For most students, showering is a key part of their daily routine. Maybe it’s because they work out every single day. Maybe it’s because they need to shower as part of their wake-up process. Or maybe it’s because showering can serve as a great way to decompress at the end of a stressful day.
Whatever the motivation is, showering is a pretty typical part of most students’ routine. But when exactly does that part of the routine happen? For the students we talked to, showering time was never until well after lunch.
ELISA HUANG: Always at night every single day.
That’s Elisa Huang, a sophomore in the school of comms. Huang says showering at night is a necessity because of what happens throughout the day.
HUANG: You don’t want to be sleeping in all that dirt that you get throughout the day. You go outside, there’s dirt, there’s germs. Outside germs on you and then you go home, and if you don’t shower at night you’re going to bed with the outside germs. You’re marinating in the germs!
While that image is a little bit strong — and rather disgusting — it’s a pretty common sentiment on campus. Most people we talked to said it made more sense to shower at night to get the residue of the day off their bodies. It just doesn’t make sense to them to bring all the dirtiness of the day into a clean bed.
Not only is that a bad way to end the day, it’s a horrible way to start the next one. Sydney Chan, a freshman in the school of comms, says she usually showers late at night after she’s done studying. While it’s not the studying that provides the contamination of the day, that contamination can still be felt quite easily.
SYDNEY CHAN: I just feel like after all of my day’s activities, I’m really dirty and filthy from just sweating. And sometimes because I’m a dancer I roll around on the floor…I feel like I can’t go to sleep and roll around in bed feeling dirty all night and wake up feeling super gross.
And with the business of her day, Chan is basically forced to shower at night. During the day, it’s classes, dance and studying. That means that time in the dorm is limited basically to getting up in the morning and coming back to sleep at night. That explains why
CHAN: I usually take a shower at night whenever I get back from studying.
But what about those people who do have more time to get back to their dorm and wash off the day? Jack Sokol is a sophomore in McCormick who hardly ever showers in the evening. Much like those people who choose to shower at night, Sokol’s shower time is a matter of convenience.
JACK SOKOL: I normally have class that ends around 2 everyday, and then I will go to SPAC, workout, then shower afterwards.
That normally puts Sokol’s showering time somewhere in the…
SOKOL: Midafternoon…3:30-4 range.
But why at that point of the day? If classes end at 2 every day, surely Sokol has plenty of time in the evening to shower. But it’s not about when the showers are free. It’s about when the gym is. Sokol says that going to work out right at 2 is almost the perfect time for him, because when he gets to SPAC,
SOKOL: It’s almost always empty.
In summary, days at Northwestern can be long, busy, and very dirty. For most people, that results in a nighttime shower. For others, it’s a shower after their workout ends, whenever that may be. But the one thing that most people had in common is that they never showered right after they woke up.
As for me personally, I could never do a shower right after waking up. It would just give me a dirty feeling — in more ways than one.
For WNUR News, I’m Rachel Spears and Brendan Preisman.
