A real weight on your shoulders: How much does your backpack weigh?

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[vc_video link=”https://vimeo.com/162714382″]

BYU students carry backpacks filled with random items every day. It adds up.

The Daily Universe hosted a competition for the heaviest backpack, offering a $50 campus gift card to the student with the heaviest backpack. The average backpack weighed around 14 pounds. The contest winner, Jane Goodfellow, won by a hefty margin with a backpack that weighed 28 pounds.

Most students seemed surprised to be carrying that much weight on their shoulders. Emily Ford, a student from Saint George, Utah, predicted her backpack was around five to seven pounds. When she weighed it, she found it weighed about twice that much — 12.5 pounds.

“That’s insane,” Ford said. “I really didn’t think it was that heavy.”

Hammad Javed, a BYU student from Pakistan, was unconcerned with the weight of his backpack.

“It has all those fancy back support stuff, so I can put a lot of things in it,” Javed said. “I use it to do my groceries, and it’s really easy on my back. I don’t even feel the weight.”

Javed predicted it weighed about 20 pounds, but he overestimated — his was only 14.1 pounds. It turns out it wasn’t quite “worth the weight.”

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