by Mercedes Czlapinski

Created on: June 12, 2009

Whether or not a college student gets enough sleep depends on the student itself. In my college dorm we have had a range of students with different sleeping habits from insomniacs to a student who went to bed at 8:30 P.M. I will admit that for the first couple of weeks freshman year, my roommate and I were those people who went to bed at 9:30/10:00 at night so we could get up for our 8:00 A.M. classes. We not only did this because of an early class, but because we didn't really know anyone yet, considering it was only our second week of college. We knew that as 17 and 18 year-olds going to bed at 9:30 P.M., especially in college, was completely unacceptable, but we couldn't help it. We would wake up at 7:00 A.M., go to class, come back, do our homework, maybe watch some TV and then go to bed. I remember we both switched to taking showers at night just to prolong the time that we stayed awake so the guys from the third floor wouldn't make fun of us.

Eventually our sleeping schedules changed as we became more and more social. This past year the earliest that we went to be was 12 A.M. and even that was pushing it; all of our friends were usually up to 2:00 A.M. or 3:00 A.M. One reason: Both my roommate and I are very involved in extracurricular activities, so when we are not in class during the day, we are usually at a meeting or in office hours. We also both work on campus during the day, while most of our friends worked the late afternoon/evening and had the minimal amount of classes they could take, having a ton of free time. By the time I got back to my room from classes, work, and extra-curriculars, it would be between 5:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M. Then we would go to dinner with our friends, procrastinate a bit by hanging out with them all the while thinking, I should probably really get started on that essay that is due at 8:00 A.M. By the time that essay was started it would be 10:00 P.M.. When would it be finished? Depending on the level of laziness, the complete hatred I felt towards the class at that moment in time, and the amount of time I spent on facebook and compulsively checking my email, somewhere near 1:00 A.M..

1:00 A.M. is peak time for our friends, who are all guys by the way. If you don't get to bed before 1:00 A.M., you have lost your chance. By this time the guys are usually about 4 or 5 beers in and if your light is on, you have fallen victim to the drunken antics, which are always fun. This usually puts us in bed between 2:30 A.M. and 3:00 A.M. only to wake up 4 hours later to go to class and repeat everything all over again. So, do college students get enough sleep? Absolutely not, and not all of it is their fault: studies show that in adolescence biological sleep patterns shift towards later times for both sleeping and waking up, so it is natural for teens to not be able to fall asleep before 11:00 P.M., but studies also show that they need between 8.5 and 9.25 hours of sleep in order for their brains to develop correctly. All of this considered, college students are getting a lot less sleep than they should be because they are staying up this late every single day, not just on the weekends when they can wake up in the wee hours of the late afternoon and get the critical amount of hours for their brain development.

So, in order for teens, especially college students, to get enough sleep, they need to do less of everything else, but just try telling them that. Less schoolwork means poorer grades, less extracurriculars means a not so spicy resume, and less social life - why would anyone even suggest that? Yes, college students aren't getting enough sleep, but they can't say they aren't getting the true college experience.

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