By: Gabrielle McLaren

We just finished midterm season, unless your prof decided that September 17 was halfway through the term. Right now, you’d rather be anywhere but in the library studying or in lecture listening. Money can’t buy you happiness, but it’s buying you sadness and draining all the youth out of you right now — so here are some alternatives.  

If you’re a domestic student taking four first- or second-year classes, none of them being at Beedie or anything wild like that, the SFU budget calculator adds fees for the SFSS, books, your dental plan, and whatever else. Which means that the estimated value of one term, before you pay rent, feed yourself, make bad choices, or drink your sorrows away, is $1,670.24. OK, math is garbage, but now it’s done. And now we know that:

• You can buy Wonderful Roasted and Salted Pistachios — which will cost you $9.47 for 400 g at Walmart. Instead of spending a semester at SFU, you could buy 70,548.68 g of pistachios.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    At PetSmart, a male russian dwarf hamster (the only hamster you really want) goes for $14.99. With one semester of your tuition, you can buy 111 hamsters (technically 111.4, but the good people of PetSmart don’t respond kindly when you ask for a portion of a hamster, so we’ll round it down).

• If Arizona Green Tea costs 99¢ a can (and it doesn’t when you’re getting ripped off), you would be able to buy yourself 1,687 cans of Arizona Green Tea. Since one can is 23.5 oz, you will be the proud owner of 39,644.5 oz of tea.

• Apple Earbuds are overrated at $35.00 a pair. Meaning that your tuition for one semester could get you 47 pairs. Or, you could use your tuition to buy 1.26 iPhone X’s — and get a single pair of Apple Earbuds with it “for free.”  
   
• If university has given you perma-pimples or imbedded worry lines and tear tracks all over your face, you might want to fix that. The price for a 100 vials of botox is $525, which means that you can buy yourself 318 vials of botox with your tuition dollars. Go to Thailand for better prices.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
  
  
• If your budget is quadruple digits, then you deserve Double Stuf Oreos. Double Stuf Oreos are $2.97 a pack at Walmart, which means that if you threw away your education, you could get your hands on 562 packs of Oreos. One pack of Double Stuf Oreos includes 30 cookies, which means that you would be buying 16,860 Oreos. Nothing has ever made me want to leave university more than that possibility.
  

• If you are an international student, you and three of your international friends pooling your tuition funds together could buy SFU.