Study: Many NU Students Back to Being Horrible People They Were before DM

EVANSTON, Il – Having just concluded its thirtieth and final hour, Northwestern University’s Dance Marathon left thousands of participating students elated, overcome with emotion, and instilled with the motivation and drive to be better students, better friends, and overall better people to and for the campus culture around them.

Now, a recently conducted study reports that all such feelings have completely vanished from the above-mentioned students, leaving them in a mental state virtually identical to that of any given participant pre-DM.

“It’s quite the phenomenon,” said Dr. Waldo Hurphburger, a professor of Sociology at Northwestern and the chief researcher of the above study.  “In a single thirty-hour period, a morally repugnant, despicably selfish student can become a beacon of charitable kindness and generosity; then, in as little as sixty hours later, lose all such kindness and go back to being, in layman’s terms, a total fucking tool.”

Hurphburger’s study found that the average Northwestern student, upon leaving DM with a sense of purpose and the “one-ness” of the Northwestern community, abandoned such benevolent emotions within an average of 98 hours after the event.  The study measured such emotions by tabulating the time each sampled student spent on “good” actions – such as volunteering at a soup kitchen, visiting the elderly, observing the pieces at the Art Institute of Chicago, picking flowers, having a meaningful conversation with a friend in need, etc. – and comparing it to the time that same student spent on “bad” actions, or actions that contribute nothing to society.  Examples of such actions included: watching Netflix, complaining about the finals the student has to take at one of the greatest schools in the world, binge drinking, snapchatting pictures of grass, and taking a Buzzfeed quiz entitled “Which House of Cards Character Are You?”

The study found that nearly 75% of all students had abandoned all “good” actions and replaced them with “bad” actions at the 98-hour mark.  And while some participants have in fact changed their lives for the better, currently, 93% of sampled students have taken to practicing completely bad actions – the same actions that they engaged in pre-DM.

“One would think that at least some charitable emotions would have been retained in a larger sample of the subjects,” Hurphburger continued, “but any sense of the importance of a good action that Dance Marathon may have initially implanted in the subjects’ minds was lost remarkably quickly.  It’s as if many of the subjects didn’t actually care about being good people in the first place; and instead participated in such an event for purely selfish reasons; to pose for pictures, to engage in a celebrated social act, and, most importantly, to give themselves a rapidly vanishing and purely surface-level morphine-rush positive energy, to mask and even atone for the unproductive lives that they lead 95% of the time.

“But hey, what do I know, I’m just some out-of-touch old guy.”