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The last weeks of April are a blessing.
It’s the first time in the calendar year where the sky is blue, the UV index has an impact on your skin and the world feels fresh, full of possibilities and joy. Summer’s on the horizon. Most Syracuse University students are crowded on the quad with friends, tossing frisbees and lying in hammocks.
Most.
Then you look to the right of the quad at the looming concrete behemoth that is Bird Library. Students on the promenade are mere ants, dwarfed by the Brutalist cube. Its oppressive veneer evokes sci-fi villainry, like if Darth Vader designed a study hall.
Some poor souls have exams tomorrow that they’re grossly underprepared for. You remember the huddled masses at desks and study rooms in the library.
Will they have enough time before exam day?
On those waning days of the semester, student priorities shift. Some sit outside with friends while others lock themselves in the library. Work has to get done, after all, even if it comes with the personal toll of spending time stuck inside.
“We wouldn’t actually go home, we’d be here all day, go home for four hours to sleep, change,” Ashley Chen, a sophomore marketing major, said. “We come back and spend a whole other day for a week of finals.”
During finals week, Bird Library is open for 24 hours. Some students take advantage of the extra time over the witching hours.
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Bird has a built-in hierarchy on its six floors. As you go up, the sound level goes down. The basement, even at 1 a.m., is like a cafeteria. People gab. Comparatively, the fifth floor becomes a ghost town by 7 p.m. The only people still there are zeroed in on studying. I didn’t get anyone to talk up there, only met with harsh stares from those wishing for my snooping to stop.
Caffeine fuels nearly every student. The garbage cans are a graveyard of Celsius and Monster cans, with a few Dunkin’ plastic cups for good measure. In 20 years, the physical toll of caffeine dependency might be felt. These days, it could be a toll worth paying.
“I think I destroy my body with Celsius,” Chen said. “I would just keep DoorDashing them, and so I would drink, like, actually, three a day.”
On the third floor, in the soundproof study rooms, pairs of students scrawl notations on eight-foot long whiteboards. DoorDash bags are strewn about the floor. Two of the students, Cordelia Dunstan and Daniela Jacob, both juniors on the premed track, are staring down a mammoth assignment.
Organic chemistry. Orgo — a dirty word that causes veteran STEM students to shudder years later. Research shows that half the people that take it fail it.
Dunstan and Jacob are here at 11:30 p.m. They’ve been here since 9 a.m, and the exam is at 8 the next morning. All their chips are down. Though this floor closes at midnight, the pair are in it for the long haul even if they have to move spots — they’re going from Bird right to the exam on Friday morning. And the exam is cumulative, meaning they have an entire semester’s worth of ground to study.
Bags of Taco Bell are scattered across the table, a sort of dirty fuel for the pair, though Jacob has shifted to a salad from Pages Cafe. Rather than keep eating “crap,” like cheap takeout, she figured she’d choose something more nourishing.
The wall-length whiteboards are critical for their success. Dunstan thought it was a tad performative to use huge whiteboards for studying, until she took orgo herself. Now she swears by them.
“It genuinely helps so much because you can write and rewrite and rewrite over and over and over again until it’s in your brain,” Dunstan said.
As the day runs later and later, some Syracuse University students can be seen studying into the night at Bird Library. From organic chemistry to engineering, students of all majors gear up for their finals, spending the entire day in the library. Zoe Xixis | Asst. Photo Editor
The pair needs each other, and not just for retaining the course material. When one of them leaves to grab food, the other stays in the room to secure it. Other orgo students tend to swarm like moths to the whiteboards, because Bird doesn’t have a lot of them, Dunstan said.
Another orgo student, Chow Po, isn’t using a whiteboard to study. The junior biology major is locked in at Pages Cafe, where he’ll be until dawn.
Po took a nap before coming here, so he’s less frenetic than some of the others. Must’ve been a good nap, because he’s alert. He chugs a strawberry and cream Dr. Pepper, which is auspiciously caffeine free. Among the late-night crowd at Bird, Po’s an abnormality because he doesn’t drink caffeine at night.
He’s already looking forward to when the exam is wrapped, when he’ll have a chance to walk around Green Lakes State Park to clear his mind of the repetitive exam prep.
“I’m not a late night guy. I want to sleep,” Po said. “But if worst comes to worst, then I gotta be up here.”
Though it’s late, or maybe early morning, whatever 2 a.m. means to you, three sophomores near Po on the first floor are acting like it’s high noon.
Like Dunstan and Jacob, Taco Bell bags cover the group’s table. But unlike the orgo crew, these three look like they’re having the time of their life.
“My mom was just yelling at me on the phone. She goes, ‘I don’t understand how you’ve been pulling all nighters and you’re there every single night,’” Nikki Korakara, a television, radio and film sophomore, said. “‘She goes, ‘You need to pull your life together.’”
Korakara and her friends, Chen and Sadie Campbell, a marketing and business analytics sophomore, are there to study — but it isn’t their priority. It’s hard to explain to outsiders, but the point of Bird for them isn’t just studying but also conversing.
“The tangents are crazy,” Korakara said. “We’ll sit here like, ‘Oh, my God, that was hysterical. We have to document that, we have to recreate that for a private story or for Tiktok.’”
Not all of the trio’s tangents can make it to print, but the highlights include geography professors that won’t curve exams to a woman studying outside on her computer while smoking a cigarette. Their late nights at Bird have created a delirium effect, more akin to stream-of-consciousness conversations than a structured study session. It’s hard to capture in writing; you had to be there.
They manage to discipline themselves by setting up a phone to create a time-lapse video, Campbell said. That way, self-surveillance would force them to focus.
“We’ve actually been pretty locked in right?” Campbell said to her friends. “We were hacked so we wouldn’t be on our phones.”
Despite their tendencies to veer off-topic, the trio are all “academic weapons,” Chen said. However, they admitted that their study habits have declined since high school — a trend they attribute to AI and brain rot, along with the natural transition to college.
A trio of engineering students have occupied the computer area near the first floor plotter printer, scrawling mathematical notations out, much like the orgo crowd.
Engineering is hard to teach, aerospace engineering senior Barrett Lathrop said. Engineering professors teach it like it’s their first language, and students are basically being dropped into a foreign land where the language is strange and the natives are hostile.
Lathrop tries to explain hypersonics to me. Mind you, I haven’t taken anything remotely mathematic since high school calculus, but he does a decent job. From what I gather, the complex equations can help figure out temperature or pressure shocks on a rocket in flight.
Even though he claims engineering is hard to teach, Lathrop seems to get it.
It does help him retain information when he explains the concepts to strangers, Lathrop said. But Lathrop is also possibly loaded with caffeine. He said he’s got 800 milligrams in his system, and the stress and burnout of the moment might be getting to him a little.
For students at Bird during finals week, the debate toward the end of the night is whether to stay or go. A handful, like Lathrop and the trio of sophomores, decide to stick through. Cashing in your chips early might kill your chances of passing a class. Might as well study until you drop.
“I’ll head out around 4, or I might sleep on the floor,” Lathrop laughs. “Like a rat.”
Video by Collin Snyder | Video Editor, Reese Niccols | Video Editor
Published on May 5, 2026 at 1:37 am