Was/is this the norm for just about everyone here when they were in college/university?
Yes and no. Every now and then I'd stay up late to finish a project. My first year I partied a fair bit, but even then I was till in bed by 1am. A lot of that was because I was all about getting in good shape back then (my uni had great fitness facilities). That said, I sensed that I was in the middle of bedtime trends in my first year: some jocks went to bed early and seemed like they were always sleeping, while film students didn't seem to ever go to bed the entire year. Apparently there was little correlation between bedtime habits and academic accomplishment when the results came in at year's end.
After my first year "life" happened, and it was either pull myself up by the bootstraps or drown. For that reason, I went hardcore into very conventional sleeping, eating, working patterns, etc. It didn't make me a lot of friends at the time, but for the liberties that were sacrificed then, I'm beginning just now to appreciate and enjoy the rewards of the forced labour back then. My advice: ideally, you should choose daily to make healthy living and working decisions, instead of those being just something you do when necessity dictates. You can either deal with adversity by digging yourself out of the hole, or deal with it by being prepared enough to avoid the holes in the first place. If you currently have the upper-hand on life, the choice is yours. If you currently don't, good luck to you, brother.
The opportunity for developing good sleeping and eating habits when starting college or university should be taken a lot more seriously than it is. There are a lot of factors that can distract you from what you'd otherwise realize is the best way to do things:
- the parental training wheels are finally off, so you're practicing real self-discipline for the first time ever;
- there are always unchaperoned girls around;
- you're at or close enough to the legal drinking age, and drugs are easy to score;
- you're living in close proximity with people who, by way of the academic filtering process, share much of the same interests as you do... even the non-scholastic interests;
- you're studying something that you were buzzed enough about already to make the effort to go to college or university to study;
- at around 19 years old, your body is at its most capable. You're stronger than you ever were, and more than it ever was and will be, it's most capable of bouncing back from physical, alcohol, caffeine, and drug abuse (sorry, mental abuse and STDs still seem to effect everybody about the same, although your immune system can hold off the appearance of symptoms for longer in the case of the latter).
Long story short, you're over-stimulated. That's why you can't, or choose not to, sleep. And you're an independent adult: your consciousness is yours to do with as you please, and the consequences of the decisions you make are 100% yours to enjoy or suffer. The parental safety-net is gone: no one is going to tell you you're wrong or right about the choices you make, as long as they're legal or you don't get caught.
The deception is perhaps that as you're growing, you're told, "When you're 18, you're an adult." Until that time, important decisions are made for you, because you don't have the capacity to make those for yourself. It's that incapacity that is the reason decisions are made for you - it isn't that when you turn 18, there are suddenly no more bad choices to make. The only difference when you turn 18 is that the choices, and the consequences, are yours to bear in their entirety. Just because you're 18 doesn't mean you're ready for it (for the most part it's an arbitrary number), but we throw you in the lion's den anyway. Good luck!