Sleepy Harvard University students may soon be able to catch up on some much-needed rest after the school’s administration agreed to consider creating a nap room on its campus.
The proposal, created by second-year student Yuqi Hou, was one of three selected by the Harvard Undergraduate Council last month as part of its “We the Crimson” initiative, an online system that allows students to submit petitions on issues that are relevant to the Harvard campus.
Hou’s plan will now be reviewed by dean of Harvard College, Evelynn M. Hammonds.
“Harvard College takes seriously student proposals to improve the undergraduate experience,” Harvard’s senior director of communications Kevin Galvin said in a statement. “Like other such proposals, we will review its feasibility and will be in touch with its proponent.”
Hou came up with the idea of a nap room as a way of helping sleep-deprived students improve their physical health and academic performance, she wrote in her proposal.
An online study that Hou included along with her petition showed that just 21 per cent of Harvard students feel well-rested on a typical day.
“Most students operate daily on a sleep deficit, to the detriment of their health and productivity,” Hou wrote in her proposal.
“For those getting insufficient sleep at night, naps can provide alertness and help students take a break from their hectic schedules.”
Harvard’s own research would seem to support Hou’s claim. Several experiments conducted by the university proved that people who take a short 20 to 30-minute nap during the day experience improvements in memory retention, learning and creative thinking, according to a November 2009 issue of the Harvard Health Letter.
Currently, many Harvard students are forced to use their own dorm rooms if they want to rest between classes.
But Hou said this is inconvenient because students regularly “running on empty” energy levels have little time during the day to run to their rooms to take a nap.
“The dorms are too far away.” Hou said via e-mail. “You don’t walk 15 minutes to your dorm to take a 20 minute nap, [especially when] most people only have 20 minutes or so of time.”
Under Hou’s proposal, the nap room would be centrally located, and would feature dim lighting and divided spaces where students would sleep, she said. Access to floor cushions would also be provided to students wanting a little extra comfort.
For Hou, the nap room is an opportunity for Harvard to join other academic institutions like the University of Colorado at Boulder, which established its own “siesta room” in 2009, in promoting mental and physical health.
The idea has been positively received by Harvard students, with nearly 200 voting in its favour. But some are concerned about the costs associated with having a designated sleeping centre on campus.
Marky Freeman, a second-year applied math major, believes the nap room, which has a start-up cost of $945, will leave less money available for other ventures offered by the university.
“The nap room would hurt students in the sense that [there] would be less money for financial aid, for extra help sessions or other things that I think are much more important [to students],” Freeman said, noting he hasn’t noticed the general student body showing signs of sleep deprivation.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody sleeping in some random location around campus,” he said.
If Harvard students truly are in need of more rest, it’s because most tend to be involved in an abundance of extracurricular activities, according to Freeman.
“I think it comes down to people having a lot of cool stuff that they want to do, and getting involved in an awful lot of stuff that they really care about,” he said. “The result is they don’t really have time to get a proper amount of sleep because they want to be doing all kinds of other things.”
