Use a Disposable Camera for Worry-Free Party Photos

Disposable cameras make everything look like the 90s. Image courtesy of the author, all rights reserved.

The things that make college parties worthy of documentation are frequently the things that make them hostile to electronics. Things get spilled, people are clumsy, and at the end of the night you may have a ruined gadget. However, that puts you in a bad place if you want to document the evening--party photos are great, but no one wants to run the risk of the ruined digital camera.

Enter the humble disposable camera. For around $10 (plus another $10 to develop the film) you can have a worry-free camera for a high-risk environment. If something gets spilled on the camera or someone drops it, you don't have to worry about a huge replacement cost. All you'll lose will be the night's photos, and even then you may still salvage something interesting, as these pictures from a disposable camera dropped in a pool show.

Because disposable cameras have cheap lenses, they tend to flatten images out. For party photos, this is actually a pretty cool effect. It's like adding nostalgia to your photo while it's being taken--it summons up photos from before the era of pervasive digital cameras. It's like a lo-tech Instagram.

The process of getting the photos developed is actually pretty painless. Most drug stores (CVS and Target, in my area) will still develop film cameras. Because they do it using digital magic, you can get a photo CD (or just a photo CD, if you don't want prints) along with your negatives. That way, you can take advantage of the wonders of the modern era post-party and post your photos to Flickr or Facebook. People seem to get a kick out of the look--my New Year's photos, which were taken this way, are some of the most popular on my Flickr page.

The last nice thing about having a camera that you don't have to worry about is that you can hand it off to other party goers without guilt. It's always fun to come back to the photos in the morning and see that your friends have snapped a few of you--something that's less likely if you're watching a nice digital camera in order to make sure that no one spills anything on it.

Though the input cost may make disposable camera impractical for day-to-day use, for big deal parties they're a great way to do something new with your photos. If you've taken your own disposable photos, give us a link the comments!

How To Prepare for Post-Graduation Now - Entering Senior Year

 Are you ready for life after graduation? Start to prepare for that day now. Photo courtesy of Joe Shlabotnik. Licensed under CC BY-2.0.

Monday and Wednesday, I discussed ways to help you prepare for life after graduation. Just thinking about what to do after college can be fairly terrifying, but by planning ahead, you can help save yourself stress and worrying. Today's post discusses things you can do in the nine months that you are actually in your last year of college. For younger college students, this post will let you know what you should be expecting to do in a few years from now.

Set Goals

This is probably one of the most helpful and important thing you can do during your senior year. At this point in your undergraduate career, you should have a pretty good idea of where you want to go. If you don't, see "Seek Advice" from Monday's post.

Setting goals for yourself is helpful because it really helps you visualize where you see your life going after you graduate. It will hopefully help you become more realistic in what you want and should expect. For instance, you're probably not going to be getting a managing job straight out of school. However, if that's your goal, put it on your timeline for several years down the road. Set your sights on an entry-level job and plan how you'd like to move on from there.

Some other goals you should be looking at could be when to send in all your job applications, when to take the GRE, when to visit graduate schools, when to visit companies you want to work for, etc, etc. Put these all out on a timeline to help make this whole process a little less overwhelming for when March and April really do roll around the corner.

Perfect Your Interview Skills

Now that you've polished your resume, it's time to really perfect your interview skills since an interview can truly make or break a job opportunity. Seek help from your college guidance counselors who will often times put on events or seminars on gook interview techniques. Ask your current or past boss and coworkers on what makes a memorable interviewee. Learn from them because they are the industry professionals who may be hiring you someday.

Practice on your friends or organize a mock interview event with your college guidance department to help other seniors in your position. Take your time to craft answers to those hard to answer questions. Check out my article from last week on this subject. Be aware of what questions are going to be asked and prepare yourself with the best possible answers. The more you prepare, the better off you'll be. However, make sure that your answers are natural enough that you don't come off as cold and impersonal.

Set Up Informational Interviews

In addition to doing research on your desired field of interest about various companies you would like to work for, it could be beneficial for you to set up a sort of informational interview with leading people within the companies you are interested. This informational interview, in which you ask questions about the company, could help you in your future career or educational path for several reasons.

Firstly, these will help you get a better idea of the individual company policies and goals, to help you better determine which companies you'd rather work for. Secondly, talking to people in these companies will also help you understand what you need to do in order to get to the job you want. It can also help you network with important people in your industry which can help you get your dream job or dream graduate school.

Informational interviews can be very helpful for you, but they can be difficult to set up. Important people in the industry can be hard to set up a meeting with. However, talk to your university's career services to see if they can help you get in contact with someone who can help you.

What tips do you have for students entering their senior year to prepare for life after graduation? Let us know in the comments!

[via USAToday College and HerCampus]

Incoming Freshmen Series: How to Stop Studying Like a Freshman

Study smarter. Not harder. Flickr photo courtesy of Sterlic. Licensed courtesy of CC BY-SA 2.0.This is the fourth post of the Incoming Freshmen Series. Read our introduction and our first post on style, second post on finance, and third post on partying for more information, and stay tuned this week for our upcoming posts.

If you were a student like I was in my high school, I kept going to classes that were meant to "prepare me for college". AP classes, IB classes, PSAT, ACT, and SAT prep classes, to name a few. The daily lecture from my teachers always included on why we were doing so much work because this is what college was like. I'm sure many of my fellow HackCollegers were in similar classes, and some of our newest readers too.

Then, we got to college and found out it was a little different. The busywork we often were given in high school had disappeared in favor of semi-weekly or even daily lectures and the nightly homework is often replaced with papers, exams, lab and discussion sections, and occasional homework. 

The majority of the freshmen I know are taking classes like Plants, Plagues, and People and Man's Food, right now, which just requires showing up a few times a week and turning in an assignment or two and passing. There are classes like that at every college, but I'm not going to speak on them. If you can't pass EASY 101, then there's a much more serious problem then your study habits. College is a different animal - a brand of learning meant for the more experienced learner. Below are some tips on how to study smarter not more.

Click to read more ...

"Blind Ambition" Tells the Amazing Story of Team Note-Taker

Team Note-Taker from Arizona State blew me away at the Imagine Cup in New York City, and now Microsoft has produced a great video about the Note-Taker device and the students behind it. If you spend five minutes watching YouTube today, spend it on this. 

iPads Don't Make Photoshop Better. Oh, and We're Giving Away Adobe CS 5.5

Adobe's new Photoshop-enhancing iPad apps look great in theory, but in practice still feel half-baked.About a month ago, Adobe sent me a copy of Adobe CS 5.5 Master Suite to test out. If you've spent any time around Photoshop over the past few years, very little on the surface will surprise you. In fact, the biggest draw of 5.5 for me wasn't any new feature in Photoshop itself, but its ability to integrate with a new suite of iPad apps. A lot of students these days use Photoshop for their classes, internships and hobbies, and a growing number own iPads, so the apps hold a lot of potential for this (admittedly very specific) niche.

Adobe Nav

Adobe released three apps designed specifically to integrate with Photoshop 5.1. The first, Adobe Nav for Photoshop ($1.99) is simply a standard Photoshop toolbox pushed to your iPad's screen. Nav allows you to change the currently-selected tool in Photoshop CS 5.5 on your computer using touch-friendly buttons on your iPad, but despite the simple premise, the app still falls short in a number of areas. There isn't enough screen real estate to include all of your tools, but instead of nesting similar tools within the same button and accessible via a long press as in Photoshop proper, the iPad user must wade through an "edit" menu with a list of all available tools, place the tool in a slot on the 4x4 grid, expelling another tool in the process, and exit the edit menu to continue work. To add insult to injury, your primary and secondary colors are visible within the app, but you can only reverse their order or switch them to black and white, not actually change them. The iPad would be a perfect tool for selecting the right color, and you can't do it within this app. The only redeeming feature here is a secondary mode that allows you to switch between open files using a thumbnail view that is unparalleled by anything offered in the actual Photoshop program. 

Adobe Eazel

The second app, Adobe Eazel (2.99) is an intriguing fingerpainting app with a unique control scheme and one-click integration with Photoshop. The app has the most unique UI I've encountered on the iPad, and it works beautifully after you get used to it. Simply place five fingers on the screen, and each finger will come to represent the undo/redo panel, size, color, opacity, and settings. Lift four fingers, keeping the one representing your desired tool on the screen, and that finger becomes a selection device to fine tune your brush. The actual painting on the app closely simulates watercolors, which feels arbitrarily limited when it could easily mimic crayons, markers, colored pencils, etc., but the effect is pretty convincing. Once you've finished finger-painting your masterpiece, one tap in the settings panel sends it to Photoshop on your computer for editing. Unfortunately, it doesn't render each brushstroke as its own layer, but it does preserve transparency, which is handy. 

Adobe Color Lava

Remember how Adobe Nav didn't let you edit your color swatches? Well that's what Adobe Color Lava ($2.99) is for. Using your fingers to mix and dab on-screen "paint," you can mix your own unique color blends to be used in Photoshop. Selecting a swatch in the app immediately zaps it to Photoshop as your primary color, which raises the question why this feature isn't included in the Adobe Nav app. If it's a matter of nickel and diming consumers, I'd rather pay $5 for a single app that can manipulate tools AND colors for Photoshop than pay $5 for two distinct apps that I can't use use simultaneously. 

The Giveaway

While the iPad apps still have some work to do, Photoshop itself is still amazing, and the rest of the apps in the Creative Suite Master Collection 5.5 aren't bad either. Since so many of you are budding creative professionals, I'll be giving away the box set of CS 5.5 to one lucky reader (don't worry, I didn't use the license) via Twitter. Note that the software is MAC ONLY. Simply follow @HackCollege and tweet at us what school you go to and what you'll use it for. Fitting that into 140 characters should be a fun challenge. Contest ends Sunday at noon ET, so get Tweeting!

Tips on How To Eat Healthy on a Budget

Make wise choices when you go to grocery to eat healthy and save money. Photo courtesy of qmnonic. Licensed under CC BY-2.0.I’ve had to learn many things this summer. Learning how to live by myself in my very own apartment, learning how to pay bills, learning how to balance my work life with my social life, etc. However, the thing that I think is the most important thing I’ve learned this summer is how to cook for myself. My mom and dad are both great cooks and here I am, living by myself, without having cooked for myself at all.

This feat was also made more difficult by the fact that I’m working at an unpaid internship and therefore am living on a rather strict budget. So how does a poor college student learn to cook on a budget and still eat relatively healthy? It’s a lot of figuring it out for yourself, but here are a few easy to follow tips that can help you along the way.

Don’t Eat Out

This is actually an unfortunate problem that a lot of my friends have. Fast food can seem super cheap with things like the Dollar Menu or coupons for 2 for 1 burgers and shakes. It’s so easy to just pick it up and bring it home for five bucks a meal, and a lot of my friends see it this way. Why bother cooking when it seems even less expensive to just grab something at the closest fast food place?

The fact is that it actually isn’t cheaper than going to the grocery and cooking a meal for yourself. For instance, I bought a package of raw chicken thighs yesterday for about five dollars. Once I cook those chicken thighs, coated with some milk and Bisquick, that one package of chicken thighs will last me about three or four meals. So for five dollars, I can feed myself for four nights. If you pick up a meal at a fast food place, you get one meal for the same amount and probably three times the calories.

Cooking for yourself is a little more work, but becoming self-sufficient and learning to cook is a much better use of your time and money than waiting in line at a fast food joint.

Cut Down on Meat, Make More Veggies

Most meals, especially dinners, focus around meat as the main protein. However, meat is expensive, especially red meat. So to cut down on costs, eat less meat per meal. To get your filling protein quota, rely more on beans, nuts, and eggs. These options are just as healthy for you, will fill you up because they are also protein-filled foods, and cost less.

Robert Post, deputy director for the US Department of Agriculture’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, says that you should typically be spending 40% of your food budget on fruits and vegetables. Your best bet is in-season fruits and vegetables, but another great option is frozen products. Because these foods are processed right after they’ve been harvested, most of the nutrients have been preserved. I, for one, am a big fan of frozen green beans. I especially prefer frozen packets over canned green beans which are less healthy due to their high salt and sugar content. 

Check out which fruits and vegetables are in season by visiting fruitsandveggiesmorematters.org. 

Drop Your Bad Habits

Bad eating habits are usually expensive, and so since you’re trying to cut down on cost, you might as well cut down on your unhealthy food intake as well. Kill two birds with one stone. One of the biggest things that can make a difference in your diet and grocery bill is sodas. They provide basically no nutritious value and have a lot of sugar. Other things include excessive alcohol and cigarettes as well as sugary items like cookies, candy, and chips. Now I am a self-professed chocoholic and can never give it up, but I do eat it only when I really, really need it instead of splurging on it every day. It makes it more special and helps me practice self-restraint.

What other tips do you have for lowering your grocery costs while remaining healthy? Let us know in the comments!

[via Money MSN]

Why Students Should Upgrade to Lion

Today, Apple released their seventh major update to the Mac OS X operating system, Lion. Over the next few days many exhaustive reviews covering every nook and cranny of the OS will be published. Although I've spent plenty of time exploring Lion while it was it was in beta, I'll leave the heavy lifting to the likes of John Siracusa and Jason Snell. Instead, I'd like to highlight the five new features I believe will have the greatest impact on students. Fellow classmates, here's why you should upgrade to Lion. 

1. Auto Save and Versions

There's nothing worse than hopping on a wave of inspiration only to be presented with an unresponsive app and the realization that it has been an hour since you last pressed Command + S. Lion now auto-saves your work every 5 minutes and during a pause in activity. There's no doubt that Auto Save is a blessing, but combined with Versions, it takes your document creation game to a whole other level. Each time you save your document, both manually and automatically, Lion creates a separate version of your document. Think of a Version as a restore point. Using a Time Machinesque interface, Versions allows you to jump back to a specific time in your document's history to retrieve an element, say a block of text you decided was worth keeping after all.  To access Versions, simply click on the name of your document at the top of the application window. Note, you must save your document manually once before Auto Save and Versions can begin working their magic. Auto Save and Versions aren't flashy, but the work they do in the background will surely be appreciated by students.

 2. Mission Control

Most school related activities performed on my Mac involve several applications; Safari and Papers for research, Preview for referencing lecture notes, Pages for assembling the document. On my tiny 13 inch MacBook Pro screen, Exposé and Spaces are invoked at a nauseating rate when I'm in work mode. Thankfully, Apple has been taking notes. New in Lion is Mission Control, a control center for your Mac, rolling Dashboard, Exposé and Spaces into one easily accessible screen. Sliding up with 3 fingers on the trackpad brings up Mission Control. Your immediately presented with a grouped view of the application windows that are currently visible in the Space you're in. At the top of screen is a overview look at all your Spaces and the applications that are running within them. Spaces and Exposé works just like before; select an application in Exposé to bring it to the front, drag an an application to a new space to open it in that Space or drag to the top right corner of the screen to place the application in a new Space. Although the elements that make up Mission Control have been around for some time now, Mission Control is a fresh new way to interact with these OS X features. If you've got a busy Mac and a small screen, you'll love Mission Control.

3. Character Picker and Improved Auto-Corrections

The English language is fairly gentle when it comes to special characters, but in the event that you're on of our international readers or have decided to take a foreign languages class this upcoming semester, you'll be pleased to know that Lion makes it significantly easier to type special characters such as è. į, ś, etc. to use Character Picker just hold down the letter you wish to modify on your keyboard until you are presented with the special character options for that key.

Although Auto-Correct gets a bad rap on the iPhone, it's effective at fixing spelling mistakes with very little user input. OS X has had some form of Auto-Correct for some time now, however in Lion it behaves much like it does in iOS, presenting its intended change and auto-correcting upon pressing the space key. 

Character Picker and Auto-Correct aren't game changing features in Lion, however for the verbose like myself, they are welcomed changes.

4. Word Lookup

Word Lookup is a feature I came across by accident. Prior to Lion, looking up a word in OS X required a right click on the word followed by a click to open the word in the Dictionary app. Looking up a word now is a simple as double tapping with 3 fingers on the word to bring up a Dictionary/Wikipedia drop down menu. When you're reading academic texts with sophisticated language, the ability to quickly define a word with a single gesture is fantastic. Once again, this won't revolutionize the way we use our computers, but there's no doubt college students will put the feature through its paces. 

5. Price

Here's the thing, according to Apple there's over 250 new features in Lion. Granted everyone will use a different subset of these features to a varying degree, that's a lot of new stuff for $29.99. At the price they're asking, the question isn't, "Why should you upgrade?" Rather it's, "Why not?"

What the New MacBook Airs (and Deceased MacBook) Mean For Students

Is this the future of student computing?

While there's been no shortage of media coverage for Apple's new OS X Lion release, the company also quietly refreshed a few of their lower end computers as well.

It's no secret that Apple enjoys widespread popularity on most college campuses, and the fact that they updated two entry level machines in the MacBook Air and Mac Mini, and killed off the popular white plastic MacBook, makes this product refresh more interesting than most. 

The Mac Mini, for the unitiated, is Apple's cheapest computer offering, starting at $599. As a desktop computer, it's certainly not a first choice for most students, but I have seen them in computer labs and in the occasional dorm room, so they aren't unheard of on campus. The new models get the upgrades you'd expect, notably a Thunderbolt port, and Sandy Bridge i5 and i7 processors, but lose the CD/DVD drive. You can still pick up an external drive from Apple for $79 if you need it, and you probably should. I probably only use my drive two or three times per year, but when I do, it's because I really need it. The added speed and cheap price should make this a very appealing option for any college students still interested in a desktop computer. 

More important than the Mac Mini upgrade, however, are Apple's notebook offerings. The legacy white plastic MacBook of yore is officially dead, and for this, we should shed a tear. This has been the iconic computer of my generation of college students, and in an instant, it has disappeared from the Earth, with nary an acknowledgement by Apple. As far as Apple products go, it was a lot of computer for your money, especially with a student discount, and it came with everything the average student could want in a laptop. It may not have been the prettiest computer Apple's designed, but it was a worthy king of campus.

Students now have two options for an entry-level Mac laptop; the MacBook Pro 13", and the MacBook Air 11". For a $200 premium over the old MacBook, you can pick up a baseline 13" MacBook Pro, which isn't a bad deal. It's basically the old MacBook with extra RAM, backlit keyboard, and aluminum chassis, so the $200 isn't too tough a pill to swallow.

For students looking to stay under $1000 though, the only option is now the 11" MacBook Air. The entire Air line received Thunderbolt ports and updated processors today, but they're still niche devices. The Air is undeniably sexy, and it would be an absolute joy to carry between classes, but I don't think it will please as many people as the dependable old MacBook. For $999 (less with a student discount) you only get 64GB of hard drive space, albeit in a speedy solid state drive, meaning your music and photo collections will have to be pawned off to external drives. The next cheapest option is actually the same price as the low-end MacBook Pro mentioned above, but still only offers 128GB of hard drive space in addition to an extra 2GB of RAM.  

The identically-priced Pro sports a larger hard drive, faster processor, CD/DVD Superdrive, larger screen, Firewire port, and SD card reader. That's not to say that the Air is a bad computer, or that every student should care about these missing features, but I have to imagine most students will miss at least one of them. Whether it's Firewire for film class, the faster processor and SD card slot for editing photos, or the Superdrive for watching DVD's, everyone who chooses an Air over the Pro will be sacrificing a feature they use semi-regularly in exchange for portability. The MacBook Pro has taken the mantle as my student laptop of choice, but it sucks that students have to pay a 20% premium to get the speed and storage space of the old MacBook. I'm sure students will ultimately be happy with either entry-level machine, but it's tough to not feel a sense of loss the reasonably-priced, feature-rich MacBook. 

Are you an incoming freshman looking to buy a Mac? If the white MacBook was still available, would you choose it over the MacBook Air of MacBook Pro? Do you think you could get through school with just a MacBook Air?