Off meal plan (junior year roundup)

Out of 3 months' worth of posts on this blog, the most viewed post (I love the blogger stats feature!!) has been this one on the difference between Brown's meal plan and my being off meal plan. I fond that really interesting, because I thought that some of the other graphs were more interesting (at least, I had more fun making them). But I guess $$$ issues are always going to be taken seriously.

About a week ago meal plan ended - i.e. dining halls closed and everyone was left to fend for themselves. So now I had exact numbers to compare for meal plans vs. feeding myself for an equivalent amount of time. And then I waited around for a week waiting for research plans to be approved, etc - giving me time to graph them. I think this graph is a bit of an improvement over the last because it shows actual values, and puts the numbers in terms of things that are a bit more tangible, especially to students. Also, it has many colours! that I think (and hope) complement the numbers rather than distract.

Some of these things are probably more relevant to me (I bought my ticket to Quito, Ecuador a few weeks ago, and the rent/average grocery expenditure numbers are mine) but I think

Also, this doesn't even touch on what happens when you compare costs of living and focus just on basic needs...I pay $38 a month to feed and educate a little boy in Indonesia, and the $2174 would support him for 57.2 months = almost 5 years. He would be 12 years old before that money ran out.

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.