An aroma drifts from a corner of the room. It’s a crossbreed of dirt, feet, sweat, Axe and Febreze.

In the corner lies a knee-high pile of shirts, jeans, boxers and socks tinted with brown from days of wear. The pile, which is spilling out of a basket, is taking over the room, drowning the feet that cross its path.

The piles grows with each new reason: sweaty heat waves, impromptu football games, rainy days with sticky mud or accidental slips of hot sauce or ketchup.

With work schedules and days full of classes, students push laundry farther and farther down the to-do list, sandwiched between tests and lab work. “Sometimes I’ve worn jeans in 100-degree weather because I didn’t have any clean shorts, and I didn’t feel like washing them,” Jacob Hefner, a senior in mechanical engineering, said. But Hefner is not the only student to take shortcuts around doing laundry. “If I haven’t been sweating, sometimes I’ll wear the same pair of boxers for three days straight,” Jonathan Mills, a senior in communication, said.

Mills said he’s done laundry only a handful of times on campus for the entirety of his college career, but usually his girlfriend or his mom cleaned his clothes.

Having other people do his laundry is the case most of the time for Mills, but he said taking trips home becomes more burdensome than choosing between permanent press and whites only.

Dealing with the pile of laundry that seems to stare him down wears on him, but Warren Immel, a senior in electrical engineering, said he will move his laundry basket into the laundry room just to feel like he has fewer dirty clothes, even though he has a laundry room in his apartment.

Immel said he also uses the method of cutting down physical activity to prevent his clothes from becoming as dirty.

While Immel tries to prevent smells, Benjamin Wingler, a senior in electrical engineering, just covers them up.

“I just spray everything with Febreze,” Wingler said.

Students like Jacob Parrish, a senior in computer science, pick through their dirty clothes when they’ve run out of clean ones. “I would just wear my cleanest dirty pair of underwear,” Parrish said.

According to Shaunak Joshi, a senior in electrical and computer engineering, alternatives are necessary at times, one of his roommates did not learn how to do laundry until he was a junior.

Rather than wearing dirty clothes, Joshi said his roommate would buy new clothes on sale.

But others just go without.

“Sometimes I go commando when I wear skirts because it’s more comfortable during warm weather,” Anna Patton, a sophomore in psychology, said. “It saves on laundry, but that’s not why I do it.”

Not all students alter their daily activities or spritz their closets with Febreze.

Amit Lakhani said he is used to doing laundry because his father uses a laundromat. For him, washing his clothes isn’t a big deal.

“I’ve been doing laundry all my life,” Lakhani said.

Kaustubh Pimputkar, a senior in electrical and computer engineering, also keeps up with his laundry.

“It’s like a compulsion,” Pimputkar said. “I have an irrational fear that I will run out of clothes unless I wash them every week.”

Christopher Kabool, a senior in business management, has a different reason for doing laundry every week: he has anosmia — the loss of smell.

“I do my laundry more often so I don’t have to worry about the smell that my clothes might give off,” Kabool said. “I do it about once a week, usually on Sundays during football.”

Some let it consume their rooms, while others tote their laundry bags to the washer every week. Either way, it’s a task every student has to face.