Angela Cuccio Prioritizes School over Sleep

According to the CDC, teenagers aged 13 to 18 years should sleep eight to 10 hours per 24 hours; however, some students at FHN are not getting these required number of hours when they settle down for the night, including sophomore Angela Cuccio.

During the day, Cuccio’s schedule is filled with AP classes, honors classes and classes for her various clubs that she is in.

“I try to get to school everyday at 5:30 a.m. because then I can get to different teachers if I need help on homework, or for HOSA, or for other club stuff; I normally have a lot going on in the morning,” Cuccio said.

She participates in all honors core classes, including Cuccio’s most difficult class which is AP European History. These classes require a heavy amount of effort and dedication which isn’t easy for Cuccio because of the lack of sleep she is getting every night.

“We have things called ‘Euro Test Days’ where pretty much everyone who has AP Euro, stays up so late at night to study,” Cuccio said. “I usually get about five hours of sleep on those nights.”

Cuccio allows herself only half of the required hours of sleep per night. She focuses more on her homework and school activities rather than the amount of rest she should be getting. Her routine when she gets home is simply working on homework until she occasionally pauses for dinner at 5:30 p.m., and then returns to homework again. When she has completed what she needs to, she goes to bed on average about 11 p.m. She then wakes up about two hours before school starts, and begins the process again.

“It depends on what I’m working on, I’m usually like ‘sleep is whatever; I have coffee, I have caffeine’ and my morning classes aren’t so hard, so I just hope by my afternoon classes that I’m mostly awake by then,” Cuccio said.

Although being sleep deprived, Cuccio tries to exceed the expectations in each class by completing all her homework with maximum effort so she can make it to college in the future.

“I usually put sleep on the back burner because if I don’t get stuff done, then there’s usually consequences,” Cuccio said. “I have to get my GPA up because I have to make it to college somehow. ”