Four phone alarms and two classes later, I finally wake up to the sound of a passing Port Authority bus at 11:00 am. Yes. I slept through my obnoxiously persistent phone alarm but I awoke abruptly to the faintest screeching of tire on road. “Narcolepsy!” I screech to my mother on the phone as I bolt out the door, without so much as a swipe of mascara or swish of mouth wash, “Are you sure I don’t have narcolepsy?” She ignores this, and asks me what time I had gone to bed the night before. And then it clicks. For the past three days, I had gotten accumulatively nine hours of sleep. Why? Was it the flux in homework? Procrastination? Late night “ultimate brownies” at the Underground? I turned to my sleep deprived peers for the answer.
Jen Park, a sophomore double majoring in Economics and History with a minor in Photography, has gotten 13 hours of sleep in the past three days. If we were going by the traditional “7 hours a night” rule, we could say that in the span of three days, Jen is about 8 hours short of getting a healthy amount of Zs.
“My priorities are messed up. I’m spending more time on my extracurriculars than my actual schoolwork,” she said. Park is a project chair for Enactus, an entrepreneurial club on campus, and a booth chair for Delta Gamma. Park is a great representation of the typical CMU student: involved. But how do we stay involved, without sacrificing our sleep?
Emma DiAntonio, a Sophomore majoring in Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering has an answer for that, short and sweet, “Work efficiently. Don’t waste time.”
Not only is DiAntonio the Kappa Alpha Theta social chair, and the Public Relations chair for Lambda Sigma, but she was also an orientation counselor at the start of the semester and is even involved in intramural sports. Did I mention she gets about seven hours a night? So yes. I’d say she is a credible source of advice.
Sleep is attainable here at Carnegie Mellon. Learning to prioritize, be efficient with our time, and say “no” to that delicious Underground brownie at 10:45 at night will ensure a sleep-filled semester, and the grades to match. And let’s be honest, waking up at noon when your first class was at 8 am is not an enjoyable experience.