I was taking a class in Cryptography and the end of the semester was approaching. I'd procrastinated everything as usual. We had a research project and a take-home final due on the same day as the in-class final. It was an absurd amount of work; even if I had budgeted my time out responsibly it still would have been overwhelming.

So I got to work on the take-home final around 4 PM the afternoon before it was due. I slaved all through the night, typing commands aimlessly into PARI/GP hoping I would magically arrive at some sort of feasible answer. I was still drowning myself in black coffee as the sun began to rise. I worked on the take-home final until I had to go to the in-class final at I think 9:00 AM, and I still hadn't finished it.

I finished the in-class final, and dragged my greasy, haggard, sleep-deprived mothersmurfing self BACK to the library to finish the other stuff, both of which were due in the prof's office by 5 PM.

As much of a procrastinator as I am, I had managed to whip up a troutty research essay on quantum cryptography a few days before this madness, so I sat down and edited it up for maybe 2 hours, and then deemed it submittable (was it? not really).

Then I began a mad dash to finish the take home final. Eventually I realized that I had only one question left and half an hour to turn all my trout in. IT was something to do with RSA encryption and calculating the determinant of some smurfoff huge matrix, and I deliberately left it til the end. I stared at it for a while and started to think I should just give up on it. TheN I had some sort of EUREKA mad scientist moment where I had an idea and it somehow worked. I literally ran to the professor's office and turned those bitches in at 4:56, four minutes before the deadline. I felt like Indiana Jones narrowly escaping a temple before a boulder crushes him or some trout.

I'm not the type who's like "ah yea pullin an all nighter is cake for me, do it all the time man what's the big deal". I smurfing hate all-nighters, and this was the first of two I ended up pulling in college. I'd say this or the miserably boring paper I wrote on Complete Metric Spaces for my Topology course were the worst things I had to do in college. It does feel great to finish a behemoth of an assignment like this, but Ican safely say I don't miss these parts of college too much.