Remember the last time you pulled an all-nighter? How the early-morning rays filtered through your window, allowing you to come to the depressing realization that the night had come and gone, and you weren’t unconscious for a single moment of it?
On Friday, Stamp Student Union will be holding its “All Niter,” a huge event that will involve a variety of performers and activities. However, this event doesn’t necessarily go all night, as its title suggests. In fact, the latest performance ends at 3 a.m.
Obviously, Stamp’s idea of an all-nighter doesn’t exactly match what many people, especially college students, consider an all-nighter. Although 3 a.m. is technically in the early hours of the morning, it’s certainly never light outside at that time. It would definitely be strange to call 3 a.m. “day” instead of “night,” and isn’t the whole point of an all-nighter that you make it through the night into the next day?
The poster for the event itself is a contradiction. It reads: “Are you afraid of the All Niter?” Yet instead of reading “all night,” the time reads “all day til 3 a.m.”
The debate rests with what Stamp considers night. If “night” just means the time spent awake during the darker hours, then yes, maybe Stamp’s All Niter is a true all-nighter because that’s what students would be doing with their entire night. But by that reasoning, doesn’t that make any activity that happens under the cover of darkness an all-nighter?
Some students on the campus had a more relaxed view of the term “all-nighter” than others.
When asked to guess when Stamp’s All Niter would end, Tracy Chung, a senior government and politics major, thought it would last until about 6 a.m. Yet upon learning that the All Niter didn’t last nearly that long, she didn’t necessarily have a problem with the title of the event. If students wanted to stay up all night, she said, they would do so regardless.
“I think if you wanted to go to bed you would, but if you wanted to stay up all night you would just do that as well,” she said.
However, not everyone agreed with the title choice.
Arya Moola, a sophomore economics major, thought Stamp might have misinterpreted what an all-nighter really means.
“I consider an all-nighter to be at least until 5” a.m., he said. “An all-nighter should be all of the night.”
Stamp’s All Niter surely will attract crowds, with entertainment spanning from breakdancing competitions to a haunted room. But whether the event is truly an all-nighter is definitely up for debate.
