Reminds me of some college cultures actually. In architecture school you were almost expected to pull all-nighters for the sake of "being a dedicated architecture student". It is like hazing of some sort.
On the other hand, most of my peers consistently stayed up through the night during examinations. Most of my peers studied in groups. I sat in on a few sessions and discovered that for every hour of study, an hour was spent on petty discussions. I stopped attending them since.
I'm now doing a PhD, so that may all change. I did fine during my first semester, so we'll just have to see.
I had a similar experience. Even through my PhD at a top-tier school in applied math, I didn't do "all-nighters" or cram sessions. In fact, after my first 2 years of PhD (where I regularly put in 80 hours a week because of the course load), I toned it down to 40-50 hours. I also didn't use performance enhancing drugs meant to treat things like ADHD.
I did (and still do) use a lot of coffee in the mornings. I also recommend going out to bars to have those petty discussions, so that socializing is reliably separated study.
I was surrounded by people who, like you said, regularly stayed up all night prior to exams. Sometimes we even scheduled that: the students would organize study-group sessions from 10PM-til.
I had a policy then that, no matter what, I was going to get a full night's sleep. Period. Full stop. I think it served me very well. A quick refresher in the morning gave me probably as much recency in terms of memory, and personally, my brain just works a lot, lot better with plenty of sleep. Even if I didn't know an answer, it was a lot easier to stay calm and rationalize something that often turned out to be right or good enough.
I only felt a little bad about it once - in a math class I left the study group right before my bedtime, while still getting the notes they'd put together the rest of the night. I felt a little uneasy about not pulling my weight, so to speak, but oh well. It could have been scheduled earlier and I would have gladly stayed.
So I'd keep it up.
Nowadays things are a little different for me - a lot of my job unfortunately involves being present regardless of whether there's anything to actually do. I worked two-and-a-half days straight a couple months ago. No overtime pay. :\
I'm exactly the same! Unfortunately, sleep is extremely underrated nowadays.
Someone on Quora asked Jimmy Wales (yes, it's a thing) what he regretted not doing enough during his youth. His answer was getting enough sleep. His argument was that, as you grow older and get more responsibilities, you'll get less and less sleep, so why not get the most rest while you can?
> Even if I didn't know an answer, it was a lot easier to stay calm and rationalize something that often turned out to be right or good enough.
That's a very valuable skill in my opinion, and I think it carries over well to stressful situations in general.
Learning and study, along with their career path, is different for everyone.
If you were a cs student in 1995, you pretty much had to work in one of the basement labs. One of the profs liked to come to the lab at 3am before a deadline and laugh at us.
Also we didn't really have many people with laptops, so if you had a group project meeting in the lab was pretty much the only way you could all get computers but still interact with each other.
The social aspects of the old labs made for many memories and lessons.