Graduate students are notoriously known for trying to save money. They’re not very different from any other student in that respect, and around the holidays we’re already digging far enough into our pockets. There shouldn’t be a need to spend tens of dollars just on gift wrap, I thought this year. Last year’s gift wrap ended up in the garbage in minutes, just before this I managed to take a picture though:

This year, I decided I had spent enough already, and felt bad for buying paper that just ends up going into the trash within minutes. Exacerbated with the fact that I don’t have a Christmas tree set up, and therefore packages are not exactly decorating my house (and can therefore be justified for being wrapped in decadent paper and ribbon for the sake of turning my house into a “House & Home” photo shoot set), I’m going with a different strategy.

While preparing for the beginning of the new year, I also cleaned out some of my older magazines and journals to make space for new knowledge coming my way in 2010. Already in the recycle bin, I pulled back out the glossy journals and travel magazines and took them apart. I usually keep scientific journals with interesting key articles in my field, but considering you can get anything online I am careful about what journals I accumulate. Nevertheless, I always come back with a bag full of them from conferences, and end up realizing half of them are not actually related to my field of work at all. So, although interesting, I will not look through them more than once and they end up being recycled.

Here is my answer to holiday (or birthday gift) wrapping that I think looks really cool: it’s the Geek-Wrap! Not only good for the environment (using paper once more than it was supposed to be), it is good for your frugal-graduate-student-wallet, and looks pretty cool too.

My interpretation of gift wrap (or geek wrap):
re-use old journals to wrap gifts for the holidays or birthdays

Let’s just see if anyone but the researcher get’s the joke Merry Christmas!!