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.'