This is basically a diary of the night before every academic deadline I've faced over the past year, reformatted to make it look like I'm giving advice. I'm not. It's useless but hopefully mildly entertaining.
Published in The Student, February 24th 2009:
The following is not recommended. The quality of your work, your mental wellbeing and your personal hygiene will suffer: but sometimes these are the things you must sacrifice if you want to get that assignment in on time.
1200hrs: GET UP! GET UP! GET UP! Kiss your pillow goodbye, you’re not going to see it until well into tomorrow. Slap yourself into consciousness, hastily scrub the most visible and most odorous areas of your person and pull on the first thing you find in your laundry basket – after 24 consecutive hours of panic and mental anguish, you will look and possibly smell like death, so don’t kid yourself. Today you are the Jack Bauer of Medieval poetry / property law / rabbit medicine and your equipment is as follows:
- One massive, sturdy bag: The sheer volume of information you’re about to compact in your skull is terrifying and you’ll need to be able to haul a ridiculous number of books from A to B.
- One memory stick: Nothing equals the unbridled dread of losing an entire day’s work half an hour before the deadline. The more paranoid can also periodically email drafts to themselves with increasingly hysterical subject lines that will inevitably become simply ‘aarrgh’.
- Enough money for supplies: what you lose in sleep, you must gain in junk food and repulsive energy drinks.
- Your toothbrush: With the amount of sugar and caffeine you’ll be cramming into your face, your mouth will eventually feel as if you’ve been licking a dusty cat.
1300hrs: As you clamber through the library turnstiles, you should feel that familiar gut-punch of impending doom. Embrace it - this distilled fear may be the only motivation available to you. So, first things first, find your favourite corner of the library and entrench yourself in it. The slightly space-age new fifth floor is invariably mobbed near submission deadlines, so don’t be afraid to employ your skills of intimidation. Sure, it may seem strange to fix someone with a feral glare and growl until they move - but have you ever actually tried it?
Territory gained, blitz the catalogue computers with every keyword you can think of. All the genuinely useful books will be taken, so now is the time for frantically scanning the indexes of books that have been in the library since Appleton was a person and not just an architectural wart. You can compensate for a lack of knowledge and respectable sources with the illusion of enthusiasm and ‘innovative’ use of texts that on the surface seem entirely irrelevant to your subject area but are actually an essential part of ‘placing the issue in a broader social and interdisciplinary context’. Max out your loan limit, bury yourself in a fort of books and skim and cite continuously for a few hours, because there’s no time to read.
1500hrs: By now you may be wishing you had some of those study drugs everyone’s whispering about. I’m not going to condone their use because people tend to throw around phrases like ‘Class B’, ‘unconfirmed side effects’ and ‘the law’. If you choose to take the medicated route, that’s your call but the rest of this guide is based on doing things the hard way. Push on.
1900hrs: Alright, stop. Your brain is beginning to take on the consistency of a fine foie gras and your eyes appear to be looking at one another. It’s time to eat. If you leave the library now you might be tempted to make a break for it and set up camp in the Pentland hills, so it’s probably best to stick to the café. As you stare mournfully at your baked potato, screeches of ‘cheese and ham panini!’ tear out of the kitchen and shudder through your brain. Block it all out. Go to your happy place. There you will find a rough, half-baked plan for your assignment. Don’t let it escape. Race back upstairs and batter out an introduction and a sentences for each of the digestible chunks you have broken it into. Now sit back and make a smug noise.
2000hrs: Have a quick wander round the main study areas and see if you can find a friend in the same horrific situation. As the saying goes, a problem shared is a problem halved – this couldn’t be less relevant here (unless your friend wants to write half your essay for you) but it’s nonetheless quite gratifying to see someone else stuck on the same, rapidly sinking boat. It’s never a bad thing to have somebody to keep pace with, so after a brief duet of bitching and moaning, get your arse back in gear.
2200hrs: Time to tear yourself away from the library. Head to Nicolson Street and stock up on anything caffeinated. Aim for enormous cans and bottles emblazoned with explosions, predators and names like Tropical Painforest, Eviscerator (Strawberry Flavour) and RRAAMMPAAAGE. Solids are probably also a good idea. Go for sweets, lots of sweets. And nuts. And raisins. Basically anything that will act both as a source of false, fleeting energy and as something to fidget with rather than any real sustenance. A wise man once said to me ‘Leave that sugar python alone, you will never tame it’. This is generally good advice but tonight he can just shut his wise face; you need all the sugar you can get, so seize that sugar python with both hands and ride it. This experience is all about the suspension of good sense in exchange for results, so expect to find yourself eating like a seven-year-old locked in a Woolworths Pick ‘n’ Mix section (RIP).
2300hrs: This is the turning point in your coursework ordeal. Head to the north side of George Square, swipe your matric card at the Hugh Robson Building and descend into the depths of The Bunker. Down here, time does not exist. Natural light? Fresh air? Not a chance. Round the clock access, strip lights and endless rows of PCs we can do. Welcome to your new home.
0100hrs: You can almost feel an air of mounting despair in the room, as those with a fighting chance at sleeping tonight gradually filter out. It’s not just its status as a windowless, subterranean hell that gives The Bunker its name, it’s also the fact that the atmosphere is reminiscent of refugee camps in those futuristic war films, in which a mother wails over her ailing child and a headcase with an accordion heralds the apocalypse. One thing prevails: you are all in it together.
0300hrs: Pee break. That’s right, even your toilet visits are scheduled. Male students have the upper hand here, since it’s harder to fall asleep at a urinal than it is to nuzzle into the comfort of a cold, dark cubicle. Alright, cease peeing now. Go back downstairs and aim for halfway by 4am.
0600hrs: There is no escaping the fact that it’s now officially tomorrow. This thought alone should be enough to put the fear of God into you but if not, run upstairs to find the central campus basking in sunlight, while the living start their days. The conviction that you will one day rejoin them should give you a lift.
0700hrs: Pee break number two (it turns out caffeine really is a diuretic). The Bunker’s toilets look like a set from Saw and you are now hopelessly tweaked, so don’t be surprised if, when operating the hand-drier, you find its unholy roar somewhat unsettling. Remember that toothbrush? Use it.
0800hrs: ‘Who are these people and why do they look so healthy?’ The Bunker is now filling up with people in tracksuit bottoms, fresh from the gym and loaded with colour-coded notes and cereal bars. Resist the urge to spit at them, let their conventional sleeping habits and high marks fill you with a jealous rage, and then channel it all back into your work. With your body now building up a resistance to caffeine, this weapons-grade spite will be the fuel for your sprint finish.
1100hrs: Now would be a good time to check that word count. More often than not you’ll find that you’ve spent the past two or three hours in a state of autopilot and that you’re now surprisingly close to your limit. Who knows what you might have written? You were thinking about time travel and feverishly eating pistachio nuts. The best policy here is to assume it’s eloquent, perceptive and methodologically sound, just don’t get caught up in proof reading. You have one hour to conclude, hit the print button and sprint to wherever your submission box may be.
1200hrs: Congratulations, you made it. You now resemble an extra out of Dawn of the Dead, so expect to find yourself staggering around campus, freaking people out with your slack jaw and vacant gaze. With classes now a ridiculously unrealistic option, you have the choice of either wandering homewards and slipping into comatose oblivion for a day, or gathering your coursemates for some celebratory drinks. A word of warning, though: sleep deprivation and irresponsible drinking make for a very, very strange kind of inebriation. You may want to wear a helmet.
