A yawn stretches across LuAnn Fong’s face as she stares blankly at her professor. She’s tired, she’s dazed, and all she wants to do is sleep. The scene could best be described by a typical episode of Charles Schulz’ “Peanuts.” The teacher is lecturing in the front of the room, but all Charlie Brown can hear is “wrahh wrahh wrahh wrahh… wrahh wrahh, wrahh?”

Fong, a freshman journalism major at Ithaca College, slept for only three hours that night. She follows an exhausting routine of rolling out of bed, sleep-walking to class, sitting slumped in her chair (and usually retaining only a fraction of what the professor says), and returning to her room to climb back in bed and curl up for a nice, long nap. After her snooze, she’ll find some time to shove food down her throat before her club meetings and intramural soccer games, only to return to her room afterwards (or the library, depending on the work load) to begin a laborious night of homework typically lasting until the wee hours of the morning. She often utilizes her coffee machine at two in the morning or orders the venti at Starbucks, just to stay up late and then crash in the late afternoon the next day.

Is this a healthy cycle?

“I’m a procrastinator by nature,” Fong says. She waits to do her work until late at night and ends up spending most of her nights working away.

While students like Fong rely upon power naps during the day, others can’t find the time for naps, and would prefer to sleep for a solid seven to eight hours each night.

A student-athlete’s schedule, for example, doesn’t always leave time for napping. Caitlin Ryan, a swimmer at State University of New York at Geneseo, is exhausted by the time her head hits the pillow.

“On most nights I’m in bed by midnight,” Ryan says. “I wake up by 8 a.m. to go to class, I have practice in the afternoon, and after a shower, I do most of my homework and get to sleep. It’s a good routine for me.”

Other students don’t have time for a full night’s sleep or a nap. Jaclyn Cameron, a physical therapy major at Boston University, has adjusted to sleeping an average of five hours a night without taking a nap.

“I have a very demanding course load,” Cameron says. “If I have time between my classes and my three-hour-long labs, I run to the gym or finish up last-minute homework. I feel like I’m consistently tired and a nap here and there would be really helpful.”

But which way of life is the healthiest?

In many Latin American and European countries, siestas, or naps after the midday meal, are still in practice. The American work ethic, which promotes working from the beginning to the end of the workday, considers napping a form of slacking off, however.

“Napping should not be frowned upon at the office or make you feel guilty at home,” writes Dr. James B. Maas, a psychologist and sleep expert at Cornell. “It should have the status of daily exercise.”