What is in a degree?

A collegiate pile of paper

I saved all the papers used for tests, homework, reviews, etc. for my bachelor's degree in Physics. I wanted to know how paper I had used. You see it all right there. This doesn't include scratch paper. That would have been at least another 25% more paper. Maybe significantly more.

How much of a tree did this take?

The stack of paper was 33.5 inches high. Each sheet is 0.005 inch thick. Therefore there are 6700 sheets in the stack.

I looked up that a "typical" tree yields 8333 pages of letter paper*. That means 8/10 of a tree was consumed for my undergraduate education.

There you go:

8/10 of a tree.

*Read, for instance, here.

Written on 6/8/2013
Updated 10/9/2013
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