I would highly recommend the book by Cal Newport: “How To Become a Straight-A Student:
The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less”
It will help you with time management and how to be more efficient.
Echoing the athlete-with-morning-practice idea. Those kids don’t fool around. They make great roommates for students like the OP. They’re often gone on the weekends, too.
Pay attention to how colleges assign roommates. Most will at least have some survey that asks you if you are night owl or early riser, etc. Be honest. Look for dorms with singles, suites or dorms with good study rooms so that is reasonable to ask roommates to do late night elsewhere.
Biggest thing is to have roommate that is respectful of your wishes. You will need to be the same. I think it is reasonable to expect quiet at time you go to bed. However, if you share a room it is not reasonable to expect roommate to turn out lights, etc. You can adjust (I learned to sleep thru my roommate’s hair dryer in a.m.) If this seems really impossible healthwise (not just don’t like to compromise) then see what documentation the college needs to assign you a single for medical reasons. But lots of good colleges have singles or at least suites with singles.
Athletes sound good. D had one. Off season not so early to bed though.
Don’t worry about it. There are early birds and night owls. One year my randomly assigned roommate started as an early bird. She was a transfer form a center system campus and lived on a farm. Midway through the first semester she had modified her hours closer to the more typical college student’s. Who knows what will happen with you.
My U used to do surveys eons ago but found more success without them. Random roommate assignments work just as well they found. You do not need to be friends with a roommate, you just need to get along and respect each other’s needs. Consider this- at home you may have siblings/parents you live with but your life is separate from them. There is dorm student staff to help with any issues as well.
Pay attention to advice given here. Keep up with your work daily- not just weekly. Rough drafts of papers can be done in advance with only minor tweaking just before due (I was bad- hated to write/type and typed into the class period on my manual typewriter, thank goodness chemistry was problem based).
You will be the one taking those early classes, usually freeing up the time slots for those of us who dislike them. In the past I knew of “quiet hours” where the dorms were expected to be less noisy after 10 pm. You may beat the rush for breakfast- and the long last minute lines before classes I faced.
Do not worry. There are all kinds in college. The vast majority work things out well. It will be interesting to see how you grow and change with your college experience.
btw- fast forward many decades later. H used to stay up later than I did when I needed to be working too early for my taste. We’re now both retired and I stay up late, he goes to bed sooner and is up earlier. Actually nice for alone time. Plus, we determine who gives airport rides to neighbors based on the flight time!
Thanks everyone!
Good advice here. You might post a thread asking for schools with freshman single rooms and/or quiet dorms.
At a small school, you might be able to get to class in five minutes or so, which is often a much better commute than in high school. My youngest went from a 35-minute drive to a 3-minute walk. So 9:00 a.m. class is not bad at all.
My son stays up late and sleeps in late most days. When he started college I told him the earliest class he needs to take is at 10am. He is a Jr this year and when I checked his schedule I found that his earliest class starts at noon. I though it was odd but he makes good grades so I dismissed it.
Grainraiser, that is a pretty typical lifestyle. This is why the OP has concerns, since the OP has a different sleep schedule than the norm.
Thank you!!!
D18 is a night owl like your S and can’t wait to get to college so she can sleep in late. She’s staying up late but having to go in early many days, so she only gets six hours of sleep on a good night.
Is living at home and commuting an option? That would at least allow you a known sleep pattern.
Probably not! @CalGal36
Wrong person! @CalGal17
My daughter is a student athlete living with student athletes, all engineering students. They get up early (as in 5am) a few mornings a week. She is not a late sleeper other mornings. It gives her more course schedule flexibility since she is willing to take the 8am classes. She does have headphones that she wears in case it’s noisy as she has always needed her sleep.
She has never pulled an all-nighter. As someone above mentioned, her latest nights were fixing bugs in her CS classes. She always called it a night at 1:00am. Outside of her CS classes (she is not majoring in CS) she has had a fairly normal sleep schedule. She is extremely busy, some days are action-packed, but she gets it all done successfully and has time for some fun and other activities.
There are plenty of students like this. It is only necessary to pull all-nighters if you procrastinate, or are a CS major.