This is basically just a re-posting of what I wrote at the end of last semester, but now it’s actually relevant.
The meal prices that I’m quoting are based on what they told us at the end of last semester, when we all got our fancy wooden spoons. If they’ve changed, or are just plain wrong, please let me know.
I have updated the points spreadsheet for the spring semester. Surprisingly, I found that it is theoretically possible to eat 14 meals a week at Usdan and not run out of points. In fact, you’ll have a whopping $2.05 per week to spend on late night, cereal for breakfast at weshop, yummy drinks at pi cafe, and other essentials.
A disclaimer: I’ve made this rather complicated, but I’ve tried to also make it super user-friendly. Please, give me suggestions on how to improve it.
To do the magic 14-meals-at-usdan, you sign up for the 8-meals plan, pay for 7 dinners and 1 brunch a week with meals, and all the other lunches and one brunch with points. This will require a lot of telling the cashier how you want to pay for your meal, because otherwise you’ll spend your meals early in the week on lunch and end up paying for the more expensive dinners with points.
As far as the spreadsheet, there are quite a few options, not all of which are necessary to use. The only thing you really have to do is put in your starting number of points in the appropriate cell. As last semester, the starting point values for each meal plan are listed on the right.
If you want to get into some fancier calculations, you can tell the spreadsheet that you want to keep spending points at the same rate over spring break (the default is to assume that you don’t spend any), or you can tell it how many meals per week you want to buy with points, and it’ll tell you how much you can afford to spend on each meal. If it’s halfway through the semester and you want to figure out how to ration your remaining points, just change the date at the top of the spreadsheet.
At any rate, the only things you should edit are the cells that are outlined in black. Everything else will adjust itself automagically.