Win a Free Netbook! Announcing the Discuss Campus Race to 5,000

Last week, Chris and I attended the Intel Youth Rockstars Summit in Santa Clara, California. It was a great time and we hung out with some other established student (or just young) bloggers like Teresa Wu, Nicole Ross, Serena Wu (not related), Fred Zaw, Daniel Brusilovsky and Corvida Raven, to name a few. One of the things we got for attending was a Dell Mini 10 netbook. I don't need the netbook, so why not give it away?

That's where you guys come in. Last November, we launched a site called Discuss Campus. You've probably seen the roundups from time to time on HackCollege. The site has a small tight-knit community constantly answering and asking questions. It's like HackCollege, but only crowd-sourced. (Which means you don't have to put up with our big egos for your daily dose of information intake.)

The cool thing about Discuss Campus is that it's built on a platform that allows us to track the best users. Each question that gets voted up gets you 10 reputation points. If 5 people vote up a post, you get 50 points. Cool. To further jump start activity on the site, we will be giving out the Dell Mini 10 netbook to the first user to legitimately reach 5,000 reputation points. Some people are well on their way to that 5,000 mark.

So this contest will be running until the winner is crowned, which should take a few weeks. Please remember to ask honest, thought-provoking questions. Our moderators will be on the lookout for voting fraud, so please don't try to cheat. So get on over to Discuss Campus and let the race begin!

Update on Tuesday, February 2, 2010 by Chris Lesinski

As is usual with HackCollege giveaways, you'll have to prove that you're a real student with a .edu email address to win the prize! 

Guest Post: The Best iPhone Apps for Students

Who can afford a dock? Not me. Photo by flickr user William Hook, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Today's guest post is from Shep McAllister, a sophomore at Trinity University. His post last week, "Dealing with a Car Accident in College," generated some healthy and not-so-healthy discussion about handling the logistics of a terrible situation. He's back again to discuss his favorite iPhone apps. Enjoy!

It’s a well established fact that iPhones and iPod Touches now outnumber male students on most college campuses. If you have one of these devices, be sure to keep these apps in your regular rotation to make college more pleasant. You’ll notice that most of these apps are pretty popular, and savvy iPhone users have probably heard of all of them. The reason for this is simple: most popular apps are popular because they’re good (or because they have pictures of women in their underwear, but I digress). Probably 90% of the apps in the store suck, including most of the ones supposedly geared towards college students. Presented here are some of the gems of the App Store, all of which I keep in my regular rotation, and have found indispensable throughout college.

All links open the iTunes App Store.

Click to read more ...

3 Small Dorm or Apartment Worthy Kitchen Tools

Image via Flickr user: kamath_lnThere comes a time in nearly every college student's life to stretch their culinary wings, and fly away to a place where there is no cafeterias. Here are some small (and cheap) tools to help you get settled after you come in for a landing. (I apologize for the terrible metaphor)

Rice Cooker

Rice  has two qualities that are hard to find together, at least when it comes to food.  It's cheap and healthy.  Unfortunately, to cook it you need a stove. Even if you have stove it's still hard to cook. There is a solution that solves both of the aforementioned problems.

Click to read more ...

Last Week's Best Discuss Campus Questions - January 31, 2010

The new semester is in full swing and so is Discuss Campus, the little question-and-answer site we launched last year. Here were last week's best questions:

21st Birthday Ideas when several friends aren't 21 yet?

So my buddy is turning 21 soon and I want to throw him an awesome bash. We're not really huge lets go out to clubs type of people we just like to chill and have a good time. The thing is we don't want him to feel like he missed out on something by just chilling. Only problem is that most of us aren't 21 yet and neither is his girl. Any ideas?

When should I start preparing to apply for grad school?

I'm thinking about applying for grad school in computer science and am wondering how long the process takes, what tests do I need to take and when most schools application deadlines are.

If you've got questions yourself, head on over to Discuss Campus and ask 'em. Think you know all the answers? Sign up and start answering!

Guest Post: Dealing with a Car Accident in College

Ouch. Photo by flickr user Adria Richards and licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0">CC BY-SA 2.0.

Today's guest post comes from Shep McAllister, a sophomore at Trinity University double majoring in communications and political science. He shares some advice about dealing with car accidents in school.

Having a car in college is awesome. You can escape campus whenever you want, members of the opposite sex flock to you for rides, and it helps establish a sense of independence and adulthood. It isn’t until you’re involved in your first car accident that you realize that being an adult can kinda suck, especially if you don’t know what you’re supposed to do.

I was recently rear-ended for the first time, and found myself clueless about what to do. I remembered that in the movies, the parties involved in the wreck exchange “information,” and then go on their merry way. Beyond this step I was pretty much lost, and while I was lucky enough to get my mom on the phone and a helpful officer on the scene, I realized that I needed to be better prepared if this were to ever happen again. So here’s a step-by-step guide I have put together, and am going to keep in my glove box from now on.

Click to read more ...

HackCollege in the Daily Trojan

It's been a while since HackCollege has been covered in an old-school newspaper. While you might know lifehacking forwards and backwards, many of the masses remain uneducated. And it's kind of cool to read yourself in something that is published every day on this technology historians refer to as "paper." The Daily Trojan published a piece today about lifehacking in college, something that we claim to know a lot about.

One of the best websites for making college life easier and more enjoyable is the aforementioned Hackcollege.com. Created by Lesinski and Kelly Sutton, two Loyola Marymount University students (the duo now teaches a class on web video distribution there), the site features tips and reviews on things ranging from finding the best espresso machine for the lowest cost or "10 ways to find a lost Word document."

I suppose I can forgive the fact that the Daily Trojan is a USC publication. (Grrrrr.)

How to lifehack your way through college, by Nicholas Slayton [The Daily Trojan]

Read the article and let us know what you think!

What the iPad Means for Students

Ooooooh. Or eeewwwwwwww? Photo by Matt Buchanan. Licensed under CC 2.0.

It's fair to say these days that students love Apple. The MacBook outsells every other laptop out there n the student demographic. The iPhone is the go-to smart phone for students: the $99 entry point is affordable and you can leave your parents with the monthly bill. Apple tried once again to explode the world today with the announcement of the iPad, the mythical Apple tablet. Unlike unicorns, these actually exist. There are many features on this thing, but I'm going to highlight the ones that will be particularly applicable to a student's lifestyle.

So what does the iPad mean for students?

Click to read more ...

The Cornell Note Method

The Cornell Note Method has been covered pretty extensively across the internet, but as your “one stop shop” for maximizing (hacking) your college experience, we’re obligated to cover it. Since adopting Cornell notes this semester, processing and reviewing my lecture notes has become a systematized and painless task.

Developped in the 1950’s by Walter Pauk, author of How to Study in College, the Cornell Note Method splits an ordinary piece of paper into 3 sections; notes, main points and summary. As you listen to the lecture, all notes are written under the notes section (duh...). If any main points can be identified right away you may write them in the main points section on the left hand side of the page. When processing your notes, additional main points are added to the main points section and finally a summary of the material covered is added to the bottom of the page.

By following this system you are forced to consider the big picture and avoid getting caught up in the finite details. When completing your weekly review, you simply review the main points section and the summary of the lecture. 

I’ve gotten plenty of odd looks and questions about the paper I use when taking notes, but those who I’ve convinced to give it a shot now swear by it. Here’s a link to a Word, Pages and PDF templates to print off for yourself. You can also purchase spiral bound Cornell notebooks here. 

Give the Cornell Method a shot in the next lecture you attend and post your thoughts in the comment section below.