We all have thoughts that wake us up in the middle of the night. Some have an errand they forgot to run, an answer to a test that they are still double checking or thoughts of a crush that simply won’t let them rest. If you are a biology major, however, the thoughts that interrupt your restful slumber tend to be outside that of normal folks. Like tonight, when I awoke with a start and thought, “I forgot to collect my virgins.”
Don’t worry. By virgins, I mean virgin fruit flies that won’t have statistically compromising offspring to add to my data. And because I need them to get a decent grade in this lab, I find myself rising long before the sun to manipulate drugged fruit flies. This is the life of a genetics student. In fact, campus security is instructed to leave an entrance to the science wing open 24/7 to give students access to the lab at whatever strange time they might need it.
“I often find myself in the lab late at night,” said Annie Clift, a junior marine biology major. “It’s hard to be working that late, but for marine biology and research, you realize that you’ll be put in situations that require odd hours for the rest of your career.”
I keep this in mind when I park and notice that campus is dead. The strange cold weather we’ve been having isn’t helping me suppress the urge to turn around and climb back into bed. The only people left wandering campus are the pre-sunrise walk-of-shamers and students making their way back from Wacky Wednesday, or whatever the excuse is called to drink in the middle of the week.
Plant Hall in the middle of the night is somewhere between quietly intriguing and downright frightening. The age of the building becomes all the more evident when you are sleep deprived and roaming the corridors by yourself. I stop two or three times to make sure the only footsteps I hear are my own, convinced that I’m going to turn a corner and trip on a ghost.
But I know I’m not the only one doing this. I keep waiting for the day when I run into a fellow student and we scare the crap out of each other. Sometimes I walk into the lab at an odd hour and find that I’m not the first one there. Instead of words, we just exchange a look that means something like, “You too?”
At the end of the day, however, I know why I’m doing it. Aspiring doctors know that they’ll need to be up and ready to take their first patient at 7:30 a.m. Marine biology students that want to research bioluminescence will have to conduct their sampling through the night. But for now, we are all lowly genetics students who have to time collecting flies perfectly or risk their results being ruined.
I hear my classmates drunkenly giggle outside of the building as I key myself into the empty laboratory and the irony is almost cruel. But I grab a microscope and settle into my routine, praying that the lack of sleep will one day be worth it.