step #4

Have a bake sale.
If you are in charge of putting on a student research forum and accidently spend all your allocated money toward a ski trip, you will need a quick and easy way to make some $.

Sure, holding a sale in which baked goods are provided–donated, really–by graduate students in the biomedical sciences might not be a particularly efficient way of raising emergency funds to cover your tracks, but who doesn't like a good brownie now then? Besides, all that extra time graduate students are known to have on their hands is probably being used for cooking a great deal more food than is required to sustain their respective lives anyway. Better yet, you should provide free food and beer for everyone attending the sale in question. For a nominal overhead, you can keep everyone happy and full, because that's when people will really buy food: when they are full. Sure, the whole thing is supposed to be a fund raiser, but it's also supposed to be a good time, and what sort of good time is everyone going to have unless we shell out a couple hundred dollars for the eating and the drinking? A not good time, that's the sort. And that's not really what you should be about anyway. If you just worry about keeping everyone happy, the necessary funds to pay for the massive, annual, campus-wide student research forum you're supposed to sponsor will fall into place. Of course it will. And when it does, people won't be nearly as upset about you spending all their student fees on a ski trip for you and 50 of your acquaintancefriends as you might think. In fact, they'll probably laugh. They'll laugh and slap you on the back, and you'll have a good chuckle about how close that was, but how funny it is that things always just seem to work out, and how they'll always just work out in the future as well.