Aaron Terrazas/The Hoya Sellinger Lounge remains filled with students studying and sleeping at all hours. College students often sacrifice sleep while balancing classes, extracurriculars and jobs.

The name of a white chocolate mocha, spiked with four shots of espresso, offered at The Midnight Mug calls to mind the very nature of an all-nighter in Lauinger Library: Crime and Punishment.

To Mark Jean (NHS ’05), the drink is not so bad. He says he needs it to stay awake to study.

As a pre-med major in the NHS, he says his workload means late nights in the library, even on weekends. Midterms are here, so he says he is really feeling the heat. He had three tests last week and more assignments in the coming days. Staring at a red, black and white molecular model of glucose, Jean admits that when he has a lot of work, something has to give.

“Sleep takes a back seat,” he says.

But Jean isn’t the only one staying up late to get work done and getting less than the sleep-expert recommended seven and a half to nine hours of sleep. Other college students burn the midnight oil, studying for exams and writing papers. Blame it on midterms, professors or procrastination:; getting sleep just isn’t always a priority for college students.

Jean says his average weekday bedtime is 2:30 to 3 a.m. On ondays and Wednesdays when he’s got an 8:50 class, his missed sleep starts to catch up with him.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, the amount and quality of sleep people get affects how they perform the following day as well as throughout their lives. A recent poll found that 74 percent of American adults are experiencing a sleeping problem a few nights a week or more, 39 percent get less than seven hours of sleep each weeknight and more than one in three (37 percent) are so sleepy during the day that it interferes with daily activities.”

But some college students take the risks. Especially if they’re like Sahil Warsi (SFS ’05) and are trying to play catch-up in addition to studying for midterms and other homework

“I have to study for midterms,” he says, holding a two-inch thick reading packet in front of him. “And the reading is for next week, and I’m already behind.”

While other students screamed and cheered last Friday at idnight Madness, Warsi was in the library long before the “Madness” began and for a long time after it was over. He’ll get sleep, but whenever he can fit it in.

“Sleep is something that gets pushed until later, and at odd times in my schedule,” Warsi said.

But the timing of sleep is significant to the body, the NSF says, and the body is influenced by light and tends to get sleepy when it’s dark. Accordingly, the brain regulates the body’s sleep-wake cycle and the various levels of sleep we get at night. With midterms and homework, however, when Warsi gets sleep is not as important as getting his work done. So he’s not bitter about spending a Friday night in the library. He’s in good company.

In fact, stroll into Lauinger Library and down to the second floor any evening during midterms, and one just may be surprised: 10-person study groups crowded around five-person tables, stacked coffee cups on a copy of Plato’s Republic, a half-eaten pizza that some student ordered to the library and snuck in without the security guard noticing, bowed heads at computer terminals, sleeping – or perhaps praying for a paper extension. There might even be a pillow laying around.

What is normally a place of silent learning sounds more like a noisy cafeteria, food included. At least it’s open 24 hours on the weekdays, and until 3 a.m. on the weekends.

“I might not get the amount of sleep I’m supposed to be getting,” Warsi says. “But I get enough.”

The NSF says that while sleep experts generally advise 7 and 9 hours sleep, the right amount for each individual often varies. Some people can get along with less while others need as much as ten hours to feel alert the next day, according to the NSF.

Dr. John Kolligian, director of Counseling and Psychiatric Service, explains that sleep occurs in stages. Some of them, he says, puts the body in deeper states of sleep. Missed or interrupted sleep stages negatively affects the body and how it feels. “The quality of your brain waves go in cycles. So say we’re running a race and every hour we run the race, at the 45 minute mark that’s a certain phase, REM [rapid eye movement], usually when dreaming occurs. It’s an important stage,” he notes. “If you disrupt a person when they’re sleeping every time that’s happening, they’ll still be tired.” He says that might be what’s happening when students get sleep at various times of the night or day, but not in one continuous sleep cycle or when students stay up all night studying. “All-nighters are really not good because they disrupt your emotional, cognitive ability,” he says. But “the reality is, that happens. If it’s happening a lot, then it becomes more of a problem, because [you may] have problems with mood and concentration. You stretch the system when you’re disrupting the sleep patterns.”

Though all-nighters and disrupted sleep patterns among students occur often, it’s not always because their schoolwork load requires all their time. Many students are involved in extracurricular activities or jobs that take up their time.

Warsi admits that his sleeping habits are “partly due to the fact that I’m doing stuff outside of school.” Warsi says he has organization meetings, such as one for the cultural dance show Rangila, to attend two to three nights per week.

That’s why economics professor Arik Levinson says he thinks students’ loss of sleep may be due to their activities and not always because of too much work. The result: students are often sleepy in class.

“Some students are sleeping in class, which means that either they are not getting enough sleep at night,” he says, or “they are getting lots of extra sleep during class,” he adds jokingly.

But his students’ sleepiness is not necessarily because they have too much work, Levinson explains.

“It is typically the same students each class, so I suspect that it is more a function of the student rather than too much work,” he says.

He also notes how the quality of a student’s work often decreases when he or she has been up very late studying or writing.

“I can tell right away which papers were written via an all-nighter, and which tests were taken after an all-nighter,” Levinson adds. “A common student complaint to me is something like `I don’t understand why I did so poorly on the exam. I stayed up all night studying.’ I think the answer is self-explanatory.”

Not all students feel overworked or stay up late. “I feel like I have a reasonable amount of work, probably because I don’t procrastinate,” Jerry Graunke (SFS ’07) says. Graunke gets eight hours of sleep at night, and doesn’t have to take naps, he says.

Valerie Warner (MSB ’07) says she’s involved in extracurricular activities including the Freshman Class Committee and the Georgetown Program Board, but that she still manages to get around eight hours of sleep each night or else she’ll be too tired.

“I just need sleep, and don’t think it’s worth staying up until four in the morning doing work,” she explains. “I do my work during the day, and sleep at night. Pretty simple.”

But all-night studying is sometimes unavoidable in efforts to stay on top of school work, science major Jean says. It’s possible, he admits, to not pull all-nighters if one balances his or her schedule right. In that case, he says, the student will even have time for extra activities.

“I have to manage time well enough to be able to balance everything,” Jean says. As a member of a black fraternity and step team as well as gospel choir among other things, he notes: “I don’t think I’d be happy if I wasn’t involved. I’m more of a complete person because of it. I enjoy being involved though if means having to stay up late.”

But he also feels that part of being a pre-med major means that he will always have much work to do.

Biology professor Joseph Neale, who teaches Introductory Biology I, a tutorial and research class, says he understands that science majors require students to work very hard. But he believes that “all students at Georgetown should be studying at the level of the science students. This is, after all, a very expensive four years to be spending it doing almost anything but intensively learning.”

But with most students taking five courses, usually totaling 15 credit hours, could it be that the course load is too heavy in general at Georgetown?

Economics professor Behzad Diba, who is teaching Principles of acroeconomics and a Ph.D. course on macroeconomics this semester, doesn’t feel that Georgetown students have too much work. In fact, he says, “GU students generally seem to have less work than students at many other universities of similar ranking.”

Instructors such as Randy Bass, a professor in the English Department and John Esposito, university professor and the director for Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, both says students might benefit from fewer classes. “I think that Georgetown students probably have the right amount of work overall, but they probably have too many different things to do,” Bass notes. “I would prefer to see students taking fewer classes and spending more time on each. I think the continuity and depth of work in courses suffers.”

For students like Warner, work can sometimes pile up, especially during exam time. “I had three midterms, a chapter quiz and a paper over the span of two days,” she says. But it was manageable, she adds. “I can’t afford to get super-stressed out. I have a lot of work, and sometimes it feels like too much. But as long as I don’t procrastinate I’m usually able to get a handle on it.”