Basic Human Needs and Grad School
Sometimes it takes the most extreme circumstances around us for us to stop taking things for granted. This is certainly true with things such as money, the people we love, even public transportation. But in grad school, you learn to appreciate even more fundamental things. Like sleep. And, as I have found out this week, food.
It all started earlier this week when I realized I was going to bed hungry. Hm? This was very strange, I thought, because usually I eat a big enough dinner at the right time that my appetite is subsided for the night and I can go to bed not worrying about it. And then, I would wake up that morning and be even more starved! During the day, too, at the strangest times, I would get hungry. What’s going on with me? I would ask myself. I barely excercise, minus the hour or so of walking I do, to and from bus stops and the office. I eat a lot when I do eat, and I eat breakfast, lunch AND dinner. So what the hell is the big deal? And then it struck me.
The average person gets 8 hours of sleep. They’d wake up at 7, have breakfast at 8. They’re hungry again by 1230/1. Then they have a nice dinner around 5/6 and go to sleep at 11. Not too bad, not too shabby at all. But.
The average grad student gets MUCH LESS sleep. In fact this past week I’ve averaged 5 hours. I wake up at 530, have breakfast at 630. By 1130/12 I have lunch. By 4/5 I have a sufficiently large dinner. Then I go to sleep around 12, 1. What’s wrong with this picture? The fact that there are an extra 3 hours in my schedule relative to the average person who gets 8 hours, I actually need to have a higher caloric intake than them.
This makes perfect biological sense. It’s a necessary means for survival. I never thought I’d see the day when I would actually be neglecting my bodily need for food, but then again I never thought I’d see the day when I was actually yelling at a microeconomics textbook. But shit happens in grad school and sometimes you just gotta throw down.
Lesson for the day: make sure, in grad school, when that snack attack hits you are ready. Oh, and tearing out entire chapters on endogenous preferences and mechanism design to light them on fire is NOT the same as “studying” them.
By the way, I put this under the categories “standard of living”, “things they should not have told us”, “training idiot savants”, and “uncategorized”.
