Do postgraduate students burn more calories than undergraduates? Should they eat more, live better and therefore receive a higher stipend?
During a meeting of a scholarship trust fund where I serve as a trustee, we were overhearing views when I half-jokingly raised the question of whether postgraduate students don’t have other undergraduates beaten in burning energy.
It turns out that science has approached the subject seriously, producing research that offers some interesting and thought-provoking perspectives.
The brain is hungry, but the question is: how hungry is it? Scientists seem to differ on how intense the hunger effect is. Some estimate a few hundred calories during intense thinking, while others find just a few dozen extra calories are burned. But regardless, mental effort does increase calorie burn, the difference is minimal or moderate. What is more striking is how much more calories students expend due to the pressure of cramming for final exams.
While the postgraduate student is more experienced and under unique burdens, it’s a fact that might introduce in the next scholarship stipend review.
While the average person consumes 2,000 calories of energy daily, as this presentation showed, up to 6,000 calories for the intense physical and mental concentration required in a chess game.
Company research and physical professions reveals how labor can demand many mental and physical calories. A construction labourer can consume more than 4,000 calories from the physical labour at a construction site. Office workers and students burn between 2,000 and 3,000 calories daily, a university lecturer who burns up to 2,800 calories daily uses mental energy while thinking and teaching but uses minimal physical energy. A professional cyclist, on the other hand, can burn up to 6,000 calories a day.
The significant point is that educational level alone does not determine energy demands; it’s one’s lifestyle and physical activity that count.
I would have preferred a clear answer to my temporary curiosity where intense thinking many hours a day, which often increases the budget – if it should raise consideration of whether graduate students truly require more for sustenance and housing simply because of their academic level.
So at the end, we had not decided they need more, but we agreed that committees can harmonise their rates set for graduate students or student loans.
If the living expenses happen more in their studies and are likely to live independently, may not have time for jobs, have increased reading assignments, writing and last year for research.
Nevertheless, for higher impact cost-of-living purposes, national student finance committees must prepare justification for the stipend claimed for graduate students.
The burden on education or brain shows burns but a much keener weight on how much food and family requires that we look for solutions beyond biology.
This approach should, hopefully, produce better academic outcomes.
