Does anyone have summer jobs any more, or do the learning opportunities, résumé-building bullet points, key letters of recommendation, and invaluable experience of the summer internship far outweigh table-waiting wages? Summer’s half over; if you’re in the midst of your own personal interning adventure, here are some beneficial words of wisdom to assist you in milking your internship for all it’s worth:
And if this summer’s internship wasn’t all you had hoped it would be, you can start dreaming immediately of landing one of the most coveted internshipsnext summer.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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I cannot believe humans didn’t come up with this until now: avoiding the tyranny of the textbook-publisher racket by renting textbooks. (Author’s note: It’s entirely possible this rental option was around a few years ago when I was in school, and I was just too snobby to even allow the idea to enter my consciousness.)
It may not be feasible to rent all of your books every term; lab books tend to actually be written in, and some texts will be kept forever as reference books. But if you could rent just a few, you’d still be saving a fat wad of cash and would be helping to limit the power of the iron-fisted, textbook-publishing regime that rules the land of academia.
According to Alan Bradford over at Geek Stew (who alerted his fellow humans to this book-rental genius-ness), Chegg.com also plants a tree for every book rented, which means you’ll be saving the bacon of trees on several levels.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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High school students are teenagers, and if we were to go strictly along biological lines, teenagers are adult animals. And if we were all still living in caves, teenagers would have moved out of their parents’ cave and found their own well before the modern-day version of adulthood (the 18th birthday).
Modern times and the laws regarding adult status do nothing to curb the biological imperative that makes all teens desperate to move out and escape the parental cave. Higher education is a popular no-parent destination. It has the excellent advantage of being fully approved of by parental units and is lacking in parental supervision.
High school students who are still in the planning phase of their exodus (aren’t graduating in a few weeks) can spend the next several months creating superbly detailed spreadsheets filled with any and all glorious escape possibilities.
College Navigator is a marvelously thorough tool from the U.S. Dept. of Education that allows the user to compare and contrast every public and private college or university in the country. It’s so easy a monkey could figure it out, and it allows the user to compare all the pertinent number-crunched info for any school (too many categories for me to list here). Which means all research will have been done except the fun campus-visit part of the process.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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I loathe grocery shopping and therefore make my trips to the market quick, much like the preferred method of Band-Aid removal. As I was walk-running past the “ethnic foods” aisle the other day, I saw ramen noodles on sale 10 for a dollar instead of their normal 5 for a dollar. College student budget instincts die hard, and I almost tripped my daughter when I did a little half-stop turny thing before thinking better of it (I have eaten entirely too much ramen in my life, I don’t care how on sale it is).
Seeing the cheaper-than-the-crap-they’re-made-of noodles made me nostalgic for my college days and how different my relationship with food and the shopping for it was when I was a no-family-having girl. Grocery shopping was irregular, spotty, mismatched (who buys only mangoes, Honey Smacks, coffee and brie?), and rarely represented all the food groups. It was also way more fun.
I only had to shop for me, first of all. I was in class all day and then I’d be studying or procrastinating all evening. Around midnight or two in the morning, after too much thinking and caffeine consumption, I’d be all zippy and sproingy and it would suddenly be the perfect time to go grocery shopping.
Single-girl shopping excursions in the middle of the night are so much more enjoyable than mommy shopping excursions with cranky toddlers half an hour past nap time. In the wee hours of the morning there are only a few other delirious (either chemically-altered, of reclusive tendencies, or hopped-up on caffeine like me) shoppers wandering the aisles along with the employees re-stocking the shelves.
It was lovely to meander my way through the store, looking at everything and basing my buying decisions solely on (a) what sounded good right then, (b) what fit into my food budget (sort of), and (c) how cringe-y would my mom get if she saw me buying it (my mother’s house was free of sugar, television and any processed or fried foods). After blowing my food money on French cheese and tropical fruit, I’d be down to ramen, tofu and frozen peas for the rest of the month.
I had to aggregate my own ramen recipes, prices and brand comparisons. Nowadays, there are books and blogs devoted to the MSG-laced perfection that is ramen:
Wendy Boswell at Lifehacker posted this amazing article on the great dot-edu sites out there and what bastions of mind-blowing information they are. She does point out, however (and I agree) that the time-suckage factor is astronomical: you can fritter away hours perusing university art gallery sites. It’s just so easy to justify educational time-wasting…
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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I know this has been The Week of the Mommy, but here’s one more bit to ponder and then I promise to be done. This article lays out nicely how difficult it is to find work-life balance. It’s important for melting down parents to read about how everyone else is having an out-of-control moment/day/week/life. Because when you haven’t slept and your whole day is one peanut butter, cream of wheat or fuse bead disaster after another and you’re wondering how it can be possible to work this hard and to be in such an extreme state of constant motion and still not manage to get anything accomplished in a day, it’s necessary to have solid evidence that other parents are grappling as desperately as you.
Seriously, how hard is it to take a damn shower? There’s water, soap, more water, a towel, done. Not so with children running amok. There is no sneaking off and showering while leaving tiny people unsupervised. Their food-in and food-out needs must be met; all food must then be removed from the table so no one chokes to death while the parental unit is showering; and then–the deep dark secret of parents who claim to loathe television and maintain a high volume of literature input in the house–the television must be turned on so the little hellions won’t harm themselves or the property during the 180 seconds that mommy is in the shower.
And still, still, even with full access to the television crack pipe that my children are whores for, 60 seconds into my frantic Speed Shower of Doom, someone is banging on the bathroom door demanding to know where their mommy is and when she will be returning. This moment has three possible outcomes: (1) I turn on the ceiling fan and drown out their cries (sort of); (2) I yell something no non-parent will ever imagine they will utter some day when they become parents: “Every mommy has the right to shower alone!” or “GO AWAY!” or “You’re making me insane!” or, when I’ve given up, “Whatever, dude. Cry all you want. It’ll just make me shower longer.” and (3) the dumb mommy unlocks the bathroom door and stupidly gives in and lets the two-year-old in to have a shower/bath too. This is immediately regretted when the six-year-old shows up and suddenly mommy is trying to get clean while standing calf-deep in what she’s pretty sure is a kiddie pee party.
Okay, done with the mommy theme. I refuse to become a mommy blogger. As far as I can tell, the blogging populations with the highest numbers are mommies and convention geeks.
For the first few years of my college career, I was a cocky little sucker who was convinced that tutors were for the less-evolved, slower-thinking students on campus. Since I was “gifted” and had always been told that I was in possession of above average intelligence, I would of course be able to learn all college coursework instantly, perfectly, and with no assistance. I know, what a dumb b**ch.
Because I’ve grown as a person, the irony of this is not lost on me: the “average” and “below average” kids showed higher levels of intelligence, common sense and basic survival skills than I had when they all joined study groups and headed to the tutoring center the first week of school.
It took me a few years, but I finally figured out that (a) I was going to actually have to work to learn all the material (sadly, no instantaneous absorption qualities do I possess), and (b) trying to get through college with no assistance just makes you look like a jackass. A jackass with a really expensive, crappy GPA.
The first trip to the tutoring center or to the prof’s office hours were the hardest. Once I got over the hump, I lived there. Later on, during Degree #2 (please see previous post) I was technically in school full-time, but I was creatively spreading my classes out to mostly evening and online courses so I could be home with my infant daughter (only people who can hire drivers and butlers can afford childcare and tuition simultaneously). Which meant I was usually studying at home, halfway across Seattle, not on campus in the library where I could search out a classmate and ask a question about the homework.
I hated so much that feeling of being totally lost or confused by a physics or chem. or calculus problem that I lost any self-consciousness associated with walking into the tutoring center, raising my hand before I even sat down, and asking for help. At some point, when my daughter was old enough to start preschool and I was on campus during the day like a real college student, I had the math tutoring center hours memorized and would just sit in there doing lab write-ups and math homework, raising my hand whenever I encountered a road block.
So the tutors saved my ass (once I managed to yank my own head out of it) and helped me figure out monumental, James Joyce-ian math and physics problems without ever giving me the answers or spoon-feeding me. I needed to understand how to do the problem, I didn’t want the answer. A tutor worth his or her salt never does the work for you. And if you find one who does, pray they’re tiny enough to fit inside your backpack so’s you can bring them along for exams.
I cannot believe humans didn’t come up with this until now: avoiding the tyranny of the textbook-publisher racket by renting textbooks. (Author’s note: It’s entirely possible this rental option was around a few years ago when I was in school, and I was just too snobby to even allow the idea to enter my consciousness.) 
