I used to work for R&DE as an FTE. Stanford campus is crazy expensive for mere mortals: parking permits are pricey, convenience foods (Tresidder) are movie theater prices. Treehouse and various bottom-of-med school bldgs have decent food fare that are slightly better / more reasonably-priced.
The dining halls had all-you-can-eat lunches for $6 when I attended a few years ago. The price is up to $7.40 or so now, I believe. Not a bad deal given the food's high quality and variety.
Still more expensive than cheap groceries, of course, but not too bad if you can manage eating just once a day.
When I was there way-back-when, the dining account dept hooked us up with unlimited all-you-care-to-eat (non-packaged) dining, likely because it was cheaper in terms of productivity (a-la Google) to keep staff on-campus.
Back at uni (somewhere else), on-campus we had a block-purchased meal system which was managed and outsourced to Sodexho Marriott (it was greasy, boring shit).
Stanford Dining dining halls were usually better-than-average because they had/have respectably awesome executive chefs (mostly from high-volume commercial culinary backgrounds) usually hemmed in by over-zealous cheapskates in management) but with more freedom to meal plan outside of generic/corporate standards, source ingredients from managed vendors and generally more competition (esp. when the Dining Clubs were operational but still with other on-campus options like Treehouse and other non-RDE Tresidder; ie peanut-free Ricker). IIRC there was prime rib and king crab sometimes, and there were french fries which were knock-offs of McDonald's. Btw, Subway and Peet's (Clark Center) are/were RDE-managed franchises.
From a grad student perspective, pretty easy, long as you live that lifestyle. You don't need a car. A bike gets you most places, and if you don't have one, the campus buses are pretty good and free. On campus housing is cheap relative to local prices and Stanford's graduate stipends are better than most other schools. We also mostly cooked ourselves, taking turns in a group, so that's pretty cheap too. If you have to eat out, the dining halls have some good options at a reasonable price. All in all, I could make ends meet and I generally had enough left over for the occasional dinner/drinks out, going skiing, life in general. I did have to dip into savings or borrow money for larger unexpected expenses from time to time though.
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http://treehousestanford.com/
https://transportation.stanford.edu/parking/purchase-a-parki...
Still more expensive than cheap groceries, of course, but not too bad if you can manage eating just once a day.
Back at uni (somewhere else), on-campus we had a block-purchased meal system which was managed and outsourced to Sodexho Marriott (it was greasy, boring shit).
Stanford Dining dining halls were usually better-than-average because they had/have respectably awesome executive chefs (mostly from high-volume commercial culinary backgrounds) usually hemmed in by over-zealous cheapskates in management) but with more freedom to meal plan outside of generic/corporate standards, source ingredients from managed vendors and generally more competition (esp. when the Dining Clubs were operational but still with other on-campus options like Treehouse and other non-RDE Tresidder; ie peanut-free Ricker). IIRC there was prime rib and king crab sometimes, and there were french fries which were knock-offs of McDonald's. Btw, Subway and Peet's (Clark Center) are/were RDE-managed franchises.
After her story?
Beats me...