[Back to School] Were you big on all-nighters?
0It’s the wee hours and here you are. Did you stay up this late studying back in the day or is it just the love of the deals that has you up right now?
As long as you’re here, share your academic all-nighter hero stories and/or cautionary tales.
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I was undiagnosed with ADHD when I was in school, so everything got done at the last second or not at all, and I usually got away with it. The most ridiculous was a written long essay that I sent via email at 5AM, grabbed two hours of not-sleep, and was in the relevant class at 9AM. At 11AM, I went back out to my car and caught two hours of sleep before the next class.
@werehatrack ahh that’s the stuff.
(this is kind of how I operated. except no ADHD, I’m just garbage.)
@jouest @werehatrack I wouldnt say garbage. I would say young with boundless energy.
I never risked my grades by waiting to the last minute to complete a project, but would study late into the night/early morning for sure.
I actually worked FT while going to school FT to complete my MBA, I dont think I had more than 2 or 3 hours sleep every night the whole two years in my late 20’s/early 30’s.
One year at college I, idk, forgot or procrastinated to write my final paper for an important class. Stayed up for 48 hours straight writing it, handed it in just under the wire, then packed up my room and loaded it into my grandfather’s minivan to go home for the summer. Hit the road home and those nice comfy captains chairs settled me right in on cruise control. I woke up going 70mph in the grass beside the interstate with a bridge rapidly approaching. Saved it and was wide the hell awake the rest of the way. Stupid dangerous of me to have done.
About two years out of college I was in my first big boy job as the solo IT staff for a small company when the on premises exchange server and domain controller (anybody remember Small Business Server 2000?) failed spectacularly on a Monday afternoon. I think multiple drives failed in the raid array or something. With the owner coming and checking every hour asking when email was going to work again, I worked 23 hour days by myself to restore service. I would go home at 6am to shower and eat something and be back in the server closet by 7. By Wednesday morning I was taking 5 hour energy every 5 hours like clockwork, on top of a steady flow of coffee. Friday morning service was restored, having built a new domain controller using the same domain (something the docs said couldn’t be done) and restored all the data from backups. I went home before lunch and didn’t wake up until sometime Saturday. The overtime on that paycheck was amazing, though later that year they changed from paying me hourly to paying a decent salary.
I still pull all nighters doing shit at the last minute every few months today, and regularly pad up to the office on two hours sleep. Lots of times I can’t work on something until the kiddo has gone to sleep, so 11-3, 4 or 5am becomes project time. Sometimes I’m surprised I’m not dead, and reading @werehatrack’s post above, wonder if I might be undiagnosed ADHD as well. It would explain some things.
Well they were wootoffs in college. But I definitely procrastinate.
Working weekend night shift at one job. 9-5 at another at the same time. Didn’t improve it.
The 24/7 on call for the last 3.5 years…
Also sometimes it’s easier to crack out an issue at night when no one is on… So no constant meetings. IMs. Being about to focus for a bit without being pestered…
I def do not pay attention to mehrathons anymore. At best id prop my phone up and hope it refreshed. Def not chasing irks.
Sorry/not sorry
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We did have an actual disaster recovery on a previous account a years ago. Thankfully what we lost was just an online agregate table used for online processing and our history database was intact. Spent a week figuring out how to rebuild that data from history.
Because it’s inserted by a complicated engine. Not just map field to field
@unksol Microsoft Teams Ding
@jouest i have a 1 hour claims meeting, exit the meeting, that glowing red 9+… I’m just clicking on shit to make it go away. You don’t wanna hear about my email
I didn’t do all nighters, I didn’t find being sleep deprived beneficial for performance. Plus, I didn’t need to study a lot to get good grades.
In elementary the drs always described me as backward kid bc I could stay up all night and sleep all day so they put me on sleeping medicine and that definitely didn’t help me get up for school. As soon as I was in control of my own meds that was the first thing I dropped. My boyfriend calls me a vampire bc I still can stay up all night and sleep all day but now I sleep bc of pain meds from a work injury.
Nope I really wasn’t an all nighter person. I’d go to bed about midnight and then get up at 4am though to try to finish what I needed to get done (or study).
By the way, if you stay up all night the next day you test as poorly as if you were legally drunk per a study looking at the cognitive effects of college students staying up all night to study.
@Kidsandliz see this is why I drank before tests
@jouest You drank because you couldn’t manage to stay up all night? Right?
@Kidsandliz something like that!
Yes, but it started in college.
@Kyeh same
If it wasn’t for the last minute, nothing would get done.
@heartny my entire college career, just once, I wanted to get an assignment and smash through it in the first minute like I would eventually have to do at the last minute. just, like…get assigned a 10 page paper at noon and then submit it 12 hours later.
@heartny @jouest My sister is one of those incomprehensible people who always got her papers done early.
In the waning days of highschool I had back-to-back assignments all week. Papers which cover the lives of three major writers, two exams on the history of different continents, and something to do with mathematics that I could save on my calculator.
To be fair, the authors were annual projects that I did read through as the syllabus went on, but never had any ideas I thought were worth putting pen to paper.
But as a kid, this kind of deadline meant weekend cram session. I just didn’t estimate I would be cramming for 71 hours. That’s right, no sleep, just studying and regurgitating the information (and borrowing ideas from Sparknotes, Cliffnotes, and Google).
The human body does not like operating that consistently, especially when you’re not infusing it with extra energy. In this case, only pain of loud music, cold showers, and a full bladder kept me awake. I practically took a nap every time I peed. Also, by hour 72, I had fallen out of my chair and took a cat nap on the floor.
I saw contrails as I was taking the exam, and nothing was A-quality work, but I was surprised to get B/B-'s. Also, I was incapable of going past 48 hours after that.