The graduate student all-nighter is a relatively rare occurrence. During the marathon undertaking that is a PhD in experimental physics, consistent daily effort delivers a much better productivity payout than intensive, sporadic efforts that mess with the sleep cycle. Personally I get my best work done in the morning, taking advantage of the quiet in the office before others arrive. But I’d be lying if I said I’d kept a perfect sleep-work-life routine during the course of my project. My infrequent late-night or all-night efforts can be classified as one of three types.
The dutiful all-nighter
This kind of night is one that I’ve found myself in when there is a deadline involved. Sometimes, no matter how well I think I’ve managed my time, there’s more work involved than I thought, and I end up less prepared than I feel I should be for something of importance. I have come up against this one a few times when I have promised to send something to my supervisors. After promising to complete some calculations for an upcoming experimental run, then promptly spending most of the day in the lab checking over the physical experimental set up and wishing I didn’t have to do the calculations, I grit my teeth, armed myself with a strong coffee, then sat down at the computer, and got it done.
Of course, for each final result I actually wanted, there were about four or five calculations I needed to do first. None of them were particularly difficult, but they weren’t the kind you could easily just do with your scientific calculator. Which meant I had to draft up some C++ functions to make my life easier. Which I then had to get compiled. Which I then had to debug. Which then I had to check against known results.
It was a time-consuming process, but by the end of the night, the calculations I needed to complete were done. As a bonus, I also had a very reasonable draft of a program that would enable me to very quickly do similar calculations in the future. So even though I was tired and it didn’t feel like the most polished, best work I’d done, this all-nighter gave me the satisfaction of holding myself accountable to my word, and completing the task I’d set out to do.
The nervous all-nighter
I don’t often get anxious at the prospect of public speaking. Most of the presentations I’ve given as a scientist have been around 15-25 minutes long, which is a good length for a script that you can memorise almost word-for-word. So when I was about 2 years into my PhD, and had to give a 40-45 minute presentation on my project thus far, at first I wasn’t too worried. It was about a week before the presentation date that I realised the techniques I’d relied on up to that point weren’t going to work. And so followed a blur of perfecting slides, practising my presentation to an empty room until long after everyone had gone home, and sleeping very poorly.
These were the kinds of nights where lying down in bed would either result in falling asleep immediately from exhaustion, or jumping back out again after 5 minutes because I couldn’t get my mind to settle, then staring at the slides and mumbling the content to myself while panicking about the exact wording of what I was saying. This is distinct from the dutiful all-nighter above because this stuff didn’t actually help me prepare for the talk. This became abundantly clear the instant I got up in front of my actual audience and started speaking. But you know what? I still got through the talk. I fumbled a few times, and I think my nervousness was clear, but I said what needed to be said.
Being a little bit nervous about a talk, especially in a style you’re not used to, is a good thing. This kind of anxiety has a function: it reminds you that you care about getting it right because it’s important to you. I think the trick to it is remembering this function in the moment, and using that energy to prepare in a productive way.1
The triumphant all-nighters
These are the kinds of all-nighters that occur when you get caught up in a problem and have a breakthrough – getting so excited you don’t want to put it down and letting that excitement take you for a ride. This can happen when you’re more generally on a roll with something, whether the paper you’re writing is finally starting to come together, and you’re right in that writing flow-state, or one of the million tabs you have open has presented an explanation that made a physical concept click for you and look at your data analysis in a new way.
The most recent PhD all-nighter I pulled was one of these, while I was in the lab helping out with an experiment late last year. After days of what felt like endless openings and closings of a huge vacuum chamber, mounting new detectors to fit an on-the-fly addition to the experimental design, and tuning some of the most difficult ion beams I’d ever interacted with, on the last days of the experiment, all of the essentials of the experiment were working smoothly. A few of us had the whole set up in our heads, and the ideas and troubleshooting were bouncing between us all, even as we slumped against the walls in the accelerator control room. The next thing we knew, there were only three more runs to tick off the board…sure, it’s 1am and some others have arrived for their shift, but why would we go home now? We were so close! And so stay we did. Until 5am.
Being able to ride the thrill of both a successful experiment and a dynamic collaborative effort between people who are passionate and invested makes this kind of all-nighter the best kind. This is where I feel in my element as a PhD student, and is what I call upon when I’m struggling through those parts of my project that I find overwhelmingly challenging. These are the times when I feel like a physicist.
1If this kind of all-nighter is occurring in your life often, I am of the firm belief that you should try and talk with someone (friend, mentor, professional) about it. I did. It didn’t help at first, but then it did.