Dark before dinnertime, but bright before breakfast

It wasn't quite Christmas in October, but Saturday Oct. 23, with its "extra hour" thanks to Daylight Saving Time (DST), was nonetheless a gift to stressed and midterm-embroiled college students.

"I was really happy about the extra hour," first-year graduate student Heather Knopsnyder said. Fellow graduate student Meg Sheldon concurred: "If you're a student, it's great -- you get an extra hour of sleep, and it's usually on a midterm weekend."

Though grateful for the extra hour of sleep (or partying) it affords them every October, many Tufts students are unaware of the origins of and reasons for DST. Or, for that matter, the fact that the correct name for the time is Daylight Saving Time -- no "s."

"I've never had any explanation," Sheldon said. "It seems to be a rather odd ritual, but harmless."

Other students are confused about the reasoning behind DST. "I always wondered how [DST] scientifically made sense," said freshman Robyn Yano, a native of Hawaii, which does not observe DST. "According to my new mainland friends, 'some guy just realized we needed an extra hour of sleep.'"

"My [friends] informed me... that DST had something to do with the amount of light in a day, although I am still confused about the whole thing," fellow Hawaiian and freshman Sara Tateishi said.

"I don't know," freshman Lianna Shapiro said. "Maybe we do it to get more hours of sunlight?" Senior Brandon Kitchel offered a similar guess: "Aren't they trying to give us more daylight time?"

All of these students -- except, perhaps, Yano's 'mainland friends' -- are partially correct. DST, which begins at 2 a.m. on the first Sunday of April and ends at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday of October, serves a variety of purposes. Because it puts hours of daylight in sync with the hours when people are out and about, it saves energy: about one percent per day. It also prevents traffic injuries by increasing the overlap between prime driving hours and daylight ones. At one point, the U.S. Department of Transportation even asserted that DST reduced crime -- which occurs more often in darkness than in sunlight -- though those findings have been disputed.

In addition to the United States, approximately 70 countries -- mostly European -- employ DST. To students like Yano and Tateishi, who come from areas in the world which do not employ DST -- including Hawaii and regions of Indiana and Arizona -- DST is both beneficial and detrimental.

Sophomore Sophia Frankenberg, who grew up in the Dominican Republic, is "not a fan" of DST.

"[The Dominican Republic] tried that -- it was such a disaster," Frankenberg said. "It lasted about a month, and it wasn't really getting darker later -- it's the Caribbean; the weather doesn't change! And then it was another disaster changing it back."

Other students from areas without DST are more positive. "DST for Hawaii students is a great thing because it reduces the time difference... meaning that I don't have to wait as long to call and wake up my boyfriend at home," Yano said. "Little things like that make a huge difference."

"It does make it easier to call home," Tateishi agreed. "Now, instead of it being six hours behind us, it is only five."

Living in areas of the continental US that do not employ DST, however, can be difficult.

"When I was a graduate student living in Indiana, the state officially did not recognize Daylight Saving Time, and so the county and city clocks remained on standard time," Physics Professor George Mumford said. "However, most of the people operated on so-called 'fast time,' [so] if you were invited to a party you had to be certain what the hostess meant by 7 p.m. Things can get quite confusing."

Knopsnyder also "had friends from Indiana who would visit and be on a different time schedule -- weird."

Associate Professor of Physics Bill Waller finds DST to be more than "weird:" he describes it as an "abomination."

"It's another bastardization of solar-based timekeeping," Waller said. "If it ever comes up in my class, I usually rant and rave over how unastronomical it is."

In astronomy, local noon is when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky. In Standard Time, noon comes very close -- "maybe off by a few minutes" -- to approximating local noon. During DST, however, local noon does not occur until one p.m., which can complicate things for those -- like Waller -- who tell time by looking at the sun's position in the sky.

"I lived in Arizona and we didn't have [DST]," Waller said. "It was fine by me."

Few students are as passionate as Waller in their DST-related convictions. Most, in fact, view DST as a mixed blessing.

"The day it changes is nice because it goes on forever, but the days after it suck," Frankenberg said.

Like Frankenberg, junior Alexei Wagner "[likes] the extra hour of sleep, but hates how it gets dark so early." Wagner does see the practical merits of DST, however: "I used to have a paper route, and [before the clocks were changed in fall] it was very dark in the morning," he said.

Sophomore Shail Ghaey recounted a similar experience: before the clocks were set back an hour during her high school years, "the street lights would still be on while [she] was at the bus stop."

"[DST] is a great concept: plenty of people are depressed because of a lack of sunlight," Kitchel said.

Ironically, graduate student Dana LeWinter dislikes DST for the same reason Kitchel likes it: its implications regarding sunlight.

"Especially as a college student, so much happens at night," LeWinter said. "And when it gets dark earlier, you just want to go to bed. It makes the winter dark and gross and depressing."