Diary of a DAAP kid: Let's do the Time Warp again.

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It is now the 7th week of the quarter, which means school is starting to kick into high gear. Classes are piling on the work, and the ever infamous studio (a six hour class that is the main focus of the quarter) rears its ugly head and demands all the work for the class be finished the week before finals week.

From here on out, time seems to move in a different way for those of us in DAAP. The days get shorter, the hours get longer. It's a weird phenomenon, and I think it is mostly attributed to spending so much time actually inside the building.

It's just a jump, to the left... or not.

It is very easy to lose track of the time once working inside DAAP- especially inside the computer labs. They are dark, windowless rooms, usually only lit by the glow of the computer screens. Last quarter I spent 36 hours in a 48 hour time period in one of these rooms, working to finish some drawings for my final project. Up in the studio rooms, there are windows and you can see the sun sinking behind Deaconess in the distance as you work into the night.

This is not a complaint, however. There is something wonderful about working at a big wooden desk late at night, head down, headphones on - and if you're me, singing along to whatever musical happens to be playing on the iPod at the time. Somewhere between the hours of 11pm and 4am, time stands still and work gets finished.

Even better is when there are several people working in studio at once. Then the atmosphere changes from meditating in solitude to more of a social event. In the interior design studios I've participated in, my friends and I play music, order takeout, and help each other with problems we might be wrestling with, be it space planning, material selection, or using a computer program. Don't get me wrong, we get our work done, but we also have a lot of fun and make memories along the way.

These late nights don't happen every single night. As I've progressed through the program, they've become fewer and farther between. I think that starting out I had to learn to adapt not only to college life but also the complexities of learning and working in a rigorous program. Now I've figured out that it's possible to get work done without staying up all night, every night to do so.

Of course, that will probably change when I start working on senior project next winter. But until then, I am appreciating both the time I spend working in DAAP... and the time I spend outside of it.