The Final Countdown
Finals period is always a weird time. You come back from Thanksgiving break and get thrust back into school after experiencing a brief taste of relaxation…
Now that all my assignments are submitted, I can actually look back on the sum total of my academic body of work and offer a little data. Over four years, I went all-in on an all-nighter five times. Let me state off the bat that many of the students here never do this to themselves; it’s a uniquely stupid thing to self-inflict sleeplessness (trust me, I’ve done it many times). The fifth all-nighter was Tuesday night, and for some strange reason it was the easiest. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to sitting in Eaton Hall into extended finals hours.
Or maybe this one sticks out because full cognizance of the fact that I graduate in less than ten days has heightened my awareness of time’s passage. Regardless, as I cheerfully worked through a pair of research papers (and ingested enough caffeine to kill a small horse), I found myself relishing the grind one last time.
I mentioned in my previous post how being done with classes was letting go of a fundamental piece of your identity since you first toddled off to kindergarten. This is a more intimate piece: finishing your last few assignments is strangely a little bit wistful. If you were a student at Tufts, chances are you’re fundamentally good at being a student. It wasn’t just a piece of your identity; it was your craft. No matter what else we did once here, we came here because we were scholars. And no matter what else we do, that stays a part of us.
And that’s why this one was easy, despite featuring the three staples of a pure, uncut all-nighter: bleary eyes, tunnel vision, and an increasingly adversarial relationship with the little clock at the bottom right of the screen. Sitting in front of a fossilized Dell monitor in a computer lab until 5:20 AM on Wednesday morning was me losing myself in the dojo one last time. Perhaps that’s why I enjoyed working through the stages of one last stand as an “I’ll sleep when it’s done” academic.
Part of the reason an all-nighter at Tufts could be fun, in an inverted sense of the word, is that the work that came out of it was often actually sort of…impressive. I haven’t taken every class at Tufts, but from what I have seen from others’ all-nighters and what I’ve somehow managed to come up with during my own, something about forsaking sleep brings out another gear.
There are so many drains on your time in college. There are club meetings to attend, events to put on, friends to see, careers to pursue, practices to run to: the general business of being young. While academic work, and a shared identity as gifted scholars, was at the core of what we did here for four years, it was so often drowned out by the fun stuff or planning for the future or just the stuff that differentiated us. In no small part because we were good, we needed to be put under pressure to be at our best.
That entailed exams that you couldn’t prepare for by just memorizing equations; you’d see problems that demanded a dexterity you could only attain by understanding the underlying concepts and relationships between them. It could entail papers that demanded you not just present facts but synthesize opinions and contribute ideas of your own. Assignments in high school asked us to understand what had been taught; assignments in college asked us to stand on the shoulders of giants.
And at a fundamental level, the student in us relished being pushed. If you’re bright enough to be here, you take pride in the fact that no matter how close you might cut it, you always deliver, whether it’s slipping in quality work just under a deadline or going from clueless to locked and loaded all in the night before an exam. So when I was in Eaton, I took a little extra enjoyment out of every wry shake of the head as I looked at the time, every time I got up and went for a walk muttering curses, every moment I stalled and then something clicked to keep me going.
And at 5:20 AM, one hand holding the fruits of my labor and the other rubbing my eyes, I carried out a personal tradition after every proper all-nighter in Eaton: for likely the last time, I trundled off to the Tisch roof to watch the sunrise.
Watching the sunrise is a bit of a misnomer, because the way the quad’s laid out means that east is the only cardinal direction you can’t see from the roof; Paige Hall and Miner Hall are in the way. But what you can do is something almost as nice: you can look south and watch the early sun’s reddish-orange light touch the buildings that make up Boston’s skyline in the distance.
You can watch it slowly spread outward, until the automatic lights that stretch between you and the city begin to wink out. I always loved it on the roof ,watching the sunrise through exhausted eyes, but that morning it felt a little sweeter and a little sadder than usual.
Over four years, late nights were the quiet, productive, familiar spaces I, and my fellow night owls, could occupy when push came to shove. But that morning, as the lights went dark, it felt like that refuge—a student’s refuge—was waving goodbye.
Finals period is always a weird time. You come back from Thanksgiving break and get thrust back into school after experiencing a brief taste of relaxation…
Experiencing finals week as a freshman can be a little daunting at first but I found a great deal of support within the Tufts community where my peers…