7:00 a.m. is too early. Course Enroll, what pre-enrollment is commonly referred to at Cornell University, should not be so early in the morning. A better time would be more like 9:00 a.m. 9:00 a.m. is early but it isn’t too early. You can wake up at 9:00 a.m. and enroll in courses and continue with your day, seamlessly. For example, if you have a class at 10:10 for which you typically wake up at 9:25, it’s not too much of an inconvenience to wake up a half-hour earlier, at 8:55, to enroll is classes. 8:55, by the way, to allow for five minutes of preparation. This involves turning on your laptop, connecting to the internet and dealing with that general early-morning fogginess.

But with 9:00 a.m. you run into a lot of scheduling conflicts. Some students are doing things at 9:00 a.m. A great deal of students are in class, for example. And it wouldn’t be fair to schedule Course Enroll during times when many students are in class. This is mostly because it’s desirable for each and every student to have an equal chance at getting into a class. So if there is one spot left in a class, and two students are trying to claim that final spot, then they should both be able to place their claim at the same time. But say one of the students happens to be busy at 9:00 a.m., so the other student claims the spot unchallenged. That is not very fair at all. Therefore 9:00 a.m. is not a very good time to schedule Course Enroll. I should point out that this situation is entirely theoretical.

But maybe now I should go backward to something I said earlier, in the sentence I wrote about how 7:00 a.m. is too early. What I meant by that was that 7:00 a.m., or more accurately 6:55, is an inconvenient time to wake up.

First of all, it interrupts sleep patterns. It is very important for human beings to sleep. It’s perhaps especially important for college students to sleep. This is because college students are young and need their minds to be sharp in order to be successful. And studies show that the young actually need more sleep than the old due to various scientific reasons. Other, unrelated studies show that sleep is necessary in order to keep the mind sharp. For example, one time I was watching 60 Minutes and they did a story on this scientific study in which people didn’t sleep for long periods of time. The climax of the story was when the sleep-deprived subjects took various tests that showed their mental sharpness to be dramatically and tremendously lacking. Lesley Stahl also did interviews with the subjects and they all looked very tired and slow-witted. I believe the study took place at the University of Pennsylvania — a fellow Ivy League institution.

In light of these results we have to consider the sleep-levels of Cornell students a pivotal issue. Eight to 10 hours of uninterrupted sleep is paramount. And here uninterrupted is the key word. This is because if students wake up for Course Enroll at 7:00 a.m., they are interrupting their much-needed sleep. Even if they go back to sleep, the cycle has been thrown off.

To recap, 7:00 a.m. is too early and 9:00 a.m. is no good because some students are busy at 9:00 a.m. This is why I think Course Enroll should be at a time when, (a) students are not busy and (b) students’ sleep will not be disturbed in any way or shape or form.

This is why 10:00 p.m. is a good time. It would be much more convenient because students are still a few hours away from preparing to sleep. (And by this I mean brushing their teeth, setting their alarm clocks, taking out their contacts, and, in some cases, showering.) And, at the same time, students are not busy so late in the evening. This may be a controversial statement because many students are doing things at 10:00 p.m. However, these things are in many cases voluntary and interruptible. Things like watching television, reading, doing homework, surfing the internet, enjoying a late night snack, writing an essay, etc.

For example, very often at 10:00 p.m., I am doing homework. If I happened to be doing homework the night of Course Enroll, I could simply take a break, which is actually a tactic many researchers of scholarly work consider to be very effective. It allows the mind to relax, they’ve concluded.

Therefore, I will have increased my mental sharpness and signed up for my desired courses all in one flip of the coin.

So, while I may be doing something at 10:00 p.m, I wouldn’t call myself busy in the way I’m busy at 9:00 a.m. Not me, of course, because I’m never busy at 9:00 a.m. In fact, the earliest I start class is 10:10 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’m just acting here, because I know many students do have class at that time, 9:00 a.m.

This is why I think Course Enroll should be scheduled at 10:00 p.m., and not 7:00 a.m. I hope the Student Assembly considers my claims carefully, as all of what I’ve said is true, backed up with factual support.

Tony Manfred is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He may be reached at tmanfred@cornellsun.com. The Absurdity Exhibition appears alternate Tuesdays this semester.