Archive for August, 2008

College Rankings

You can’t begin to imagine the disappointment I felt last week while on vacation; my laptop was turned off (no Internet, alas) and I knew that I was totally missing out on U.S. News and World Report’s annual college ranking list: America’s Best Colleges 2009. They put it out every year—hence the “annual”— and the [ READ MORE ]

Summer Vacation

  • August 8th, 2008
  • Posted in College

The fam and I are off on our annual two-week vacation to a hot place. Seattle in the summertime is somehow lacking; perhaps because there are no shimmery waves of Death Heat radiating up from the asphalt. So we feel the need to journey to hell and back in order to have experienced a proper [ READ MORE ]

Fall Internships

Mindless food service industry jobs have only two redeeming qualities for a college student: nearly unlimited access to free food and a meager paycheck. To avoid smelling like a greasy steamed hot dog and getting paid not nearly enough to smile at horrid customers, please consider a fall internship. There’s a good chance you’ll make [ READ MORE ]

Custom: Cool For Sneakers, Not For Textbooks

This travesty was recently brought to my attention: vaguely ‘custom’ textbooks being published for specific courses and schools, thereby forcing students to but the books new and severely limiting the re-sale options. For a while there, textbook publishers had college students over the proverbial barrel. Textbooks are horrendously expensive, even the used ones. And to [ READ MORE ]

Honorary College Degree

I came across this stunning article about the daughter of West Virginia’s Governor, Joe Manchin III, being given an honorary ‘executive master of business administration degree.’ Heather Bresch was awarded the angry-crowd-inducing college degree from West Virginia University. What!? Why? I’m confused—I was under the impression that anyone having an honorary college degree bestowed upon [ READ MORE ]

Coolest College Application Essay Ever: Re-Post

Author’s note: This is a refurbished older post. It’s still relevant and I’m on vacation. No one can back up “Coolest” with facts, but I stand by my statement nonetheless. The non-sheep in me wanted so much for it to have been an actual college admissions essay. Alas, I can find nothing to back that [ READ MORE ]

Words of Wisdom: Re-Post

Author’s note: this is a refurbished older post. It’s still relevant and I’m on vacation. For anyone who has just graduated, this advice may come too late. But if you’re still in the throes of your higher education, Lifehacker.com has a solid, reader-written list of everything they wished they’d been told before they left college [ READ MORE ]

Taking a Gap Year

Author’s note: this is a refurbished older post. It’s still relevant and I’m on vacation. 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 [ READ MORE ]

Rhymes With ‘Fresca’: Part Two

Given everything in the previous post, it will shock no one to learn that I started to read to my kids when they were in utero. They both have impressive personal libraries, but we supplement their kiddie-lit collections with twice-weekly trips to the library. We frequently discover new authors and check out every book he [ READ MORE ]

Rhymes With ‘Fresca’: Part One

I am a reader. I was raised by three voracious readers: Mom, Dad, Stepmom. I come from a long line of book addicts. My parents read to my brother and me a LOT. I remember desperately wanting to learn to read and it seemingly taking forever to get to the part in school where the [ READ MORE ]