Imagine the following situation with me: your wisdom teeth are troubling you, so you visit a new dentist for the first time. The receptionist calls your name telling you it is your turn. As soon as you sit down, the dentist walks in wearing flip-flops, sweatpants, and his favorite football team’s jersey.

Okay it might not be that bad, he looks cool. You compliment him saying “nice jersey dude” and he thanks you then asks you about your favorite team. The only problem is that the two teams are rivals, and your team just defeated his. The dentist is still not over the game and he decides to take it all out on your teeth.

Let’s recap a little, how would someone prevent that situation from happening? Either that you do not compliment his jersey, or that he does not show up to his appointment wearing a football jersey because it simply is not the place for that. In fact it is kind of unprofessional of him.

Now imagine you walk in your physics class and you find your professor wearing his pajamas and a baseball hat. It sounds absurd right? It is because we always expect “the professor look” out of our professors. Then my question here is what is “the student look”?

When you walk in a classroom, you find all sorts of different looks: there is always someone in their favorite sports team jersey, someone in their sweatpants, someone in their flip-flops, and there are always nicely dressed people. In simpler terms, there are those who spent sometime in front of the mirror in the morning choosing carefully what they want to wear, and there are those who virtually rolled out of bed, brushed their teeth (hopefully), put on what they wore when they hung out with their buddies the night before and came to class.

I understand and respect that that someone’s choice of clothes is their personal choice, and I understand how comfortable it is to wear sweatpants. But here is why it is better to be the person who dresses nicely. First of all, it is important to separate a classroom from a living room. A classroom should be a professional place for knowledge and education. At the end of the day we are lucky to be receiving such high quality education and a nice dress code is a simple yet highly important way to show that we truly care and appreciate it. It is also disrespectful to the professors and to your peers. It does affect the psychology of the person when they go to a classroom and see people treat it like a living room.

Another reason is that people are incredibly nice here, and they will always compliment you when you are dressed nicely for class. Trust me, it will always make your day a thousand times better. Imagine you are walking by and someone tells you “nice shirt” or “looking great today”. Simple things like that will make you look forward to more of the same.

Sometimes classes get way too hard and we all have those days when we have a ridiculous amount of work to finish within little time. Dressing down might affect the student’s mood, and when a student is not feeling too great, chances are that they might not feel excited about a class, causing them to not want to engage properly, thus not understand the material fully. On the other hand, taking the extra step to put a little effort in digging deeper in your wardrobe will go a long way, as you would feel more excited about the class and ultimately engage better in class discussions.