Slumber parties (or sleepovers, if you’re not a girl under the age of 15) were all about getting a group of friends together to play games and keep your parents up well past midnight. As college students, all-nighters are spent alone with a cup of coffee and a half-charged laptop on the fifth floor of Bird Library.

Sleepovers had pillow fights, but with college all-nighters, your Astronomy 101 textbook is most likely your pillow.

In preparation for a sleepover, my friends and I would rent a scary movie, something like ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ or ‘Friday the 13th.’ The rest of the night would be spent cowered in fear beneath our blankets and jumping at shadows that looked like Freddy Krueger’s glove or Jason Voorhees’s hockey mask. Now? Spending an all-nighter pouring over hundreds of pages of philosophy notes is much scarier than any movie could possibly be. Except maybe ‘The Exorcist.’

Not only could we pick out whatever movie we wanted to watch, but at sleepovers, we would also binge on enough junk food to make a diabetic swoon. Lukewarm pizza, liters of Mountain Dew, torn-apart boxes of Ho-Ho’s and sheer adrenaline were enough to make it into the early-morning hours.

When you’re studying, on the other hand, a coffee thermos, whatever you could scrounge from Kimmel before it closed and a cold sense of guilt and despair are much more common ways to stave off sleep.

Once the clock strikes 4 a.m., all sense of privacy at a sleepover is casually pitched out the window, as the conversation topic would switch to the opposite gender. Who’s the cutest girl in the class? On a scale of 1-10, where would you rank ‘insert name here’?

On the other hand, if you’re even awake at 4 a.m. while studying (a commendable feat), and if you still have the capacity for speech, you’re probably mumbling the vocabulary list on page 305 of your Spanish book to yourself, much to the entertainment of onlookers.

So as the school year starts, remember how much fun you used to have when staying up all night was cause for celebration, not dread.

Compiled by Erik Van Rheenen, asst. copy editor. ervanrhe@syr.edu

Published on August 28, 2011 at 12:00 pm