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).

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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After saving for 18 years, my parents had my college money saved up and ready to mete out for strictly education items only. And still, the first semester’s worth of tuition, dorm costs, and meal cards were a bit of a punch in the abdominal region for all three of us. Oof.

And then came the necessary accoutrements: computer, extra long sheets, phone, textbooks, school supplies, etc. That shopping expedition, which was the absolute bare-bones minimum, I assure you, gave us vomitous feelings. My entire childhood had been strictly budgeted just so my college education would be covered. None of us were used to just laying down thousands of dollars for anything that didn’t fall into the Life or Death category.

It’s easy to fall prey to the Everyone else has a pink furry lamp so I have to have one too! mantra, but try to avoid it.

Loft Bed: It Depends
If you’ve managed to keep the buying under control, then, no, you won’t need a gigantic wooden behemoth that you’ll have to disassemble and try to get rid of nine months from now.

If you brought along enough extra furniture and plastic crap to fill an apartment and are shocked to discover you will be calling upon your Tetris skills to cram it all into half of a tiny square room, then yes, you will be needing a loft bed. Since everyone regrets investing in a loft bed within a few months of buying and building one, you can probably find one cheap on Craigslist.

Dorm-Room Phone: No
Everyone under the age of sixty has a cell phone, so paying for a land line in your room is dumb. It’s also risky if your dorm has big loud parties with all doors open along the hall. There’s always some guy or girl who misses their ex (who is spending the year abroad in outer Mongolia), and feels it is absolutely imperative that they drunk-dial said ex, beg to get back together, and then pass out with the phone off the hook while outer-Mongolia ex is ranting and raving about what a jack-ass the drunk half of the ended relationship is. You will be paying for this

Desk Lamp: Yes
If a lamp doesn’t come standard with the room, get one. Otherwise you’ll be studying by fluorescent ceiling lighting, which will hum and flicker and will foster violent tendencies around two a.m.

Laptop: Yes
This does not require explaining.

Printer: No
It’ll take up too much space, and the ink cartridges suck to replace, and they will always run out ten minutes before a paper is due. Learn to use and love the campus computer labs and the people who work there (use the lab, love the people). You can print stuff out there, and if anything goes haywire (and it will), the Gods of the Computer Lab will be able to help you. This will not be the case if you are crying about a term-paper meltdown in your dorm room.

New Textbooks: It Depends
See previous post.

Linens: Yes
A towel (two if your school is near a beachy area), a washcloth, comforter, and one set of sheets. Make sure the sheets are the right size. For some reason, even though only a non-majority percentage of students at any given college are over six feet tall, they make all dorm beds extra long. Which means that for probably only one year, all American college freshmen have to buy (and then never ever use again) extra long twin bed sheets. Asinine.

Dorm Fridge: Maybe
Only if you or your roommate either can’t share or have a difficult time reading labels or remembering which shelf belongs to whom.

Microwave: No
99% of the other dormies will have one, and if you’re wanting to “cook” anything stinky and offensive, most dorms have a kitchen. Even the lamest and grungiest versions will come equipped with a microwave.

Shower Shoes: Yes
Because dorm hook-ups are way less hot when all involved parties have foot fungus.

Bucket-Thingy to Carry Bathroom Paraphernalia: Yes
It will cost you less than five bucks, and if you don’t bring one, I can guarantee that (a) your room will be the farthest one away from the bathroom, and (b) you will drop your towel in front of a hallway full of people while trying desperately to juggle slippery bottles of shampoo, wet toothbrushes, squishy toothpaste tubes and sharp razors. I don’t care how hot you are, it’s still hard to be sexy while standing there naked, wondering whether squatting or bending over to retrieve the towel and the bathroom items is your best bet.

Running Shoes: Yes
Even if you’d rather walk, forward motion at any speed is the cheapest and best way to get away from your fellow dorm residents for a while and have some time to think and release some stress.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Fall term will be starting soon, whether you’re prepared for the deluge or not. Summer vacation is good for earning money and bonding with peers, but it’s getting toward the portion of summer that would be well spent on getting a few of your higher-education ducks in a row.

Getting one’s organization system planned out and ready to go before the second week of the fall term hits and you’re already in too deep to breathe, let alone dig yourself out, is a prudent move. I’m a sick and twisted little girl, and will sometimes let a deliciously unorganized disaster pile up just so that I can dive in and organize it to perfection later.

I did notice, however, that at the beginning of my college career I tended to hold off on the organizational system streamlining until the term was over. Winter, spring and summer breaks were spent cleaning up the previous term’s mess while muttering to myself that next term I would grow the hell up and keep my academic life in order from day one.

By the time I graduated, I was overly super at keeping schoolwork and papers in line and perfect. It turned out, weirdly enough, that dealing with a chunk of information as it came along was a thousand times faster than shoving it into my “Deal With” folder and having to dig through said folder after the term was over, and wonder (a) what the eff it was, and (b) figure out whether to keep it or toss it, and (c) if it was a keeper, then where would I be keeping it?

Arjun Muralidharan over at The Productive Student has a three-post series about organization systems for students. If you don’t have your own personal system designed and perfected as of yet, I recommend checking them out (before classes start).

How to Defeat Your Digital Mess Forever
Creating a Simple 26-Piece Filing System
3 Productive Folders to Revolutionize Your Storage System

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(images: chaos and tidy)

As an undergrad, I got really good at taking notes. However, I took them according to my own odd little system, and I’m not sure they would have been of any use to someone else. Now I can be less sad about missing out on the ShareNotes.com concept, wherein college students take notes, upload them, share them (was that not implied?), and get paid if their notes are awesome enough to be downloaded. If you’re a spectacular note-taker, and you’re planning on showing up to class and taking notes anyway, you may as work your marketable skill.

ShareNotes.com is a unique online lecture note sharing service. We’ve created a collaborative environment that allows college students who share classes to also share their lecture notes. In just minutes you can be part of the ShareNotes.com community. Bolster your study materials, share your lecture notes and maybe even make some money.

You can take advantage of ShareNotes.com a couple of different ways. You may post your quality lecture notes and make money each time your notes are downloaded. Or if you would prefer, you can choose to download quality lecture notes that have been posted by your colleagues. Either way, you win. You may choose to do one or the other, but we think you’ll do a little of both.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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Google Operating System is an unofficial Google blog with some supremely useful tips, including this post about how to circumvent the subscription requirement in order to view academic papers. Although, these days, shouldn’t part of the graduation requirements for any degree be the student’s ability to obtain as much info, gadgetry and application paraphernalia online for free?

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Anyone who has more writing to do than motivation to get it done should check out Write or Die from Dr. Wicked, who claims to “put the ‘prod’ in productivity.” Write or Die is a lovely little web application that implements the Psych 101 principles of Operant Conditioning and Negative Reinforcement to get the writer’s ass in gear.

The writer sets a word count goal, a time goal, whether they want the grace period to be Forgiving, Strict or Evil, and then chooses the level of negative consequences: Gentle, Normal, Kamikaze, or Electric Shock (sadly, that one’s not actually selectable). Then the writer just has to start typing words in the box until the goals are met.

If writing stops, the negative consequences begin. In Gentle Mode, a little box pops up reminding you to keep writing. In Normal Mode, a really grating song starts playing and you will have it in your head for the remainder of the week. And in Kamikaze Mode, if you stop writing, your text begins deleting itself. A little bit evil, but it could certainly help anyone with procrastination issues.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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I totally do. I know that Mr. Obama was NOT named after the structures military personnel sleep in. Too bad for me, I had (had, until yesterday) my effing word processing program (Microsoft Word, if anyone’s keeping score) in its default auto-correct setting. I’ve always had it set there because it probably came set like that when I bought my MacBook. It has never been a problem until now.

Last week, I wrote a post the day after Election Day about our President-elect, Barack Obama. Right now, the red squiggly underlines are alerting me to the fact that Microsoft Word doesn’t think I spelled “Barrack” correctly; my computer, in all its infinite wisdom, thinks “Barack” is my misspelling of “Barrack.” *sigh*

So, unbeknownst to me, last week I typed in “Barack” and it was immediately corrected to “Barrack.” A good rule of thumb when writing an education blog is to avoid egregious misspellings. I’m just saying.

My husband gets full credit for reading the Obama post yesterday and giving me a heart attack when he said, “Um, hey, [he was trying to be gentle] did you know you misspelled Barack in that Obama post?” I said some bad words about mothers and stuff and dove for my laptop.

After fixing the error and recovering from my panic, I turned off the auto-fix thingy on Word. To avoid looking like a dumbass, I would highly suggest everyone else doing the same for the next four years or so.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The economy is tanking (or so they keep telling us), and that’s starting to make the the lives of college students everywhere more pinched and frowny and less chipper and skippy. Working while taking a full course load just sucks, even on a good day.

Alan Bradford at Geek Stew has some excellent pointers for anyone requiring a sure fire money-making project. It didn’t work all that well for the Germans during the Weimar Republic, but you could get lucky.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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:

Top 10 Tips for Interns
Tips to Make the Most of Summer Internships
Summer Internships—Making the Most
Internships Are More Important Than Ever
Inside an Ad Agency Summer Internship

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 internships next summer.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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