2:26 AM - Food and Focus with Friends

The pizza boxes, coffee cups, and jumbo-sized water bottles interspersed between laptops and notebooks on the second-level Clough Commons study tables say it all: These students are in for the long haul!

It’s approaching 2:30 a.m., and engineering majors Michael Senoo and Maggie Lindsay are studying for an 8 a.m. calculus exam. The plan is to go to sleep around 4:30 a.m.

“I feel most productive between midnight and 3 a.m.,” says Lindsay.

Senoo agrees. For him, going to Clough Commons for an overnight study session allows him the level of focus he needs to feel fully prepared for an exam.

“When I can focus all my time on one subject, I get my best work done,” says Senoo. He says in his calculus class, for instance, properly preparing for the exam requires reviewing a series of chapter quizzes; if he reviews them all at once, he feels better prepared than if he were to “chop it up into bits and pieces.” He says it really just comes down to being confident about going into the exam.

“I feel like if I had six hours of sleep and kind of knew the information, I’d do a lot worse than with two hours of sleep and knowing all of the information,” Senoo says. “In a 50-minute exam, I know I’m going to get through that period and then I get to sleep after; it’s just so much easier to think that way. It’s really not a big deal.”

For Lindsay, studying into the wee hours of the morning has been a way of life for her since eighth grade; Senoo says it’s a habit he’s only recently adopted, “But, it’s been working out well, so I don’t see a reason to change.”