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

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’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

The University of Michigan, who went to the Supreme Court to defend the use of race and gender in admissions in 2003, just announced they have changed their admissions rules to be in compliance with a new state law banning affirmative action. The University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman, says she remains committed to diversity. There are ongoing judicial challenges to Proposal 2, the ban on affirmative action that Michigan voters passed in November.

According to the report on NPR,

On campus, there is still anger and disappointment that voters overwhelmingly chose to drop the university’s vaunted affirmative action program. For many opponents of Proposal 2, it’s simply not possible to maintain a diverse student population without affirmative action. Several groups are challenging the consitutionality of the law. On campus, many students say that they have accepted the end of affirmative action in admissions. And those involved in recruiting say that they will simply have to redouble their outreach efforts.

College| College Admissions

Do you remember, back in the day, when it was crazy talk that the world might be round? And how cranky the Catholic Church became when Galileo started spouting off about the freakishly scientific Copernican theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around (as God intended because Man is the center of the universe)? And how weird those solar power-hungry hippies were when they were conserving energy and doing all of that bizarre recycling and yelling about the end of life as we know it if humans continue to burn through resources? And Al Gore backing them up with his totally off-the-wall slide show about “global warming.” Who would believe that mankind could roast an entire planet into oblivion? Freak.

Yep, I like to sit around sometimes (after I’ve done some voting for the always right Right Wing) and think about all the weirdos who have tried to steer us humans wrong in the past, and how the supremely conservative men and women have always pointed out the crazies for us. Good times. Thank god those Earth-is-round folks were proved wrong. We’ve been up in space and the photos of the Earth are clearly flat. It’s like a squished box. And Galileo, that guy sure got what he deserved. A gazillion years of purgatory; that’ll teach him to be good at math and do all that thinking. Pope John Paul II was just being nice when he publicly stated (in 1992) that Galileo was right. And as for Mr. Gore, sure his theories can all be proved with basic math and elementary scientific observation, but George Bush and his people have been doing lots of vehement denying, so I believe the President (who hasn’t been wrong yet).

Oh, if only I were simple-minded, then life would be simple, too. Too bad I’m strapped to this round planet with a bunch of closed-minded conservative yahoos who are happy to watch the planet go the way of the buffalo. I tend towards crankiness, yes, and some might say my personality, um, rhymes with ‘itchy’. But, I’m also an optimist. A sarcastic, cranky, ‘itchy’ optimist, that’s me. So thank gawd there’s a green light at the end of this tunnel of global-warming doom: there are degrees to be had in the field of sustainability.

Arizona State University now offers bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees in sustainability.

The School of Sustainability, together with the Global Institute of Sustainability, provides innovative, interdisciplinary education and research opportunities for undergraduate, graduate, and professional students, to better prepare them to identify and solve sustainability challenges.The degree programs are flexible, interdisciplinary, problem-oriented programs where students explore the sustainability of human societies and the natural environment on which they depend.

And more and more colleges and universities are heading in a green direction with the energy consumption on campus as well as building green (environmentally sound) structures. Changes showing up at universities is a positive sign (like a possible drowning victim spewing sea water). Humanity may still be screwed, but we might be able to fix our flat planet.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Colleges and Universities | Admissions |Environment