A night owl person is someone who tends to stay awake late at nights and feels more energetic post-evening. Have a look at this article on Wikipedia if you’re unaware of what being a night owl means: Night owl.

Sleep early to wake up early.
- Dad

Sounds simple, right? You’ve got to attend school at 6am so sleep as early as 10pm the night before. Well it makes sense, but the point is I just can’t! Sorry dad I never managed to act upon your simple advice.

I kept trying to FIX my sleeping habits for a long while but the results weren’t promising, I guess it is what it is.

I think I’m a night owl for obvious reasons:

  • have never been a fan of early mornings (for any purpose even a date with my crush).
  • have always had a more creative mind late at nights.
  • Sleeping before 00:00 is almost impossible for me.
  • Ted in HIMYM says “The decisions you make after 2am are the wrong decisions”, well for me it’s usually the opposite!
  • Right now I’m writing this post at 4am :)

To be honest, I think working with monitors (non-solar human-made lights) messes with my sleeping habits and keeps me awake at nights, though I find it unlikely that monitors could sharpen my thinking, hence I conclude I probably have the genetic predisposition.

Being a night owl means that my mind is at its sharpest post-evening, and my performance is at its lowest in early mornings. I can’t sleep early at night thus waking up early is always a pain! This causes a lot of trouble for me (e.g. banks and government offices only offer service before noon). Anyways in this post I intend to address the hassles in Academia:

A study among 1000 adolescents by the University of Madrid found that night owls scored higher than early birds on inductive reasoning tests, which often serve as a proxy for intelligence. However, they lag behind larks in academic performance.
- Wikipedia

Studies suggest night owls are more intelligent, but they’re apparently bad at Academia! I don’t find it surprising and here is why:

Classes

most classes occur in daytime especially in the morning. Waking up and attending the class is a struggle for me let alone understanding and properly processing what the professor is talking about!

This semester I have to attend classes at 7:30am 5 days a week, even thinking about it gives me a headache. I’ve never failed a course due to excessive absence (presenting the class is a must for most courses) but I normally get very little from the class and I’m almost all on my own to pass the course.

Final tests

As mentioned earlier my mind is at its worst in the morning and most final tests are taken in the morning. This means in addition to not being able to take the most from class, I’d have my lowest performance on the test. In such a situation one can’t expect me much no matter how intelligent or talented you label me.

Dormitory environment

Here comes the good news! Dorms have a friendly environment for night owls! per my personal experience study halls of dorms are 24/7 available and students don’t find any obstacles looking for a calm and quiet place to study (except for the finals when it gets crowded).

Online education

Proper use of telecommunication tools to ease education has been subject of much controversy in the past decade at least. Yet the progress made (at least in Iran) was utterly slow! COVID pandemic forced colleges to adopt online education as the only option during lockdown.

From my point of view this imperfect online education had its own headaches but having the classes recorded and accessible by a click was a sweet experience.

Most professors used messaging apps like WhatsApp to keep in touch with students, this way asking questions was not limited to the time of class and professors would be responding to questions and requests at any time of the day.

Nowadays with vaccination done in large scales, we’re looking forward to breaking free from lockdown and going back to colleges. I hope the perks of online education would not be thrown away and we wouldn’t just move to the way everything used to be before lockdown.

Conclusion

Even though it seems my eveningness is of extreme kind causing huge bumps on the road, I am aware that I should be working on my side to eliminate as many intensifying factors as possible, However the society seems to turn its back and the respond you get when complaining is Stop b*tching and fix your sleeping habits!. Though a little disappointed I still have high expectations from Academia.

My suggestion for Academic decision makers to ease the situation is:

  • Considering students' performance in picking timings for events. e.g. instead of announcing timings for courses, students should be asked to have a saying in picking a time which suits them best.
  • Lessening limits of accessibility to tools and materials. for example laboratories shouldn’t be available to students in a fixed timing and classes should be recorded the way they were during the lockdown.

In Bahonar University of Kerman (In which I’m currently studying), an acceptable progress has been made in comparison to other academic centers however I believe it is yet far from satisfying.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments :)