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Comment by Cyph0n | Hacker News Reader

Never once pulled an all-nighter in college (ECE). I also never studied for more than 2-3 hours in succession. I always took a nice break between study sessions to let everything sink in.

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.

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YMMV - I was in college for six years, got a BS and MS in CS.

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 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.

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.

I also never pulled an overnighter. I also never studied for more than 2-3 hours. In fact, I never studied for more than 15 minutes nor go to classes! (Semi) unrelated, I failed a lot of classes, dropped out and got a real job paying well doing something I love, ahead of many of my 'classmates'

Learning and study, along with their career path, is different for everyone.

Keep it up.

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.

Some of my most memorable memories of college were those "petty discussions"

Haha, yeah, I get you. It's probably because I don't like spending more time than necessary when it comes to studying. I'm a really heavy procrastinator otherwise.

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