Spending Other People's Money

or, "thoughts I had after finding out that oversized color posters are $*&! expensive"

As a chemist (both undergrad and masters), older grad students and profs slowly convinced me that you _always_ spend the extra money to buy a reagent even if you think you can make it. This is a combination of "Your time is valuable" and "making stuff on an industrial scale usually means that they can get it more pure than you usually will on the benchtop" (with one or two exceptions where we knew we would have to repurify the chemical).

As a PhD student, my administrator has been working on me to spend more money when I go on trips. Taking taxis rather than public transit*, getting reimbursed for _everything_, etc. etc. Still, I prefer a per diem, because then I feel like I'm spending my money, not other people's money. As an economist, per diems seem more rational, too (well, people other than me might choose to go to more expensive restaurants just because their work is paying for it).

Anyway, I spent much of this morning walking around trying to save MIT money because I didn't want to spend $100 on a poster. Usually I just slap 9 pieces of paper on 9 pieces of posterboard, but since I'm doing a poster for MIT bigwigs, I thought it should look nicer than that. But see above: oversized color posters are expensive! But even after getting the cost down to $50 by making it smaller, using CopyTech rather than Kinko's, and doing the foam core mounting myself, I still feel bad about spending other people's money.

Do other people feel this way? I feel like much of the world _prefers_ spending other people's money...

*Note that I often take public transit anyway because I prefer getting a feel for the city I'm in. Certainly, when I go on vacation for myself I do that.

Lessons from a Poster Session

1) Rich people get fed really really good food. The paella was heavenly, as were various different small finger foods which I couldn't identify. But do you really need to serve your melon and pineapple in slices so thin you could read a book through them? (nice visual effect though)

2) Rich people also get hit with very effective brainwashing rays. After sitting through Hockfield's talk I had this impressively warm glow about MIT. I mean, I like MIT enough to have come here twice (or three times, if you count Day Camp), but on the other hand, 9 years as a student here leads to accumulating a few layers of cynicism for even the shiny happiest of us. And I was _really_ feeling good about MIT after the talk. I think my favorite point was that after Hockfield gloated about MIT's 9 Nobel prizes since 1990 (2 more than #2 Stanford, 6 more than our favorite school up the river), she said that the important bit was that 6 of the winners had been hired to MIT as junior faculty. Whereas most top schools get their best scientists by stealing them from other universities. And she said this in a way that led us to think that MIT was this nice, happy, nurturing place where interactions with colleagues helped everyone reach their best potential. And now that I read that, I realize that the brainwashing is wearing off, because that really isn't true... but I was _believing_ it at the time.

3) I'm fine at being nice to people, and babbling about my research. Which I guess is why I was picked to go to this thing. I'm not good at working people to get useful contacts for myself, sadly. Which, besides the tasty free food, and (more importantly) the fact that my advisor told me I was going, was why I wanted to be there. I guess the lack of this skill is why I'm not a Sloan student.