> To be sure. I remember some interesting "ah ha's" in writing a Macbeth
> paper on amphetamines...and translating Augustine's Confessions while
> doing coke -- in all night sessions, of course.
I did two or three all nighters in college. I was never one to study my brains out, because I had already adopted a radical view towards education in high school. High school is where this straight-A, gifted student learned how to fail. It helped me deal with academic pressure later on. When you graduate 200th out of a class of 250, there is nowhere to go but up. And I made it to a graduate degree.
Oh, about those all nighters. I remember doing one for my three-dimensional design class. The projects you do for 3-D design involve lots of meticulous construction with glue, balsa wood or matte board. There is no way to fake a 3-D cube built out of balsa wood and grades really depended on craftsmanship.
All nighters in art school could be lots of fun. You are in a classroom with other students and you get to blast the radio and have interesting conversations. You also drink lots of caffeine, which do strange things to your body as the night wears on. Imagine trying to glue balsa wood strips to each other at 4 am when the caffeine jitters strike your arms and hands.
The other all nighter I did in college involved a student senate meeting that went on all night. When I left the meeting, and the student union in the morning, the sun was literally coming up. That meeting was a particularly contentious one because a bunch of us were trying to block a new student fee which was going to be levied to pay for renovations to the student union. We lost, the union got renovated and it lost much of its former character.
Chuck