Like many college students, Nikisha Valdez knows the challenges of trying to get a good night's rest and going to class.

"Last year I actually slept through one of my finals," said Valdez, a junior in the College of Arts & Sciences.

According to the Better Sleep Council's stress and sleep survey, 65 percent of Americans say stress keeps them awake at night.

Students like Valdez often attribute a lack of sleep to their schedules.

Valdez said she gets an average of four hours of sleep each night, which she attributes to the combination of her course load and her job. She said she wishes she got eight to 10 hours of sleep a night, but with 15 credits and a part-time job, it is not possible with all the work college students have to take on.

"There's just so much homework (and) all this work the teachers give us," she said. "And it's worse when you have an 8 or 9 a.m. class."

Anna Gaczol, a freshman in the College of Communication, agrees.

Gaczol said she gets about six hours of sleep per night but wishes she got nine or 10.

She said homework and early classes were to blame for her lack of sleep.

"They don't work well together," she said.

Gaczol said she notices more students sleeping during class than she did in high school.

William Cullinan, an associate professor of biomedical sciences, offered similar insight regarding why some college students aren't getting enough sleep.

"I think students are involved in a lot of activities," he said. "Particularly at Marquette, you see a lot of students working, involvement in a lot of extracurricular activities and of course Marquette has been said to be one of the tougher universities."

Because sleep is an active process involving different stages, the only solution for obtaining an adequate amount of sleep is planning ahead in order to complete a full sleep cycle, he said. Therefore, napping between classes is not an effective way to replenish sleep, he said.

"There are at least four stages of sleep, and it's important for people to cycle through these stages throughout the night," he said. "If you don't put a block of time together, you can't cycle through these phases and won't get the mental alertness that comes with a full night's sleep."

According to the National Sleep Foundation's Web site the amount of sleep people get can affect their behavior as well as the quality of work they produce.

Sleep also affects memory, according to the Web site.

Recent studies show students would retain more information gained during the day by obtaining at least eight hours of sleep rather than pulling all-nighters to study.

While the solution may be obvious, it is not necessarily easy, Cullinan said.