The reason you had to pull all nighters in Arch. School is because you'd be on a nice schedule to finish your project up early and your teacher would come around about 3-4 days before your deadline and have you change a buch of crap on it.
It's called prepping you for the real world when demanding clients change their minds and then want everything fixed yesterday, it's also why the architecture school at K-State is one of the best.
Yeah, the pay sucks, that's because people don't want to pay for good design because they watched a couple of shows on the DIY/HGTV and think "Hey I could design something like that".