Co‑Authoring a Student Research Paper with My Sugar Daddy as Industry Advisor

Much to the annoyance of my friends, family, and roommates, I am a fourth-year psych major. What that means is that I’m quick to diagnose, will never answer a question directly, and tend to loop every conversation back to neurotransmitters. It’s my passion, and I won’t apologize for it.

Learning about psychology hasn’t just made me an insufferable person to be around. It’s also made me a good sugar baby. I love learning about people, and I’m a great listener. At the moment, I have two platonic sugar daddies who just call me every once in a while to vent. And I have another, Douglas, with whom I have a more traditional SD/SB set-up. We have in-person dates and try to work in as many weekend getaways as my academic calendar will allow. It’s not a forever thing, I know that. But, luckily, I have the tools to navigate this kind of relationship with my mental wellness totally intact.

So, now that we’ve had our initial intake consultation, let’s get to the main point of my story. Basically, even though I love my psych classes, I’m a bit of a procrastinator. And I had left my senior thesis until the last minute. I had a basic understanding of what I wanted to research, but as my advisor repeatedly warned me, the kind of data I wanted to gather would take months of work. And I had to get started like…yesterday.

What I wanted to research was something having to do with workplace culture and its impact on productivity. Researchers reading this will be like, “Okay, kiddo. What do you mean by workplace culture, and what do you mean by productivity?” I hadn’t clearly defined these two things, so my research paper was already off to a rocky start.

I don’t usually talk about myself and my classes to my sugar daddies, but one night, I was just really crashing out over it while out at dinner with Douglas. I had just days to submit a formal proposal for approval by my advisor.

Douglas works as a project manager at a tech security firm, so he knows a lot about workplace culture and productivity. But when I tried telling him my idea for research, he just looked at me with a furrowed brow.

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “It sounds interesting. But what exactly are you looking for? The way that coworkers get along? How much natural light is in the building? Paid vacation packages? The flexibility to work from home? There’s about a million different directions you can go here.”

He was right. And I was embarrassed not to have an answer for him. My face went red.

“That’s the part that I’m not sure about,” I told him, “There’s some existing research that really interests me about how changes to the work environment can improve productivity. I think the paper I read said something about having more plants in the office.”

Douglas nodded approvingly, and my heart rate dropped to a normal rhythm again. Now he was tapping his fingers on the table, and I could see the gears turning in his head.

“It’s an easy enough experiment to set up. You simply divide the team up into ‘plant group’ and ‘no plant group.’ Then you’ll need to think up the metrics for measuring productivity…”

“Okay, but I would be interested in trying something new, actually. Like, I don’t know, a fifteen-minute yoga session to start the day, or something like that.”

Douglas and I went back and forth like that for the next hour. And by the time the dessert course came to the table, I had a fully-formed idea of what my proposal should look like.

Even though we had been planning to go to another bar afterwards for a drink, I asked Douglas if he would be super disappointed if I went home and wrote up my draft proposal. To my surprise, Douglas seemed about as excited as I was about this whole thing.

“Go, go! And send me the draft as soon as you’re finished.”

I kissed him on the cheek before rushing out.

“But hey,” he said, giving me a flirty squeeze of the hand. “Next time, you’re not ditching me before drinks.”

My advisor gave me really positive feedback on the proposal, but then she asked something that I hadn’t considered yet (preoccupied as I had been on just getting the proposal done): “Where exactly do you plan on conducting your research?”

Shoot. Hadn’t thought of that.

I spent the rest of the afternoon cold emailing businesses in the area to see if any of them would be interested in working with me. While I was waiting for responses and doing some reading for another class, I got a text from Douglas asking how my advisor meeting went.

I told him that it was good, but now there was another hurdle: finding the right experiment location.

“Oh…,” he texted. “I kind of thought it was obvious that we would be doing it at my office? I already notified my boss.”

I could have kissed him through the phone.

One thing I love about Douglas is that he is so much more structured than I am. I’m the kind of person who will come in with general ideas and lots of positive energy. And he’s the one to be like, “Okay, but what do we actually need to do to make this happen?”

So, over the next couple of weeks, we worked together to draft the research plan and put together consent forms and all kinds of stuff. It was honestly so much work, and I was stressed about whether Douglas was going to get annoyed or tired of the project before it was over. But, no. Douglas was even nerdier about all of this than I was (and it’s hard to surpass my level of nerdiness!)

The actual week that the study ran was exhilarating and fun. It brought me back to, like, fifth-grade science projects. I had my yoga instructor friend come in to lead the yoga sessions, and Douglas and I stayed up late processing the data from both the tracking software we were using to measure productivity and the surveys submitted by participants.

Throughout the process, my advisor was surprised to hear how hands-on my sugar daddy was throughout the process. She didn’t know, of course, that Douglas was my sugar daddy. She thought he was just someone I knew through a family friend.

“He must be a really good friend,” she said off-handedly. “He’s putting in a lot of legwork. You should definitely give him a gift card or a thank-you card when this is all over.”

My face turned red, and I ducked out before she could see.

When the experiment phase was over, the hardest part for me was just beginning: the writing. I’ve never been a very strong writer, and this was when my procrastination really threatened to tank my academic career.

But as always, Douglas was encouraging.

Eventually, he said to me, “You know, this all started with me wanting to help you because you’re so cute when you talk about your work. But now, I’m invested. And so is my boss. The findings could actually change the way we schedule the workday. My boss has already started looking into meditation specialists and personal trainers who can come in and keep giving sessions. Depending on what the results say, obviously. But no matter what, he likes that I brought this kind of idea to him. He said he’ll be looking to me for more in the future.”

Douglas helped me analyze the data and was constantly available to read drafts and offer his notes. It looked like the yoga sessions did have a small but significant positive impact on the productivity of his coworkers.

Granted, there were a ton of caveats: the experiment runtime was extremely short, and our sample size was small. A few employees stepped out of the room to use the bathroom during the yoga sessions, and one employee showed up late three days in a row, missing the sessions entirely.

But still, the results supported my hypothesis, and they were clear enough that writing the paper was easy. At the end of the day, it was enough for me to graduate with my advisor’s approval, and that was the most important thing.

When I got the final feedback back from my advisor and the dean of the psychology department, I printed everything out and placed it in a box with wrapping paper and a ribbon. Inside was a note on the cover page of the paper that said,

“To Douglas, without you, none of this would be possible. I’ll be sure to remember you when I’m a world-renowned psychologist and best-selling author. And I hope you’ll remember me when you create your own business and become a billionaire.”

That night, Douglas and I went out to dinner again. And this time, I didn’t skip out before drinks.