Getting Your Brain Ready for School Again

Time flies so fast... Photo courtesy of Flickr user redstamp.com and licensed under CC 2.0It is now officially August, which means that we have to shift our brains from thinking, “Summer is barely halfway over, I’ve got tons of time left before school starts,” to “Oh, damn, it’s August and my classes start in like three weeks.” Realizing that your summer is almost over isn’t the most fun thing to come to terms with, especially if you’re having hard time switching from summer mode back to school mode. There are a few things you can do in the dwindling weeks of summer to help make that transition from summer to fall a little easier.

Start Getting Up Earlier

For those of you who have been going to work everyday, this may not be such a big deal. But for those who have been lounging about all summer without any real preset time to get up for the day, this is definitely a good idea for you. It’s a rude awakening when you have to start getting up for your early morning classes when you’ve been sleeping in until noon everyday. Help yourself out by easing into waking up early while you have the chance. Every few days, wake up an hour earlier until you’re able to wake up at the time you’ll have to when you’re back at school. Obviously, you’re going to need to adjust what time you go to bed accordingly. Hopefully doing this will get your body used to your class schedule faster and make you less cranky and grouchy.

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Guest Post: The 9-5 Student Schedule

Could clocking in and out be a thing of the past? Photo courtesy of Flickr user mwichary and licensed under CC 2.0Today's guest post comes from Stefan Knapen, a sophomore medical student at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, and founder of studysuccessful.com. Interestingly enough, Dutch students go to medical school straight out of high school, so I'm sure Stefan is familiar with balancing a full agenda.  Here are his thoughts on how technology may soon do away with the rigid class schedules we all endure.

Will the 9-5 working schedule of students keep excisting? When you look at trends in the employement-world, you see that there is less 9-5 work, this is a trend which is nothing but logic. Hundred years ago everybody worked in factories at assembly lines and it was nice if everybody could be on the same spot, so the assembly line could actually roll and everybody did their thing. Nowadays, the majority of work is providing service and you can do that individual and every time of the day. The 9-5 job is over, people can set their own working hours to do their job. How is that with students? Will the 9-5 schedule disappear?

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Picking a Landing Page: Flavors.me vs. Google Profile

Walnut World: weird concept, good landing page. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Michael Durwin. Licensed under CC 2.0 by NC-SA.Most college students are at an awkward time in their lives where they aren’t internet-famous enough to need their own website, but are looking for some way to show prospective employers (or distant relatives) what they’ve been up to online. Simply giving someone a link to your Twitter stream or your Facebook page looks like you haven’t put much thought into it, and designing your own website is--for many people--more work than it’s worth.

For college students, there are two reasonably good-looking, professional sites that stand ahead of the rest because of their ease of use and attractive, simple layouts.

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Welcome to the New HackCollege!

So, what do you think of the place?  With Kelly and Chris graduating and moving on to the real world, it's time to usher in the next generation of the site.  We've brought on some great new writers, Kelly dreamed up the new Belushi-style site logo, and has obviously been hard at work at the new look for the site.  Fall semester is just around the corner, and it's shaping up to be an exciting year for HackCollege. 

Our summer isn't over just yet though... More on that later.  Just be on the lookout for some more big news in the coming weeks.

In a world where most every blog withers away after a few months, HackCollege is stronger than ever, and will soon be starting its fifth year of delivering great student-created content.  I think I speak for all of our writers, past and present, when I say that it would never have happened without an incredible group of readers.  Thank you all for being so awesome.

Netbook Giveaway

To celebrate this red letter day, we'll be giving away two Dell Mini 10 netbooks to some lucky readers. If you want to enter, just "like" our Facebook page and leave a wall post telling us what excites you most about the next year of HackCollege. Get your wall posts in by Friday, and we'll pick out a couple of winners.

We hope you all enjoy the new site! Let us know what you think in the comments, or hit us up on Twitter.

Idiotproofing Your Facebook Photos and Videos

Yep, THAT red cup. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Chris Makarsky. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

So it happened. Your first red cup picture has made its appearance on Facebook. Most likely you're underage - and you're probably a freshman who let your squeaky clean high school reputation slip a bit. But the question is - what do I do now?

In the United States, drinking under the age of  21 is illegal. However, for some reason, social networking sites like Facebook are hotbeds for photos of underage beer pong, keg stands, Jello shots, and undercover vice cops. 

Wait, what? Follow these tips below to protect yourself from getting into trouble by not being cautious enough on Facebook.

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Use a Hair Straightener to Combat Wrinkles

Are you a girl? Do you know a girl? If so, this trick is for you. Image courtesy of Flickr user Beebit and licensed under CC 2.0I'm officially convinced that women invented the concept of lifehacking centuries ago, and only recently did men decide to give it a name and create blogs about it.  It seems like every day my girlfriend gives me a lifehack she picked up at home without realizing how awesome it was, so I started writing them down to share on the site.

Anyway, not everybody has an iron and ironing board in their dorm room, so wrinkled clothes can be a real menace.  You could try to use downy, or hang your clothes up in the bathroom while you take a hot shower, but honestly neither of these options are ideal.  Luckily for you, you either a) are a girl, or b) have convenient access to a girl. My apologies for our friends at all-male colleges.  This is great, because most girls in my experience own a hair straightener, and it just so happens that this is all you need to get rid of wrinkles in a pinch.

I never thought twice about the device until my aforementioned girlfriend whipped it out when I had some wrinkles on the sleeve of a dress shirt.  Without so much as a word she plugged it in and closed my sleeve between the two heated ceramic plates, and slowly slid the iron down the length of the fabric.  Obviously, be sure you aren't wearing the shirt you're trying to iron.  It worked surprisingly well as a dual-sided iron, and the wrinkles were all but gone! 

This solution isn't necessarily ideal.  Most of these irons don't use any steam so you have to be wary of starting a fire in your closet. Also, since they close onto the fabric like a big pair of tweezers, ironing the main part of a shirt won't be as easy as getting to the sleeves.  Even so, it's easier than using a real iron, and it's probably a lot easier to find too.  Now that your wardrobe is freshly-pressed, don't forget to brush up on how to keep your clothes wrinkle-free when packing for a trip.

Practicing Safe Texting

Don't be like this guy. Image courtesy of Flickr user mrjasonweaver and licensed under CC by SA 2.0So you're driving home from work and you hear that familiar buzz coming from your pocket, purse, cupholder, passenger seat, etc, etc. It's your phone announcing that it has a brand new, juicy text for you to read. You look from your phone back to the road. To your phone. To the road. Do you pick it up? Do you leave it? Do you wait for a stop light? Do you have the self-control to resist reaching over and grabbing it? You might say, "It's just a peek at the message. Oh, well, actually, I need to reply to that, but it'll just take a second, and we're going down a straight street. No big deal." 

Unfortunately it is a big deal. According to statistics released by the Washington Post in January of this year, 28% of car accidents occur when people are talking on their phones or texting. 200,000 crashes every year are blamed solely on text messaging. So for text-addicted people who can't seem to resist sneaking a peek at that oh-so-urgent text, here are some tips to keep you and the rest of the drivers a little safer on the road.

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Her Campus Honored With 30 Under 30 Selection

Her Campus founders (from l-r) Stephanie Kaplan, Windsor Hanger, and Annie Wang got their start as undergrads. Congratulations to our friends at Her Campus, who were recently named as one of Inc. Magazine’s 30 Under 30 entrepreneurs. The site, a lifestyle hub for the modern “collegiette,” uses a team of nearly 400 student contributors to produce articles on style, health, love, dorm life, the workplace, and world news.

The founders wanted to “speak to the...unique set of wants and needs” of college women too old for Seventeen and too young for Marie Claire “that were not being addressed elsewhere,” said co-founder Stephanie Kaplan. HackCollege readers might enjoy their recent articles on what to eat as an intern, how not to get confused for a high schooler, and how to turn a summer camp job into a career--all useful, and all unlikely to be covered in a traditional women's magazine.

The site’s success is due in part to its way of distributing both national and local content. The main site shows articles of general interest, while individual “campuses” show content for specific colleges and universities. This allows readers at schools with no women’s magazine of their own to get content of specific interest to them while still building off the resources of a national site. As a result of the format, Her Campus has gone from having a team just at Harvard (the site’s home school) to having a presence at more than 40 colleges and universities nationwide.

As the founders--Stephanie Kaplan, Windsor Hanger, and Annie Wang--go forward (Kaplan and Hanger graduated last year), they hope to add even more individual schools and become “a staple for every college girl’s life,” said Kaplan. Readers interested in starting up a Her Campus branch of their very own can apply here. 

[30 Under 30 via Inc.com.]