Off meal plan

This is a graph idea that came out of the inevitably frequent conversations with people on my hall and other 'off meal plan' upperclassmen about how ridiculously expensive the college meal plan is. I think it comes out to something like $9 a meal, but a number like that is not that easy to compare to the less well-defined manage-your-own-food-budget. I generally think of meal plan as 'a lot' more expensive than off meal plan but have no clear conception of what 'a lot' is. I decided it would be easier to visualise if I graphed it.

I was pretty surprised at how much 'a lot' really was. My initial idea was to stack things up on my 'off meal plan' bar until it equaled the meal plan bar but I pretty much ran out of 'large expense' things to stack, with over $200 to go.

The graph isn't meant to convey an expenditure switch because none of the other expenses actually 'came out' of meal plan money - Benthics $$ came out of a Brown travel grant and TA stipend, NEAS from the stipend and a research assistant job, dive gear came out of a summer research fellowship, etc. - it's just a visual comparison of magnitude.

Other (qualitative) benefits of not paying the college to make food for you:
1. flexibility
2. feeling like a real person
3. not being utterly lost and helpless when the dining halls close (spring break week, ha.)

Okay I am off to make lunch and work my butt off so I can spend the second half of next spring break freezing in Nahant water and looking for algae.