Tuesday, December 10Royal Holloway's offical student publication, est. 1986

In search of some much needed sleep

Sleep. It’s vital, especially for students. We seem to have two moods: ‘sleep is for the weak’ and ‘I want to sleep for a week’. With the frantic juggling of work and socialising, sleep tends to be neglected, especially around deadlines and exams. But then it can also be cruelly taken away by late night revellers, as many students in halls have found.

One angry, sleep deprived resident said: “Due to living in Wedderburn sleep is often interrupted by fire alarms or drunk people singing ‘I dont want to miss a thing’ outside my window.” This is not ideal for anyone, but especially inconvenient on nights before exams. It can be especially hard when you are free from work and others around you are not, but being considerate coming home from Monkey’s or the SU should be the norm.

Another first year has gone to extremes after lack of sleep: “I hated living at Kingswood and have chosen to live at home next year due to the noise levels at Kingswood”

It’s understandable that, especially as first years, we should be free to go out and enjoy university life, or indeed have fun in our own flats. The university policy of no noise after 11 is sensible, but barely policed, and so more and more people have deemed it acceptable to keep people awake til the early hours or scream and shout when they get home at 3 or 4 in the morning.

It’s not only revision that the noise is disturbing. As more and more people are finishing exams, the workload is starting to decrease. But that doesn’t mean that we deserve to be disturbed in sleep. I work most Saturdays, sometimes having to get up around 5am to make an early shift that could go on for 12 hours. When I am disturbed by other people’s late night music and drinking I really struggle to get enough sleep to do my job effectively and then miss out on whatever plans I had for after work in order to catch up on sleep.

So when you’re next up late, remember that sleep is much needed for others around you and be considerate, as many people already are.