SPOILER: If you don’t want to read this post, there is an excel document that will calculate how many meal points you have used versus how many you should have used. Click the link below to use it.

Meal Plan Calc-2nwj8zh

Have you ever wondered whether you have enough meal points to buy an overpriced box of cereal at a campus store (Side Note: If you want to see how overpriced the box of cereal is, check out my second blog post (It’s about two times as much as downtown)), while having enough meal points to eat at the end of the year? Well, its an issue that I regularly face. On Penn State’s ELiving site there is a calculator, but I found it most unhelpful, so I made my own.

A few things to mention before I describe it. Most importantly, if you realize that you will have a lot of meal points left over, you can still downgrade your plan until the last day of classes. This is important because any meal points in your account of the end of the school year will lose all value. The calculator assumed that you started spending meal points on the first day of this semester and will run out on the last day of finals. Finally, today’s date will automatically update so don’t worry about that.

Anyway, it should be pretty self explanatory, but I will list the steps to use it. First, you need to be on a computer that has Excel, but most computers have it. Second, click the link above to download the document. Click enable editing to edit the document. Select what meal plan level you chose in the beginning of the year (this helps calculate what pace you should be on). Next, if you know how many meal points rolled over from the fall, you can put this in. If you don’t know, it’s not a big deal and you can leave this blank. Then fill in how many meal plan dollars you have left. You can find this number on the register after you checkout or it’s on the ELiving website. Once you put those two numbers in, you will get a few numbers. You will get the “Correct Pace” which represents how many meal points you would have left if you spent exactly the right amount each day. You will get the amount over or under this pace and finally you will get how many meal points per day you should spend to reach $0.00 by the last day of finals. Hope this helps.

P.S. If you find out that you have extra money on your account, you can buy me food. Unfortunately, I am going through meal points too fast this semester.

It’s that time of the year where statistics about how the U.S. workforce is less productive during the first two days of the NCAA tournament than Christmas morning are spread rapidly. Of course, many other statistics come out, some of which actually relate to the basketball teams playing the games.

Full disclaimer: I have made enough brackets in my life to know one statistic for sure. No matter how I pick my bracket, there is a 100 percent chance that I lose to my mom who I am convinced picks teams based on their mascots.

Moving on to the statistics I used to make my bracket. I used FiveThirtyEight’s bracket forecasts ESPN’s average predictions to make my bracket. Links to both are below.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2018-march-madness-predictions/?ex_cid=rrpromo

http://games.espn.com/tournament-challenge-bracket/2018/en/whopickedwhom

Generally, when I make my bracket, my main strategy is to find teams that have the highest chance of winning (based on FiveThirtyEight predictions), that the least amount of people are picking (based on ESPN’s lists of who people are picking). Meaning, I try to pick the good teams that nobody else is picking. To explain why I believe this is a good idea, consider this example:

To win any kind of bracket group that is more than 4-5 people, you generally have to get the national champion right (barring extremely strange cases where a huge underdog ends up winning the whole tournament). Lets assume you have a perfect set of projections that has Villanova with a 55% chance of winning. You should obviously take them because they have the highest chance of winning, right? Well, in my opinion, it depends how many other people picked them. If we assume 90% of people in the group picked them, then even if the 55% comes to fruition, 90% of people are still in contention to win the group. As you can see, my strategy is meant to win the group or probably lose to everybody, based on its designed deviance from the average bracket.

Generally something that struck me when comparing FiveThirtyEight odds for each game compared to who people were predicting to win the game was how close to the actual forecast the general breakdown of people are. However, I will list some of the larger deviations from the FiveThirtyEight forecasts for National Champion.

Most Overrated teams: % chance of winning championship (% of people who predict them to win)

Virginia 13.740 (19.7)

Michigan State 6.84 (8.4)

UNC 5.313 (6.9)

Most Underrated teams:

Cincinnati 6.672(2.4)

Purdue 5.496 (3.2)

Villanova 17.962 (16.1)

Generally you can see that perennial powerhouses are slightly overrated while lesser know teams like Cincinnati and Purdue are generally underrated. Additionally, people may have shied away from Villanova due to their propensity to lose early in the past tournaments or not wanting to take the top seed. One final comment is that people generally chose to underestimate how likely top teams are to make it to the sweet sixteen and then overestimate how likely teams are to make it to the final four. This may have to do with people knocking out top teams early or keeping them in until the finals.

Best of Luck!