Hustle Mode On: This PURM Student Logged 6.75 Hours Last Week

Nina McLaughlin is no stranger to the grind. She’s a dynamo of industry. The busiest bee in the hive. A hustler and a real go-getter. Which is exactly why this past week McLaughlin went so hard at her PURM position.

“My friends and family all tell me, ‘Nina, stop you’re working yourself too hard,’” McLaughlin explained. “And to them I say, ‘You’re right.’ I’ve been working too much this summer. I’m logging so many more hours than I need to. Hell, if I got paid hourly, I bet I’d make way more than that $4,500 PURM stipend. My time is priceless.” 

McLaughlin's workplace has been entirely vacant for the past month after she and her coworkers discovered that their PI had in fact not gone on vacation but had instead fled the country to avoid her pre-major advising duties. Completely unsupervised, McLaughlin and her coworkers now work at home, by which they mean that they have an Excel spreadsheet open on their computer as they watch Netflix in another tab. 

But of course, this isn’t always the case. “Sometimes I’ll just pull up to the office so that I don’t feel unemployed,” confessed McLaughlin. “But whenever I walk through that office door I immediately feel exhausted, so naturally I need to leave and spend forty-five minutes picking out a Starbucks order. And then by the time I come back, the coffee makes me feel energized enough to go on a lunch break and take two hours to decide where I wanna get food. And then after that I need to take about another hour to find a good Spotify playlist to jam out to. And then maybe I’ll fill out, like, two lines of the Excel spreadsheet and call it a day. It’s a lot of work, but somehow I always find a way to manage.” 

Reports of McLaughlin’s legendary work ethic have reached the ears of top faculty at the Wharton School, who have asked her to host seminars on productivity in the fall. When reached for comment on this development, McLaughlin replied, “It’s not easy working as hard as I do, but at least it’s good, honest work.”