This Week's Best Questions on Discuss Campus - Week of April 9, 2010

Question cat has a question. Photo from flickr user silgeo, licensed under CC 2.0 Generic.

Another week, another roundup! We've got some pretty juicy questions this week.

Please also welcome me in congratulating our latest user to reach 1,000 reputation points, Tessa! She's a current junior at SDSU. There's a Discuss Campus laptop skin on the way!

Dating in College

College is an interesting moment in most people's lives. Think about it. All of a sudden, you are:

• fresh out of the hormone-fest known as high school
• living away from your parents
• alcohol is around. and it is copious.

What do you think? What is your idea of a good college dating experience?

Coming out in a small social circle

I happen to live with a rather small social circle, most of which is my department. In the last 2 years, I've come to the realization that I'm very likely gay. Unfortunately, almost all of my social circle is composed of straight guys, including those in my department...

How would you suggest dealing with this? How would you prefer to receive this news?

One piece of advice...

So, it's that wonderful time of year again. The time when high school students across the nation are receiving acceptance/rejection letters and deciding on where they will attend for the next four-ish years.

We were all there. Probably.

If you could go back in time and give your-soon-to-be-collegiate-self one piece of advice, what would it be?

Got the answer? Head over to Discuss Campus!

Hack Your Way to Better Seats

Above: my ticketed seat for the Women's National Championship game. Below: My seat for 3/4 of the game.Sporting events are a lot of fun, but the good seats aren't very friendly for the college student's budget.  I recently attended some NCAA Tournament basketball games, I frequent NBA matchups, and love heading to the ballpark for summer baseball.  Here are some tips I've picked up over the years to help you get closer to the action.

Scout Ahead

You're setting yourself up for failure if you're roaming the arena's lower bowl willy-nilly.  Start out at your ticketed seats in the upper decks, and start plotting your upgrade from this perch.  Find a few sets of seats you might want, and keep your eye on them.  If nobody has touched them about a quarter-way through the game, it's pretty unlikely anybody is going to.  You should be able to scope these out with the naked eye in most basketball arenas, but football and baseball stadiums might require a pair of cheap binoculars.  

Once you have your seats picked out and the section number memorized, figure out your point of entry.  Look at the three closest entrances to the section.  If you can see the ushers from your vantage point, watch them for a minute and see if any of them aren't really checking tickets; that's your insertion point.  If you can't see the ushers from your seat, you'll need to do this reconnaissance work in the concourse.

Click to read more ...

Top 5 Resume Boosters to Make Your Resume Stand Out

How can you rise to the top? Photo by flickr user goh-wz.livejournal.com licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Today's guest post comes from Jay Willingham, a current senior at UT Austin (Hook 'em). He also runs the up and coming site, CampusByte. Head on over and check it out! If you'd like to write a guest post for HackCollege, please read the Guest Posting at HackCollege guidelines and then send us an email!

First off, this is not an article about "how" to write a resume. Hopefully you've got that already figured out by following a sample or a resume guide. This is about the 5 most important aspects you must incorporate into your resume that will cause your potential employer to stop, take a second look and leave a lasting impression.

5. It All Starts in High School

It is imperative that you don't go into listing every single activity or club you belonged to in high school. You'll have plenty of opportunity to show just how "well rounded" you are when you get to your college activities. But what you should point out and include are achievements of major significance, such as Valedictorian or Salutatorian.

The remaining 4 tips after the jump!

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Unpaid Internships: Soon to Be a Thing of the Past?

I was pleasantly awoken yesterday to a New York Times article titled "Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say." I say, "No shit," although I am not an official.

Unpaid internships are one of the gravest injustices against students today. Some of the best candidates are unable to work for free, so companies that only offer unpaid internships automatically limit their applicant pool. I've been lucky enough to only work paid internships throughout school. It's nice to see that the Times is covering this, because it's the status quo in the film industry in Los Angeles. The only people entering the film industry are those that can afford to do so. It's bullshit. The Times reports,

At Little Airplane, a Manhattan children’s film company, an N.Y.U. student who hoped to work in animation during her unpaid internship said she was instead assigned to the facilities department and ordered to wipe the door handles each day to minimize the spread of swine flu.

Tone Thyne, a senior producer at Little Airplane, said its internships were usually highly educational and often led to good jobs.

How has this become acceptable?

Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say [via the New York Times]

Got an opinion? Blow off some steam in the comments. Ugh.

Friday Fun: GTD?

Top 6 Considerations in Choosing Your Browser as a Student

Chrome. Picture by flickr user nDevilTV and licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Today's post is a guest post from Sunny Singh, a student a Stoke Park School Sixth Form in the UK studying A-Levels. (Honestly, I'm not quite sure what that means but it sounds impressive, yeah?) His guest post is about choosing the right browser as a student. If you'd like to write a guest post yourself, shoot us an email!

A web browser is probably the most used tool in the world. Web browsers allow users to enable add ons that can make our browsing experience better or enable Life Hackers such as ourselves to find out how much time is spent on the internet. 
To break down which is the best browser for you, lets think of how college love life is like. 
College love life is fast, it is usually done efficiently, has no strings whatsoever, is intended for the cutest girl, comes with many bonuses and the most important part is the fun. In that perspective let’s look at the some relevant categories and browsers.

For the people who have no idea about how many web browsers there are out for them, here’s a list: Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, Firefox, Avant, FlashPeak, Sleipnir, Flock, K-meleon and Maxthon.

Your 6 considerations after the jump!

Click to read more ...

Maximize Your Amazon Shopping Prowess

Shipping costs can make anybody want a hug. Photo by Flickr user sⓘndy²º¹º licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0I never really got into online shopping until college, but I'm totally hooked now.  I'm a loyal Amazon user, and am consistently amazed by their endless selection and impressive deals.  It makes driving out to a store where I'll pay twice as much seem pretty silly.  Here are a few apps/extensions I've found that make the online shopping experience even better.

Filler Item Finder

Shipping costs...oh those shipping costs. That $5 really is a downer.  We all know that Amazon offers free, and not too-terribly-slow, shipping on orders of more than $25.  I've found myself more than once in a situation where I have an order of $24 and some change, and just need one more chachka to get over the hump.  If you need some help finding that elusive cheap crap, head to filleritemfinder.com.  All you need to do here is enter how much you need to spend to get free shipping, and the site will generate a list of cheap items on Amazon you can buy to qualify.  There is really a shockingly large market for $1 or less car parts on Amazon...who knew?

Amazon Discount Search

The next tip is a super-handy Firefox Extension called Amazon Discount Search.  This is pretty easy to explain: right click at any time, scroll through the extension's menu to choose the category of item you're interested in, and what percentage markdown you prefer.  You'll immediately be taken to a page with all of Amazon's current discounts that met your criteria.  It's an incredibly convenient tool for the bargain shopper (and really, who isn't these days?)

Wish List

Finally, there's the Amazon Universal Wish List Firefox extension.  Amazon's wish list feature is great for tipping off friends and family to what you may be eyeing for your birthday, or even just for keeping track of your material desires over time.  This extension will let you instantly add any item from any website to your Amazon wish list.  That way, if you see some awesome gadget on Hackcollege, but don't have the patience to find the corresponding item on Amazon.com, you can add it to your wish list and deal with it later.

Review All Marked Evaluations

Since most grades are reported via Blackboard or ANGEL these days, students rarely actually see their graded papers and exams. Today’s tip comes courtesy of a friend who works as a Teaching Assistant, “Always schedule an exam review with your TA or professor.” Here’s a few facts about TA’s:

• They are sometimes usually terrible markers
• They are overworked
• They don’t really care about you.

 When you put it all together, it’s easy to see how a TA might make a mistake when grading your paper. Just recently, I went in to review a mid-term exam I scored 72% on. The professor gave me my exam and an answer key to see where I went wrong. My intention was just to get an idea of what kinds of mistakes I had made so I’d be prepared for the final. I ended up finding several answers where I had written the same points found on the answer key, simply in different wording. I politely pointed this out to the professor who rewarded me full marks. On one question I failed to provide any of the suitable points for marks, but I succeeded in showing my understanding verbally while talking with the prof. He gave me half marks. At the end of the quick 15 minute review session I managed to raise my mark to an 80%.

To summarize, reviewing marked exams shows the professor that you care which can translate into bonus marks if you can demonstrate your knowledge. Reviewing marked exams also lets you identify your mistakes so you don’t make them on subsequent evaluations and gives you the chance to ensure that your work was fairly graded. Basically, reviewing marked exams = higher marks. Suddenly the 15 minutes of time you invest makes a lot of sense.