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. 

A Syncing Solution for Macs

Image via doubleTwist Press siteMore and more college students are buying Macs to handle their college computing needs. While Macs are nice, everyone knows they lack the freedom to sync non-Apple devices with them. Now, Motorola and RIM and Google have come out with great smartphones and Sony with a great portable gaming device.  All of the aforementioned gadgets have multimedia capabilities that can't use the music, videos and photos on Macs because they aren't supported. doubleTwist tries to correct that nonsense with a piece of software that can sync Android, Blackberry, Kindle as well as a host of others that can be found here.

doubleTwist has teamed up with Amazon MP3, bringing a music store to the application. This makes it easier to take advantage of the cheaper albums (sometimes as low as $5.00) with out having to do a lot of extra legwork to have it in a music library.

Unfortunately there is no support for eBooks in the Amazon store so it isn't a one-stop-shop in that regard. The Kindle does support audio, so putting recorded lectures and textbooks in the same place.

Guest Post: Ramenbox.com Review

Introducing... the Ramenbox. Photo by Blake Sutton.

This guest post comes from my younger brother, Blake Sutton. He's currently a sophomore at Notre Dame studying biochemistry or something. I don't like ramen so I forced him to write this review.

Going to school in the Midwest has few advantages. When you move in during the summer everything is humid and sticky. During the winter, snow gets dumped on you. The nearest Asian supermarket is in Chicago. It is nearly impossible to get decent ramen around here, something I miss from the West Coast.

Click to read more ...

The Princeton Review Ranks "Best Value" Colleges - Save Money with Expensive Schools

I'm not usually the Matt Lauer type, but this video about The Princeton Review's "Best Value" Colleges makes two good points:

1. You have to apply for aid. No excuses. I don't care how big the trust fun is. If you have friends who don't apply for aid, slap them and then tell them that you'll fill out the forms in exchange for 20% of the proceeds. (You can't really do that. It's just to prove a point. But, I guess you already slapped your friend, which might prove the point also. Maybe we're over-proving here. I don't know.) The FAFSA is also important to getting work-study, which you'll want no matter how much you can afford to make it rain.
2. Look for "good value" colleges, not "cheap" ones. Transferring to a cheaper school won't solve your budgetary woes! What's The Princeton Review mean by "good value"? It means that more expensive schools can actually cost you less than "cheap" ones. Spendy colleges tend to re-distribute tuition from rich people into the Financial Aid office -- and do other such friendly acts for its less-fortunate students. It's kind of messed up, but that's how it goes.

See the full list of the top 10 value public colleges and the top 10 value private colleges.