider
as I take another walk about campus. It is just past four o'clock.
Staying up all night is a challenge; it's an accomplishment that comes
as the product of some determination and sacrifice. Not everyone tries
it; not everyone who does try makes it. The lights in the dorm windows
have been cut by more than half in the past hour. Just six lights glow
in Speare; only nine in Stetson. Pulling an all-nighter is, in short, a
damn sight more difficult than taking an exam. So it delivers, if nothing
else, a considerable psychological benefit. I'm ready. I studied all night
for this. There is in the dark and trackless night a feeling of a vast
and all but limitless expanse of time. The time between dinner and midnight
is just about the same as the time between midnight and breakfast. But
the night seems ever so much longer.
Sometimes it might seem a little too long. The hour between four and
five is the toughest. By four o'clock there has already been a long investment
in the evening, but the dawn is still a good ways away. If you're going
to get punchy, 4:30 is probably when it's going to happen. It is just 4:30
when I return to the student center to find Marci Solomon dancing on a
coffee table. If they were giving out prizes for best dressed, this freshman
human services major from the Bronx would have won in a walk. She came
to the Curry Center in Black Watch tartan flannel pajamas and a pair of
exceedingly pink Elmo slippers. Her dance is a celebration of having just
finished reading a book, Ham on Rye, for her "Violence in the Family"
course. It is the third book she's read in the last four days. Many have
danced with far less cause.
Solomon is a part of a rambunctious crowd. Tyce Thyat, a freshman studying
for a calculus exam, follows Solomon's dance with a minute or so of cartwheels
and handstands. Her theory, apparently, is that there is nothing more effective
at fighting off the 4:30 drowsies than a few moments of spirited physical
activity. Earlier, putting the same theory to work, Thyat jumped up and
ambushed friend Alissa Jansen as she was returning from a walk and wrestled
her to the floor. Every public all-nighter should have at least one Hulk
HoganRowdy Roddy Piper moment.
At five o'clock the stress-free zone in the ballroom is all but out
of business. Todd Shaver, director of student activities and one of a half
dozen adults supervising this nocturnal study hall, has been accepting
the thank-yous from students all night long and it has taken its toll;
his eyelids are heavy and the smile on his face can't mask the weariness
there. There is not a student in the building who does not believe that
Shaver and the student activities staff have performed an essential service
in keeping the student center open. But tomorrow the students pulling all-nighters
will be back on their own; this is the only night this week the building
will be open, and it's not clear yet that the service will be offered again,
despite the rave reviews. "It's a matter of funding and staffing,"
Shaver says. "We did this with volunteers. We can't ask people who
have to work the next day to stay up every night," he adds with a
shrug.
As I get ready to leave at six o'clock, it's as though the three dozen
students who have made it through the first university sponsored all-nighter
have collectively exhaled. The books are still open but the conversations
are relaxed and unrelated to exams. Over here a couple of students talk
of commuting to campus from Needham and Dedham. Over there a half dozen
students discuss interracial dating. Alison Farwell's three cups of coffee
were not enough. She is asleep on a couch.
Out on Huntington Avenue it is morning. An inbound E Line trolley waits
at the Northeastern stop in front of the quad. The traffic is heavy enough
that I need to wait for the light in order to cross the street; I'd not
seen a single vehicle in my earlier forays across campus. The Marino Center
is beginning to stir, but there is nary a light in Speare and only four
remain on in Stetson. The day's paper is in all the boxes along Huntington;
Chicken Lou's is open and serving coffee. It's time for me to go to work.
The darkness may linger, but the night has fled.
Charles Fountain, an associate professor of journalism, wrote on
Northeastern's past presidents in the March 1997 issue.
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