I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: learning outside of the lecture hall box is good for you. It opens you up and forces you to adjust your thinking about the world: it’s not all black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, fair. And it’s always eye-opening for a college-age whipper-snapper to realize that their little slice of reality is absolutely not everyone else’s. Plus, a semester abroad is a superb excuse for your parents to support travel and road trips.

I’ve done this twice, and I can whole-heartedly recommend a term “studying abroad.” This sometimes doesn’t even have to involve leaving the U.S. I stayed in the States for the road trip I took to the Deep South (Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana). I was a senior at Evergreen College, and designed my own curriculum for the quarter. So, you know, it clearly had to include a road trip to the opposite of my native California (and if the South isn’t the opposite of California, I don’t know what is) as well as photography, reading Southern literature, and writing about it all. And back when I was a sophomore at Cal State Fresno, I went on the South Pacific Semester and spent 4 months in New Zealand and Australia with 3 professors and 22 other students. It was a big New Zealand road trip with some Great Barrier Reef thrown in for good measure. A geology lecture is better when you’re standing on a volcano and biology is just a lot damn shinier when you’re snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef.

The Christian Science Monitor had an article about Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington having a Semester in the West that sounds incredible. Can you imagine a 100-day road trip through the American West for credit? Sometimes I’m cranky that I’m done with school (for the time being).

“For their three-month odyssey, the students earn a full semester of credits: four each in politics, environmental studies, biology, and writing & rhetoric. They write several papers during the trip, and one final piece - a ‘capstone epiphany’ - is delivered with slides to a campus-wide audience.

More important than what they learned about the American West, however, may be what they learned about themselves. By being thrust into some of the most contentious cultural and environmental issues this side of the Mississippi, the students ended up challenging - even overturning - some of their most cherished notions about the politics of the region.”

Posted by Alexa Harrington
College | School | Life

A few weeks ago, we pointed you to the New York Times article about rising Asian populations on campuses around the country. At UC Berkeley, Asians make up a whopping 41% of the undergraduate population.

Now, the Times reports that states with bans on affirmative action - namely California, Florida, Washington and now, Michigan, public universities are scrambling to find ways to attract and admit blacks and Hispanics.

It is not easy.

“At Wayne State University Law School in Detroit, a new admissions policy, without mentioning race, allows officials to consider factors like living on an Indian reservation or in mostly black Detroit, or overcoming discrimination or prejudice.

Others are using many different approaches, like working with mostly minority high schools, using minority students as recruiters, and offering summer prep programs for promising students from struggling high schools. Ohio State University, for example, has started a magnet high school with a focus on math and science, to help prepare potential applicants, and sends educators into poor and low-performing middle and elementary schools to encourage children, and their parents, to start planning for college.”

Opponents of affirmative action have been saying the same thing for decades - we need to prepare students when they are younger. They content that the answer is in creating better public schools that academically prepare every student for higher education.

“When we saw what was coming down the road, we started looking to other models, but no other model results in as much diversity,” said Mabel Freeman, assistant vice president at Ohio State. “The only long-term solution is to do better in the pipeline and make sure all kids get the best education possible, K-12.”

Posted by Sindya Bhanoo
Affirmative Action|Admissions |College

U.S. News and World Report released their list of the top 10 overrated careers for 2007. The list was drawn from more than 2,500 confidential counseling sessions with real-world professionals over 20 years. Often the work is more tedious than others would guess. Or people enter a career to make a difference only to encounter frustrating roadblocks at every turn.

Top Overrated Careers + Alternatives

1. Advertising Executive
Alternative - social marketing

2. Attorney
Alternative - mediation

3. Chef
Alternative - personal chef

4. Chiropractor
Alternative - physician assistant

5. Nonprofit Manager
Alternative - philanthropist

6. Police Officer
Alternative - homeland security official

7. Psychologist
Alternative - personal coach

8. Real Estate Agent
Alternative - sales for higher demand products

9. Small Business Owner
Alternative - #2 person in someone else’s small business

10. Teacher
Alternative - corporate trainer, adult ESL teacher, tutor

College | Work | Life

Brain Food
Eat breakfast - extra points for protein and fiber
Eggs
Increase intake of Omega-3 fatty acids
Eliminate processed and packaged foods — sugar, fats and chemicals

Sleep 8 to 9 Hours
According to researchers, sleep is necessary for the brain to process and consolidate knowledge and for memories to form. During sleep, researchers say, the hippocampus (where memory is stored) becomes highly active and moves knowledge from short-term memory to long-term memory. Scientists say sleep has the biggest effects on procedural learning, such as how a dancer would learn a new step, or how you would learn to fly an airplane or play a musical instrument.

Puzzles
AARP recommends brain teasers, crossword and sodoku puzzles to keep mentally alert.

Music
Frances Rauscher, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh showed how listening to Mozart improved mathematical and spatial reasoning.

Music has shown to consistently increase brain power is in younger children who receive music lessons. Rauscher found that preschool children given music lessons saw a 2- to 3-point boost in IQ scores over children given drama lessons or no extra lessons at all.

Learn Another Language
Studies show that people experience a general improvement in memory from studying a language. It has also been demonstrated that age-related decline in mental function can be halted by learning a new language.

College | Memory

Alternatives to Your College Bookstore

A recent BusinessWeek.com article about Chegg.com, a site that allows students to buy and sell used textbooks and other school-related goods and services, spurred discussion on Digg.com. End result, you can find vastly different prices on multiple textbook sites, it depends on what you’re looking for. Send us your tips, site suggestions and experiences with these sites and we’ll add to the list.

Textbook Crawler / Price Comparison Sites
Ranked in order of mentions:

Abebooks.com
Bigwords.com
AddALL.com
TextbookCompare.com
BookFinder.com

Textbook Buy / Sell / Trade / Classifieds Sites
CollegeMedium.com
Tradeyourtextbook.com
CampusTrade.com
Textbookx.com
DormItem.com
ValoreBooks.com
DirectTextbook.com
Campusbooks.com

Other Textbook Sites
Half.com
Amazon.com
Barnes&Noble.com
Shopzilla.com

Individually Purchasing Textbook Chapters
ichapters.com

Canadian College / University Textbooks
Booksu.com
Tusbe.com

Textbooks From India
75-90% discounts. Identical to the US editions, but with grayscale photos and plain paper.
Firstandsecond.com/

Tips
Get a group together to pay cheap shipping.

Place an index card in the bulletin board of your department for the book you’re looking for.

The Future
Electronic versions of textbooks.

Colleges and Universities | College |Textbooks

I’m managing to keep my crankiness under control regarding the new-found commonness of the term gap year. Where in the hell were those two words when I was a senior in high school? On another continent, that’s where. Young non-American adults are apparently encouraged (sometimes even expected) to take a gap year between high school and college. How nice for them.

In the land I am from, saying “I’m taking a year off before I start college,” means one of two things: either you’re a slacker and have no direction and do not wish to succeed in life; or your parents aren’t going to foot the tuition bill, and you need a little time to think before you leap into the Student Loan Chasm of Doom. So, clearly, as I was a spoiled girl (college paid for) with so much direction and focus it was coming out of my bottom (if you can convince yourself that you have a plan, then you can convince your family, too. It’s called suspension of disbelief. Sometimes it’s also called bull****), I went directly from high school to Cal State and did not pass Go. I took a break in the middle of my undergrad degree.

When I took my gap year, it was not referred to as such. It wasn’t even viewed as such. It was viewed by my family as “The year Alexa didn’t apply to medical school.” No, I was never planning on applying to medical school. Which explains my surprise upon learning that this was the plan as my grandparents saw it. So I didn’t see how taking part of a year off to work and travel was in any way going to interrupt my here-to-for unmentioned medical school application process. But logic is not a language that translates well between generations, and my grandparents and I had to agree to not get along for a while. They came on board with the Europe Trip when my foster brother and I started sending very entertaining letters home. On paper. (It was like a blog, except that it was 1996 and it required postage stamps.)

Anyway, taking a gap year is normal if you grew up not in the U.S. And, oh happy day for everyone who isn’t me, parents across America are starting to accept the whole idea of their kiddos taking a year off between high school and college. I’m still reeling from the whole idea that my Year of Flake is suddenly a socially acceptable Gap Year. I‘m trying to recover from the reel and argue absolutely for taking a gap year if you are so inclined.

For the record, it was the best year ever. What do you learn when you’re not in school? A lot if your eyes are open. Don’t get me wrong, I love being in school, I love learning, and I’m better at being a student than I am at most other ventures. To be fair, I’ve spent more years as a student than I have at everything else except, you know, breathing. But sometimes you need to look up and see what’s happening outside the education furrow / rut you’ve been in for so long.

If you stare at books and the insides of lecture halls for years on end, eventually it all starts to blur together into one long road of memorization and red tape, punctuated by especially brutal finals or papers or lab write-ups. Looking at real life for even a few months gives you something solid to spackle your book knowledge to. Context and objectivity are pretty interesting animals. Who you are and how the world works when you’re in high school are changed completely when you hit college. The same goes for you in school vs. you in the world. Or you in the U.S. vs. you traveling across another continent.

And, yes, of course I grew, I learned, I came back a better version of me. I honestly don’t know how someone could do something different and manage to not learn from it. So I won’t go into the depth or the amazingness of the pre vs. post-Gap Year Alexa. It was good, it was worth it, I highly recommend stepping outside of your comfort zone and seeing the world and yourself from another angle. And, as with everything in life, you’ll get out of it what you put into it. That’s right. Also, there’s no free lunch. I’m going to start my own inspirational poster company.

You probably shouldn’t go into it thinking that your gap year will be easier than school. If you do it right, it’ll probably be more fun, but not so much with the easy. I worked to earn the money for the trip. (That’s how I learned the valuable “food service sucks” lesson). I planned the trip (in cahoots with my foster brother). I had to work out traveling with another human (foster brother who may actually be an alien) and maintaining a good friendship. If the red tape wasn’t properly dealt with prior to departure, I wasn’t going to be allowed to leave the country. If I pissed off a Turkish train conductor in Istanbul, I was the one who was going to be escorted from the train station before I ended up in a Turkish prison (the train guy started it). If all Americans and British passengers were going to be pulled off a Yugoslavian (it was 1996 and still Yugoslavia) train in the middle of nowhere and questioned (not in English) at gunpoint, I was the one who had to figure out how not to get shot. See? All kinds of learning experiences.

My “gap year” (which was less than a year) was amazing. It’s right in there with my senior year at Evergreen as far as how much I learned and how stupidly happy I was. I worked my ass off in both instances and am completely proud of what I managed to pull off.

I’m pro gap year, absolutely. But since I did it in the middle of my college career, and I also did it before it was cool, you might require a few more convincing (read: adult) arguments for taking some time off. Here are 3 excellent adult arguments for taking a gap year in case you need some back-up logic to convince your parents (or yourself) that we learn better and grow more completely outside of the classroom box, and one excellent list of what to do and how to do it right (I had no big plan, I was flying strictly by the seat of my pants). And one really funny gap year site which you should not show your parents as it’s not that far off the mark.

Resources for Understanding the Gap Year

A Meaningful Detour: The Gap Year

Grasping the Gap

Take this job and shove it…I’m taking a gap year

Excellent battle plan, including a site list and a book list

One very funny gap year site

Posted by Alexa Harrington
education | college | university

A recent New York Times article talks about “Little Asia on the Hill,” that is, UC Berkeley.

“This fall and last, the number of Asian freshmen at Berkeley has been at a record high, about 46 percent. The overall undergraduate population is 41 percent Asian. On this golden campus, where a creek runs through a redwood grove, there are residence halls with Asian themes; good dim sum is never more than a five-minute walk away; heaping, spicy bowls of pho are served up in the Bear’s Lair cafeteria; and numerous social clubs are linked by common ancestry to countries far across the Pacific.”

The article goes on to say:

“Across the United States, at elite private and public universities, Asian enrollment is near an all-time high. Asian-Americans make up less than 5 percent of the population but typically make up 10 to 30 percent of students at the nation’s best colleges:in 2005, the last year with across-the-board numbers, Asians made up 24 percent of the undergraduate population at Carnegie Mellon and at Stanford, 27 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 14 percent at Yale and 13 percent at Princeton.”

Apparently, Asians have become the “new Jews.” Immigrants working hard and working their way up the totem pole.

At some universities, where Asians are being admitted a lower rate despite higher test scores, university integrity is being questioned.

“…a study released in October by the Center for Equal Opportunity, an advocacy group opposing race-conscious admissions, showed that in 2005 Asian-Americans were admitted to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, at a much lower rate (54 percent) than black applicants (71 percent) and Hispanic applicants (79 percent) — despite median SAT scores that were 140 points higher than Hispanics and 240 points higher than blacks.

To force the issue on a legal level, a freshman at Yale filed a complaint in the fall with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, contending he was denied admission to Princeton because he is Asian. The student, Jian Li, the son of Chinese immigrants in Livingston, N.J., had a perfect SAT score and near-perfect grades, including numerous Advanced Placement courses.”

Another blog, SAJAForum, blasted the Times article for clumping all of Asia together. All of the students interviewed in the article were of East Asian descent, none were from South Asia.

SAJAForum points out that Berkeley’s Chancellor made a point to highlight the difference:

“Dr. Birgeneau [Berkeley’s Chancellor] agrees on at least one point: “I think we’re now at the point where the category of Asian is not very useful. Koreans are different from people from Sri Lanka and they’re different than Japanese. And many Chinese-Americans are a lot like Caucasians in some of their values and areas of interest.”

Posted by Sindya Bhanoo
Asians|Admissions |College

I’ve had a lot of projects due at the same time recently and not coincidentally, I came down with a cold - sore throat, sneezing, runny nose, stuffy head. I took several doses of Airborne a day (the best tasting immune boosting product in my opinion - it’s not too strong), went to bed early and the cold ran its course. It was a shorter than average cold, thanks to Airborne?

A report on NPR says immune boosting elixers such as Airborne have little effect on colds, but new studies have found that those who have more stress, are twice as likely to get a cold.

From NPR’s interview with researcher Sheldon Cohen at Carnegie-Mellon University:

In one study, Cohen and his collaborators interviewed 400 healthy adults about how stressed out they are. They asked questions such as:

— Do the demands you face exceed your ability to cope?

— How anxious, angry, or depressed have you felt over the last week?

“After we administered the questionnaires,” says Cohen, “we exposed the people in the study to one of five viruses that cause the common cold.”

Cohen’s team then tracked the volunteers for six days and found that those who had reported higher levels of stress were twice as likely to catch a cold as those who were less stressed out.

This correlation has held up in two follow-up studies. Cohen has also evaluated long-term stressors such as marriage problems or the loss of a job.

“So the longer the stress lasted,” says Cohen, “the greater the probability that the participants exposed to the virus would actually catch a cold.”

So, it looks like you can take Airborne and have a shorter cold or practice stress management and perhaps not even get a cold….

Time Management | College | stress