My first semester of college was good for me. I finished with above a 3.5 GPA, plenty of new friends, a lot of great extracurriculars and great friends and a lot of experience to build on for second semester. The one bad habit of first semester that I have not been able to break is staying up later than I should to socialize with my friends.

Like I said, I have made a great group of friends and it is very hard for us to tell each other “goodnight” at the end of the day (this may be midnight or after). We enjoy being around each other, sometimes too much. We met each other through being involved in the Gamecock Gateway bridge program with the University of South Carolina, so we are close. Most of the time, we are just talking or discussing some drama that happened during that day. Often, we are talking about a bad grade one of us made that day! I love these people and am very thankful that I will come out of my freshman year of college with such a solid friend group.

The reason, I think, that this is difficult for me is for one big and obvious reason: I lose sleep because of this. It is easy to stay up until the early hours of the morning talking, but it is not so easy to wake up in the morning after not getting the appropriate amount of sleep (trust me, it is very hard to get out of bed when you are in college). Fortunately, I do not have 8:00 a.m. classes, but I do have 9:35 a.m. classes; so, they are still fairly early in the morning. Also, I have not only noticed a drag in productivity while sitting in class, but also while I am at work and even when I get back to my residence hall from work. This tiredness makes it more difficult to study in the afternoon and into the evening.

I think if you were to ask any student in college, no matter what year they are, why we stay up so late, they would tell you it is because every person has a certain FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) that we have to deal with. Whether it is missing out on making plans for the upcoming night out, or whether it is just missing out on a good conversation that the entire group is having, this makes it hard to go to sleep.

I am not trying to say that you should not socialize with your friends after a long day in class, I am just saying that you shouldn’t let it affect your sleeping schedule. My advice is to prioritize your day so that you have most of your work finished by the time the early night time comes around. This way, you do not have to worry about having to complete any assignments and you can just focus on relaxing with your friends and enjoying some time together.