The ‘Sleeping MIT Students’ Blog Is Exactly What It Sounds Like

Image via Sleeping MIT Students on Tumblr

This in-depth chart shows when students from MIT are typically asleep, at least according to a survey conducted by the school’s paper of record. But a new Tumblr is skipping the data and relying on actual physical evidence to really show when MIT students are nodding off and catching some shut eye. And it’s mostly during class.

A new blog called “Sleeping MIT Students” is exactly what it sounds like: people are encouraged to snap photos of their classmates dozing while sitting in lectures, working at the library, or even riding the T—anywhere they catch someone with their eyes closed, really.

There’s not much info on the motivation behind the blog, but judging by the amount of clearly-exhausted students publicly snoozing, it’s easy to guess there was a trend afoot on campus, and someone took note. If statistics released by the school in 2006 still hold weight, the average MIT student is only getting about six hours of downtime each night, so it’s no wonder they are napping during the day.

Already, according to the creators of the blog, there are 2,000 loyal followers tracking all the sleep-deprived student photos going up on the site, and more keep coming in each day. At one point, two separate people sent a picture of the same anonymous sleeper to the blog’s administrators after stumbling upon the culprit with their head down in a campus building. “Yes, this is the same person sleeping at the same place as the post before this one. Apparently two different people took a picture of the same person sleeping and sent it to me. This is crazy,” the creators said about the coincidence and apparent rising popularity of the humorous blog, which takes a tongue-in-cheek approach at depicting what MIT life is like.

Tumblr also took notice of the increase in popularity. Just last week the blogging platform sent a note over to the admins of “Sleeping MIT Students” to let them know they would be a featured trending page due to the spike in activity. “This is incredible. Thank you, guys! And as MIT students, we will surely keep on sleeping and taking pictures of others sleeping,” the admins posted in reply to the notice from Tumblr.

As the images continued to pour in—most are anonymous submissions—the blog administrators decided it was time to also create an accompanying Facebook page to help spread the word about the project. As of Wednesday afternoon it only had about 45 people following it, however. While the team is encouraging students to snap and send as many photos as possible to the site, they are also playing nice, and have offered to remove any sleepy photos that people don’t want lingering around on the Internet.

MIT has been getting creative with their efforts to highlight the student body. Last month, a separate group kicked off “Humans of MIT,” which was an off-shoot of the wildly popular “Humans of New York,” and the city’s own “Portraits of Boston.”

As for the “Sleeping MIT Students” blog, Boston reached out to the admins to find out more about the project, because, you know, this is very important news and we need to get to the bottom of it.