Arjun Muralidharan, aka the Productive Student, has a list of 14 ways college students can strive for greenness on Earth. You’ll want to do them all to slow the destruction of the planet, but you’ll actually do them to save yourself some coinage.
-Eat less meat or go vegetarian
-Do more efficient laundry
-Buy groceries with less packaging
-Eat out less
-Buy a greener computer
-Optimize your commute
-Decompose organic waste
-Bring your own bag for shopping
-Recycle paper
-Buy recycled notepads and textbooks
-Put old and unwanted textbooks up for sale
-Use a durable water bottle
-Be conscious about lights everywhere
-Reduce and manage electronic devices
I don’t care how high your SAT scores are: if you’re planning to attend any institution of higher education that isn’t blatantly obvious in its accreditation (Stanford, Yale, etc.), and you don’t take the so-easy-a-monkey-could-do-it step of checking your intended school’s official accreditation status, then you’re an idiot.
Go here or here and get it done. You’ll spend hours more time texting today than you will ascertaining that your institution will hand you a valid degree after you’ve given said school your blood, sweat, tears, time, and money. Avoid this woman’s mistake.
Oh, it’s coming. Denying it won’t help you. Fall Term is starting up soon whether you’re ready or not. When the first week of classes have been attended and while you’re still focusing on first chapters, small quizzes, tolerable assignments, and the finer points on your professors’ syllabi, at the very least please skim this: How to Study: A Brief Guide. Learning how to learn is, how do you say, crucial, of the essence, invaluable, indispensable and totally effing necessary.
Watch it, people. Just because information is second only in volume to pollution on this planet, it does not mean all info is available for you to use and then slap your name on to it like you wrote it or something. Plagiarism, for those of you who missed that day in class, is when you take someone else’s work and falsely claim it as your own. It’s very bad, and it makes you look like an ass@$%*.
The NY Times has an article up about plagiarism and the tech-savvy information generation. The lines are blurry for Gen-Y, apparently.
If you’d like to avoid being an uninformed cheating ass@#$%, the following links are helpful.
I must go. The line above regarding information and the volume of it is freaking me out. Can digital information have volume at all? And is it possible to measure the volume of every printed word on the planet? What about all the still-intact newspapers in old landfills? Do those count as existing information? Crap!
The list is broken down into the following categories:
Small Business and Entrepreneur Blogs and Resources
Marketing Blogs and Solutions
General Business Blogs
Human Resources and Ethics Blogs
MBA Survival Guides and Business Career Blogs
Economy Trends and News
Investing News and Financial Blogs
Resources for Business Women
Online Business Blogs and Tools
Management Resources and Information
Harvard Business Heavy Hitters
One more reason to be paranoid and mistrusting: virus-writing bastards who want to send their flying monkeys out to the ether and into your helpless, naïve little computer, wrecking college, career, and any hope of a happy future for you and your currently non-existent spouse and children. How could you let this happen? When are you going to grow up and take responsibility for all factors within your control?
Not yet paranoid enough to make you feel the urge to be responsible? Watch this SANS security expert discussing security issues with modern technological gadgetry:
*Author’s Note and Update: I recently received a very nice letter from Educaedu.com’s PR person, explaining that because their U.S. site is new, it is still incomplete. However, as she pointed out, they do not charge schools a fee to be listed on the site, and as the information regarding schools, programs, degrees offered is updated manually, it’s understandable that important programs, like UC Davis’s Veterinary School was not listed at the time I wrote this post. UCD’s Vet School is on their site now, though, which I find relieving.
I apologize to everyone for incorrectly wading through the insane amount of bullsh*t I deal with every day and seeing their site as not on the up-and-up. It is sometimes difficult to separate the poo from the pearls. It’s possible that the World Wide Web has made me so leathery and cynical that I can’t stop myself from shooting first and apologizing later. Stupid Internet.
I would also like to point out how polite and calm the PR person is down there in the Comments. I think it’s clear why she’s in Public Relations and I am not. I would be a disaster at that job. I am impressed with her ability to keep it holstered.
The best way to test a website that claims to be an excellent searching tool is to use it to locate something you already know exists. Educaedu.com is an international search engine for locating the perfect degree/course/program for a given student based on what they want to study and where they want to study it. The section of the site for the United States is fairly new, so perhaps we can chalk up its incompleteness to the fact that it lacks maturity. Or maybe (I’m being cynical), schools have to pay up to be included on the site.
Here’s what Educaedu has to say about its many global sites:
Educaedu, the leading online educational directory, has recently released a website exclusively for the United States with more than 1,000 courses and programs. Those who are looking for a specific course or program can search the Educaedu website and can directly connect with institutions of interest. Universities, colleges, and smaller institutes find this website useful to promote their courses and programs with the objective to attract potential students.
One of the advantages of Educaedu is the advanced search engine system, which can filter courses and programs by state, city, mode of study and area of study. Another benefit Educaedu offers is its ability to directly connect students with schools and programs of interest by directing them to the specific program coordinator or admissions officer using advanced and efficient enquiry forms. By continuously updating its database,
The website provides all the necessary elements for the quick and easy selection of a course most suited to ones profile.
I don’t know what’s going on behind the curtain, but I do know that at UC Davis one can acquire a degree in Materials Science and Engineering, and when I searched for a program I knew to be in existence, it was nowhere to be found on Educaedu.org’s list of California schools offering degrees and courses in Materials Science. I’m just saying.
Has anyone counted the plethora of higher education institutions in the State of California lately? Not including the large number of private schools (Stanford, Mills, USC, etc.), there are 23 California State University schools and 10 University of California schools. The total of Educaedu’s list of California colleges is 33, which is purely coincidental, I assure you. Only two of the 33 are UCs and four are Heald colleges. None are Cal State Universities. I call foul. (I call the more appropriate eight-letter word, but I’m working on being classy this week.)
Perhaps one would have better luck finding complete lists of actual four-year colleges and universities on one of Educaedu’s original sites for Spain. Good luck avoiding matriculation through Spain’s version of Heald Technical College.
Author’s note: I couldn’t just write this post and walk away. Nope. I had to check one more thing: Unforgivable! I clicked Educaedu’s own damn link to Veterinary Medicine Schools in California and they have three schools listed. Not one is the University of California at Davis, one of the most respected and well-known vet schools in the f-ing world. I’m not exaggerating. Now I’m calling bullshit and I’m writing it without the asterisks.
Ten more days until taxes are due for the 2009 tax year. And by “due” I mean that they must be postmarked by April 15th, 2010 or you’re in trouble with the IRS.
If you’re doing your own taxes, it’ll be fairly simple. College tuition, scholarships, and college tax credit rules make it slightly more paperwork-y. If your parents are footing your higher education bill, then it’s their taxes that will be wrapped 80 billion times over with red tape. Fun!
Below please find several resources for pertinent tax-time information for college students and their parental units.
Any sushi can be made in a dorm room. All you need is a rice cooker, access to a good fresh-fish counter, and a sharp-ass knife. Besides the obvious no-cooking benefit it shares with raw-fish sushi, Peepshi has several other advantages over its protein-packed cousin:
*Lacks nutrients
*Fishy odors are non-existent
*No chance of food-borne illness (or a lawsuit should a drunken dorm room guest eat a day-old spicy tuna roll)
*Makes use of the Peeps that will go on clearance the day after Easter (cheap fake food!)
*Higher chance of hilarity ensuing if alcohol is present
*Perfect source of sugar-energy for college students: makes you soar to new heights and then bonk harder than you’ve ever bonked before
Serious Eats explains how to prepare this post-holiday delicacy using only Peeps, Rice Krispies Treats, Fruit by the Foot, and a sharp-ass knife. I recommend the knife-wielder avoiding the alcohol.
The folks at Grammarlogues have a guest post up in the NY Times’ Learning Blog: 5 Easy Ways to Learn Grammar With The New York Times. I totally do this! I’ve done this for years, actually. My own version involves not so much practicing, as it does utilizing the NY Times when I’m in a must-know-now situation.
While I seem to be able to teach myself any subject an institution of higher learning can throw at me (including calculus, which I’m sure will come in handy when the apocalypse comes), I have never found a grammar how-to manual that explains the concept and then shows you several examples so you can understand how it works in actual situations. I need to see the example if the concept is hazy or has too many variables.
What I really require is a university English department to have a 24-hour help desk so I can hand over my sentence and have a professional help me to understand why the correct form is right, and why my version is the equivalent of a six-year-old making “soup” by dumping every spice in the kitchen cabinet into the bathtub.
When the manuals and the online grammar help sites fail me, I turn to the NY Times. I Google “NY Times” and the pertinent portion of the sentence that’s stumping me. The NY Times is the well-edited-newspaper version of an infinite number of monkeys whanging away at typewriters: eventually one of those monkeys is going to hammer out Shakespeare, word for word. Somewhere in the NY Times’ archives there’s a sentence chunk exactly like mine (only with correct grammar and punctuation).
Author’s note: this post was reprinted in the Education section of the NY Times Online.
