Seminar refreshments

[Catria]

For some reason, I thought that, the higher-ranked the department (or school, if it correlates with undergraduate rankings more than with graduate rankings), the greater the ability of its graduate students to substitute meals with seminar refreshments. That is not to say that it was a factor in anyone's choice of applications, but attending departmental seminars is definitely part of a PhD experience.

 

But how easy/hard is it, really, to substitute meals with seminar refreshments at your department?

[dr. t]

If someone cannot find free lunch at Harvard at least three days a week, they don't know where to look.

[fuzzylogician]

If someone cannot find free lunch at Harvard at least three days a week, they don't know where to look.

 

Similarly at MIT. There are several lists dedicated entirely to free food. You could probably eat a meal a day there attending promotional/recruitment events. Lots of free food in Cambridge, MA.

[rising_star]

It depends. I find that I get bored with the seminar refreshments because they are the same thing over and over. Some are better than others though. So, while you could rely on them to substitute for meals, you could also very easily get bored of doing that.

[Eigen]

Our seminar refreshments are beer, chips & cookies- no way you can sub meals for them. 

 

That said, I probably have 2-8 meetings per month that I can easily use as meal replacements for several days. 

[Catria]

If someone cannot find free lunch at Harvard at least three days a week, they don't know where to look.

 

Can you do so within the same department? Or you have to get out of your department to do so?

[Vene]

I've actually found my seminars underwhelming. I attended seminars at a large Midwestern university as an undergrad and they regularly provided coffee and cookies for their seminars. Not really enough for a meal, but it was very welcome. But, now that I'm at a university in the Northeast the seminar series I'm required to attend doesn't serve anything. I've been to the seminars of a couple different departments (because the topic was relevant to my research area) and only once did I find one that offered food of any sort.

[ss2player]

Talks at my school generally provide at the very least coffee+cookies+fruit, but at some of the larger events there will be more substantial food you could eat for a meal. Plus different programs or departments will have events and journal clubs you can attend; my department usually has awesome Indian or Mexican food which I really enjoy.

 

I think us not having any undergrads makes this easier though; no scavengers in sweats and Uggs trying to jack our shit.

[TakeruK]

You can't use seminar refreshments as meal replacement in my department/program! It's just coffee, cheese/crackers, fruits and we have a budget of $15 for about 20-30 people. However, post (or pre-) seminar meals with the seminar speaker are a pretty good perk, but not something you can get every week!

 

Also, over in astronomy, they have a full wine and cheese spread every week at around dinner time. It's a nice incentive to get over there if a planetary science talk is happening! 

 

You can get several free meals per week if you know where to go though. Like Eigen, due to various lunchtime meetings (very few classes are scheduled at noon), I probably also get 8-10 free meals per month. There are also many more free meal opportunities that I pass on partly because the food is not always great and partly because I feel like the "free meals" aren't really free! It usually requires an hour of your life that you could spend doing something you're actually interested in. I also think I am a decent cook and it's pretty cheap for me to cook my own lunch and spend my lunch hour eating it with my friends instead of listening to a seminar I'm not really interested in.

[Catria]

It takes me 10 cookies to substitute a meal using seminar food...

[Vene]

It takes me 10 cookies to substitute a meal using seminar food...

So many empty calories.

[ion_exchanger]

Student presentations have pizza afterwards. Seminars with invited speakers have nothing provided, however you can have lunch at a fancy campus restaurant with the speaker if you sign up. When I worked at NIH, our seminars were in the morning, and some provided bagles with cream cheese or cookies and cakes with coffee. Yum.

[TakeruK]

Oh one thing you should keep in mind while you are visiting departments this Spring during recruitment/interview visits:

 

During these weeks, at most (but not all) programs, the budget for seminar snacks, or basically any kind of free food, is generally increased. Part of the reason is innocent--more people around, so more food needed. But it's partly to look good too. So, don't be surprised if you see less free food around when you start the program for real than when you were visiting

 

My program provides a pretty good weekly happy hour but we're always happy when prospective students visit I guess that's another thing to keep in mind when gauging how happy the current students look

[dr. t]

Can you do so within the same department? Or you have to get out of your department to do so?

 

I would be outside my department, but not outside places I would be expected to show up, if that makes sense?

[dr. t]

Our seminar refreshments are beer, chips & cookies- no way you can sub meals for them. 

 

Uh, false.

[reinhard]

Wow you people are lucky. Where I am from, we get I think 16 cookies, sometimes 8 because the cafe in our department couldn't sell them all. We get used coffee too.

[maelia8]

We generally get sandwiches or hummus plates, which make for a good lunch but can get tiring after a while. I usually manage to snag lunch or dinner at departmental working groups or meetings twice a week, and at least once more for a one-time event such as a talk or presentation. I also attend presentations in other interrelated departments every few weeks, and there are holiday and welcome parties with nicer food spreads every once and a while.

 

However, keep in mind that departmental events tend to surge at the beginning and end of a semester with a dearth in between. I lived on department food at the beginning of the semester, but had to supplement it more and more as the semester wore on and then was able to live off of it again during the wave of holiday parties and end-of-semester events. Some weeks you get a lot, some weeks you get none. I wouldn't depend on it as a year-round food source when calculating your expenses.

[ion_exchanger]

During recruitment week, the pizza is substituted with sandwiches and chips.

[Vene]

Uh, false.

Replace that you can't substitute meals with you shouldn't.

[TakeruK]

Clearly there is a difference in preferences when it comes to what counts as a meal

 

Catria is right though that the quality of free food does "seem" to correlate with "ranking" because higher ranked programs tend to have more money (which is how they get science done to achieve the high ranking), and more money means more opportunities for food. At my Canadian grad school, there is no food at all for seminars, not even cookies. The only time we get free meals were: 1) pizza at the first seminar of the year to welcome everyone back, 2) the once-a-year reception for all new students, 3) the once-a-year lunch with prospective grad students, and 4) the very occasional chance to have a meal with a visiting speaker (any individual student might go to 2-3 of these meals per year). 

 

Also, my preference is that I would rather cook my own food and pay the approximate $1.50-$2.00 per meal cost than do something like eat chips+beer for dinner, or 10 cookies for lunch Sometimes even when you get actual food, these free meals aren't very healthy and it makes me feel like crap the rest of the day. 

 

I would not want to depend on free meals to save money, because if, for some reason, the free food plan falls through (maybe you couldn't get out of the lab at that moment due to science) and you're stuck buying a lunch at $8-$10, then you've spent 4 to 5 times as much as if you had just cooked for yourself! One missed free meal can negate all the money you might have saved that week on free food.

[SymmetryOfImperfection]

Depends on which seminar. The seminar for my direction has cookies and coffee. At my old school we had sandwiches, fruit and cake. I thought big programs would have better stuff, nope.

[St Andrews Lynx]

It's usually cookies/biscuits & coffee at seminars in our Dept, then for public defences the student is expected to provide pizza/Dunkin Donuts & drinks. 

 

A friend of mine at an Ivy League uni for grad school (non-funded professional qualification) told me that of course the fancy Ivies/top 10 schools provide plenty of free food - they need to as justification for the outrageous tuition fees...