Posted by Late Night Against Procrastination took place in Stewart Memorial Library on Thursday, February 21 and roughly 130 students attended the event.
“I think long night is a great opportunity to study with your friends as long as you don’t get distracted,” said Logan Rockwell (‘22). “It does seem like a long night, but not necessarily against procrastination.”
The relatively small turnout allowed students to work better and kept the noise at a reasonable level for people to actually complete their assignments. It also meant that food was not gone too quickly.
“This my second year doing Long Night Against Procrastination and I think that it is a good opportunity for students to get motivated to do work during a stressful time of the semester with mid-term exams coming up and essays to write,” said Deborah Kim (‘21).
This year’s Long Night came with a couple of twists: instead of simply staying at the event long enough to be able to win a t-shirt, students were required to fill out a passport with activities such as Writing Center and Speaking Center conferences, tutoring sessions, professor’s office hours, etc. in order to be eligible to win a t-shirt. The idea, however, did not pan out entirely, as the activities were disproportionately geared toward underclassmen. As a result, not many were completed and by the end of the night there were many leftover t-shirts left.
“I think that it is harder for upperclassmen to obtain challenges for the passport because most upper classes don’t have SI sessions to attend, nor do they have essays to revise for classes unless its for scholarship applications,” said Kim. “I feel like if professors for every major also came, then studying could have been more effective and students could get signatures for their passports. Many students this year were not able to receive a t-shirt because they weren’t willing to do the passport challenges.”
There are still about 100 T-shirts available. Any student who completes three of the challenges in the passport before the end of term can get one while supplies last. Allison Carr will send an email out after spring break explaining the process, but there will most likely be a designated time once a week when passports can be redeemed.
“We tried a new thing to try to control for some of that chaos and I think maybe we overcorrected a little bit, so we’re still working on that,” said Assistant Professor of Rhetoric Allison Carr, coordinator of Long Night. “Certainly the idea that there were not enough things in the passport to apply to older students, that’s not something I thought about when I put it together.I didn’t think about the way those resources are useful in different ways depending on how advanced you are in your program, so I’m glad to know that now. Now we just need to figure out…how do we get enough people in the library to make it sort of a fun event where work can still be done and prizes can be earned and people can feel like it was not a waste of their time.”
Adjustments will be made before the next Late Night which will return in the fall.
“It is still a goal to try to control a little bit of the chaos, but I want to do so in a way that still makes students excited and I think that that element was missing this year,” said Carr.