Have you ever tried to go vegan? I wouldn’t recommend it in this town. It’s surprisingly not that hard to do in Orlando. Many restaurants there are designed to be extremely vegan-friendly and there’s even a vegan hotdog cart in the heart of downtown to help you stick to you ways even when you’re out making other bad decisions late Friday night. We don’t have anything like that here. I’m not vegan, so I’m not all that upset about it, but I’m sure some people are, and it’s to those people that I would love to stress my philosophy that it is perfectly fine to break a few plates now and then, just don’t put yourself in a position where they’ll all come crashing down at once.

                “Oh no, you’ve got enough spinning plates already”, is what my friend told me their boss would say as an excuse to avoid giving them a fulfilling amount of responsibility at work. Nobody can see your plates or how wobbly they are, only you can. The issue I had for the longest time was figuring out which plates were worth spinning in the first place. Being vegan, for example, is a difficult plate to spin while being a graduate student in College Station. Plus, there are certain habits cultured by grad students in general that can make new grad students confused about which plates they should be spinning. For example, stories of grad students basically living in labs on the sustenance of microwaved noodle cups are commonplace. I can’t live like that, I don’t need to live like that to be a productive graduate student, and maybe you don’t either.
 
                I’ve tried it, of course, because it seems like a rite of passage, but it felt unnatural. I’ve heard people giving out advice say, “stop comparing yourself to people”, and I get where they’re going with that advice but it shouldn’t be followed blindly. Look around at your peers and try to compare and contrast their habits not only with your own but amongst them, too. You might get some good ideas for things to try, plates to pick up and try to spin. For me, I’ve found that cooking my own food from scratch for at least three-quarters of the meals in the week is a plate that I need to keep spinning. If I let that plate crash, all of my other plates start to get uncomfortably wobbly. It’s a difficult plate to keep spinning, a bit of planning and commitment is required every week, but at least I’m not trying to make all vegan meals. The ideal plate spinning technique incorporates both responsibilities and hobbies. You’re going to drop plates sometimes. Pay attention to what happens to your other plates when a particular one falls and soon you’ll be fit for a circus, but keep in mind you’re the only one who can see your plates, so do it for your own entertainment.

--- A memoir blog post from an anonymous graduate student in the College of Agriculture