<p>Hey there lucky fellowship winning graduate students. How do you go about managing your respective supply and travel funds? I think that the funds disappear at the end of the year and so you need to use them up or lose them. Do you give yourself a monthly allowance, plan expenses for various times throughout the year, use them as you go or blow it all on a nice toy on the last day of the fiscal year? Any supply budget strategies would be appreciated.</p>
<p>Also, have any of you had experience with a situation where you have a modest amount of money towards travel. An amount that will pay for conference fees and a portion of airfare but nothing else? What have you done when faced with the difference in expense between your allocation and the cost of a trip? What set up do you have with your PI in terms of paying for meals? transportation? miscellaneous expenses?</p>
<p>I get $1300 from my fellowship annually for supplies, which of course far outstrips my actual supply budget. I was thinking of applying the whole amount to one of my big money drains, like FACS or mice.</p>
<p>My PI pays the difference between our travel stipends and the actual costs of travel. No restrictions on how much we can eat or anything, although we’re expected to find reasonable lodging and airfare. :)</p>
<p>My fellowship this year doesn’t have any travel funds (surprisingly enough, the NSF only has international travel funds for like field research - not a travel fund for conferences!) but the training grant I was on before now had a travel fund. It was quite large, something around $1200 for each student, so I didn’t really have a problem budgeting but I tried to go to one conference in the fall and one in the spring. We didn’t have a difference in allocation because if you can’t get through a trip in less than around $600, there’s something wrong with your grad student poor skills, lol. Airfare and lodging always cost the most out of my expenses, but a lot of times me and another grad student would share a hotel room (at one point I shared a room with three others, lol) to cut costs before our travel stipend was raised, and I ate like I ate at home - maybe breakfast at McDonald’s or Starbucks or in the hotel; lunch at a nice sandwich shop or some cheap restaurant, and dinner would be the big expense but not ridiculous - no lobster tails or anything.</p>
<p>I see, maybe my travel budget isn’t quite as small as I thought it was. My only experience in traveling for a conference was to a conference in Europe where the hotel fees alone were more than I have budgeted for travel.</p>