As I sit in class each day and watch my classmates trickle in, coffee cups in hand, I’ll admit the first thing I notice is what they’re wearing that day. We’re a varied campus, and students usually have on a wide variety of clothing – there are the girls who dress to the nines, the boys who have a uniform of jeans and a polo and the inevitable individual who wears clothes that are difficult to describe but generally eccentric. The students who stand out to me the most, however, are the ones who come to class dressed entirely as though they didn’t dress at all. Clad in sweatpants, a baggy t-shirt and rubber flip flops or tennis shoes, these students look as though they really couldn’t care less whether they are in class at all. Here’s the thing about that: if I’m noticing their cavalier attitude, I’m willing to bet the professors and other students are too.

I’m a big proponent of treating every day like it was worth getting up for. I won’t lie and say I’ve never gone to class in something that’s more pajamas than clothing after a weekday night out — we’ve all done that — but I do wake up 9 days out of 10 and actually put on an outfit that is suitable for public appearances. College classes are more casual than they’ve ever been, but I think it’s easy for students to forget that professors are people worth impressing! They might be writing you recommendation letters for graduate school or even post-graduate careers, and it would certainly be nice if they had an image of a well-put-together student in their minds, rather than a sloppy looking kid who happened to score well on tests.

It’s a general consensus: Forbes magazine tells its readers to “dress as you want to be seen,” not just in the workplace but also in life. And yet so many university students only dress decently whenever they go out at night. Why not all day long? I understand the appeal of comfort, but nice looking clothes just aren’t that uncomfortable, and when I say nice, I also mean decent: jeans and a top at least look as though you spent a few minutes in front of your closet. I know a lot of people save their nice clothes for “special occasions” but consider this: can’t the occasion be that you’re alive and you woke up today, so you might as well look nice? Won’t your clothes go to waste if you never wear them?

With the recession having taken over many American’s shopping habits, a new concept stores and magazines are preaching is “cost per wear.” If you spend a considerable amount of money on a dress and only wear it three or four times, chances are you spend a pretty high amount of money for each time you wear it — for a $100 dress that gets worn on four holidays, you’ve spent $25 per wear. If you wear that dress on dinner dates, dressed down with flats for lunch with a friend or class, and to go shopping a few Saturdays, you lower the cost per wear by a lot, and really get more out of the dress. The concept of Sunday best is a thing of the past. There aren’t nearly as many rules regarding what you can wear where now, so wear what looks good.

Regardless of a lack of rules however, it is important for students to know that even before the working world, what you wear does reflect who you are to people. Mark Twain is often quoted as having said “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” While that seems obvious, many of us missed that point.

Appearance creates credibility.

If you don’t take yourself seriously, nobody else will either.