In college, there’s many unspoken rules when it comes to scheduling. Avoid 8 a.m.s, try not to take over 16 credits, confirm with Rate My Professor, make time for your social life and juggle all this while trying to complete your degree. On one of the recent sunny days, students around campus shared how they prefer to stack their schedules. 

There may be an assumption that somehow, early morning lectures are fatal to the over-caffeinated, ramen-fueled existence of student life. But why is this? Morning people do exist, right? 

Emma Ciechanowski, a fourth-year Spanish major with a biochemistry minor, said that even though she is a morning person, and will take morning classes, she sometimes prefers to avoid them. 

“I also like afternoon classes because in the morning I can get all my work done faster than in the afternoon,” Ciechanowski said. 

When Ciechanowski said she was a morning person who still preferred afternoon classes, this opened a bigger question: How do students like to use their productivity? 

“I’d say early afternoon I’m the most focused and ready. It hits like 4 p.m. and I’m done,” said Sarah Hanks, a first-year nutrition major. 

Harper Smith, a third-year double major in environmental economics and policy and sustainability, contributed to this morning versus afternoon productivity debate with her own perspective.

“I think I prefer afternoon classes because I’m more productive in the morning. So I’ll still get up early but I like to kind of get (work) out of the way before I go to class,” Smith said. “I find that after class I just crash and I can’t focus anymore.”

Well, OK, so even these morning people seem to have an aversion to morning classes. That still leaves the grand scheduling dilemma: pack the day in a tightly wound burrito of productivity, or space things out to make it more manageable. This is where opinions really start to differ. 

Lilly Darnell, a first-year biology major, said, “I like them stacked. I like to just get them all done. I feel like if there’s an hour or so gap, I kind of lose interest in the rest of the classes.” 

Ariel Gert, a second-year finance major, said that anything akin to an hour break or so between classes feels like a waste of time. 

“The only time I like to have a break is so I can get lunch or something like that, but otherwise it kind of feels like I’m just wasting time,” Gert said. 

Olivia Catto, a fisheries and wildlife major, is also a second-year and she took a different stance. 

“I kind of don’t like stacking my classes because if I miss one of them then I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ll just miss all of them,’ if they’re all back to back,” Catto said. 

Avi Aurora, a second-year mechanical engineering major, agreed with Gert, however, and said he also preferred to schedule his classes back to back.

“When I have those 40 minute (to) one hour breaks, I just don’t get much done in between so I’d rather just get my classes out of the way,” Aurora said. 

Then there are the upper-division students, with fewer scheduling options and a bit less flexibility. Stacking classes and early mornings are sometimes just part of the deal.

Kourtney Denney,a fourth-year majoring in forest operations, said that if she had every choice in the world she would stack a few classes on either end of a mid-day break. 

“Realistically, I would like two or three (classes) a day,” Denney said. 

Mostly, students said they are just trying to find a balance. Whether that’s a balance between classes or a balance between work, school and social life. College can seem like a quest for the perfect schedule, but once that sweet spot is found, the week starts to feel a little less like a survival mission. And from there, graduation no longer seems impossible, it seems downright achievable, give or take a few all-nighters.