Students Hunker Down in Cabot

It’s a cold Saturday night in the Square. The streets are deserted, and the largest group of undergraduates to be found isn’t warming up at a hot party, but instead cuddling books at Cabot library.

At 3 a.m., the unforgiving fluorescent lights at the campus’s temporarily 24-hour library revealed a band of diehards hunched over their textbooks and laptops. Since Lamont—which sports plushly cushioned chairs and footstools—kicks students out at 12:45 a.m., the crowd was forced to settle for the wooden straight-backed chairs of Cabot.

At any given point on a Saturday night during reading period, the library hosts approximately 50 diligent students, said Peggy Y.P. Bui ’07, who at 3:30 a.m. was still studying for her organic chemistry final and working the late-shift at Cabot’s front desk.

Since reading period is still young, and exams don’t start until Saturday, most anxiety stems from papers and major projects.

“All the papers my roommates and I have are due during reading period. In fact, I have three papers due on the same day,” Bui said.

But Michael T. Lapsa ’08, who was working on a Spanish Ca final essay and a speech for his Expos class, “Representation and the Right to Vote,” said papers were the least of his worries.

“I’m sure the stress will get worse,” he said, citing an upcoming Math 1b final and catchup reading he needs to do before taking the Ec 10 exam.

Three first-year students at Harvard Law School, Ryan W. Copus, Matt J. Kohley and Jessica N. Walder, agreed as they sat around a small table slaving over a property law exam scheduled for today. “The test is worth 100 percent of our course grade,” grimaced a bleary-eyed Copus at around 2 a.m. “It’s hell.”

Down the stairs, Raymond A. Jean ’08 complained of other reading period woes.

“I feel that coming back after break, I don’t have the structure of classes to help me plan my time, so it’s difficult to know how much time to dedicate to each thing,” he said. “I feel the only way to be certain is to go overboard. I feel like I have to do every practice problem, and I have to write three drafts.”

Luckily for stressed students, relaxing procrastination methods are not hard to find at Harvard—especially with high-speed internet.

Jean was huddled over his laptop, but not because he was working.

“Like I should be working on Expos right now, but instead I’m looking at pictures of cars,” Jean said.

Yangda Ou ’08 takes a low tech, less desk-oriented version of a study break from reviewing his Ec 1011 and Physics 16a problem sets.

“I go take a walk around the Yard and play pool for 20 minutes and go right back to work,” he said.

Ou’s roommate Yao Huang ’08 agreed that in times like these “even procrastinating stresses me out.”