Shifts that pass in the night

As closing time approached at the Aquatic and Fitness Center on a December night, Olu Adegboye (Col ’24) glanced over his shoulder at the students playing pickup basketball behind him.

The AFC closes at midnight, but Adegboye, a late-shift supervisor, gives players a few extra minutes to finish their games if needed.

“This is probably their way to unwind, to take a break from studying,” he says. “So we let them play it out.”

For Adegboye, a cognitive science major, working at the AFC is his way to unwind, by doing something “not so academically oriented.” He resumes studying after finishing his shift around 12:15 a.m. and usually stays up until 3.

“I’m a night owl,” he says. 

About 90 minutes after Adegboye’s head hits the pillow, Lucy Brown (Engr ’25) is sipping her morning coffee. She walks through the door of the AFC at 5:30, the opener to Adegboye’s closer, the early bird to his night owl.

“I’m very much a morning person,” she says.

At the AFC and other places around Grounds that employ students, there’s a shift for both types. One person’s unimaginably early or impossibly late is another’s perfect fit.

Abby Dyer (Col ’24) works late at both the AFC and the Charles L. Brown Science & Engineering Library. Her 10 p.m.-to-2 a.m. library shift is usually quiet, letting the environmental sciences major get a lot of schoolwork done.

“Occasionally you get people checking out books or returning books,” she says. “Mostly this time of year it’s a lot of people panicking because they have an exam the next day and need to print something out.”

At the end of her shift, she preps the library for the next day, a task that includes erasing the whiteboards that people use as study aids. She likes to read the boards before wiping them. It’s a chance to learn a little something outside her field of study, and it’s her favorite part of the job.

A shift at a rec center like the AFC is less of a paid study session, even in off-peak hours. Workers take head counts, clean, rerack weights and generally keep an eye on things.

“They want us circulating a lot, which is good, because a lot can happen when you’re exercising,” Brown says.

The biomedical engineering major finds that the early routine suits her. Her roommates think she’s crazy, she says, but she enjoys getting a jump on her day.

“It’ll be 9 o’clock and I’ve already worked a whole shift,” she says. “I’ll come home and one of my roommates is on the couch drinking coffee and the other two are still asleep.”

On a dark, frigid December morning, Brown came through the rear door of the AFC at 5:30 and made her way through the quiet back hallways to the front desk.

Aleshia Williams (Col ’25) was already there. The African American studies and media studies double major was grateful to have caught the morning’s first bus, saving her from having to walk across Grounds.

Bella Coulter (Educ ’24) arrived next. It was one of her last shifts. She had finished her coursework in kinesiology the previous day and is no longer eligible to work at the AFC while awaiting graduation in May.

Like Brown, she started working there in the summer and found that the routine suited her—but in some seasons better than others.

“During the summer it was nice because the sun rises at 5:30,” she says. “Not anymore.”