Keep Your Body From Falling Apart During Finals

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Finals are approaching, and for many students that means hours of studying supported only by coffee and occasional sugar-filled study breaks. Not surprisingly, this wrecks your health, lowers your concentration, and makes you a dead person by the end of finals. Laura’s already done a great job covering environmental hacks for finals–now we’re focusing on how to keep your body from falling apart during study time. Here are a few ways to avoid that inevitable crash-and-burn cycle so you can finish up testing and head home for important winter break activities, like chugging egg nog until your arteries cry.

Get a flu shot – As soon as you can (preferably before you start taking your exams), get a flu shot if you haven’t already. Your student health center probably provides them for free or cheap. You may normally have the immune system of a horse, but long periods of study punctuated by lack of sleep and bad food can reduce your immunity–and you don’t want to be vomiting any more than you have to on your Computer Science final.

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Winning Friends and Influencing People: College Cause Edition

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College is a time for people to get really involved in something they’re passionate about, whether it’s a Free Tibet, vegetarianism, their college political party of choice, or something else entirely. However, what starts out as a well-intentioned passion for social change can quickly take a nosedive into the realm of irritating (and alienating) everyone around you. Here are some tips to prevent that from happening and, hopefully, encourage others to listen to you.

Don’t get confrontational: This is the particular problem of newly-converted vegetarians (especially if they came to it via PETA). There is nothing wrong with not eating meat (or only buying fair trade, or campaigning for a candidate), but there is something wrong with being rude to people who disagree with you. If, to use the vegetarian example, you rag on your friends every time they sit down with a dining hall steak, they will grow to hate you. However, if they simply begin to notice that you don’t eat meat and ask about it, it can be the opening for a great conversation about why you’ve made the switch. You don’t want your defining feature to be your cause, because that alienates people who don’t initially agree with you. You want to be “Tim, my lab partner who uses Linux and doesn’t eat meat,” and not, “Tim, that asshole who glares at me when I grab a burger.” There’s a difference.

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Slogging Towards Turkey

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My friend saw this and was convinced I had joined a sorority. Nope. We just learn their slimming arm-pose techniques.

It’s been a long couple of weeks. We’re hitting the point in the semester where the work is piling up in forboding sorts of ways (I have an English paper, a response paper, a Women in Cross Cultural Perspectives response and essay, an annotated bibliography for Social Problems, and a lab for Bio Anthro due by December 7th), and it’s rainy and honestly all I want to do is take a nap.

But, it has been a good few weeks too. I went up to Blue Ridge with Elizabeth and my family, and we climbed Amicalola Falls (and by “we” I mean “Elizabeth and my parents” because my sister and I were too lazy to go more than halfway up), and it was lovely and there was tons of food and I napped. I even got to sit on an easy chair and I swear to god, of all of the stupid things I miss since entering college, furniture is high, high on the list. It almost makes me want to rent a house rather than live in the dorms next year. Continue reading →

HackCollege Reading List: Concerning the Soul

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“Yes, then you remember that once a professor said something like this to you, that the world was suffering from materialism and intellectualism. He was quite right, but he cannot be your physician any more than he can be his own. With him intelligence goes on discoursing to the point of self-annihilation. He will perish.”

— “Concerning the Soul,” Hermann Hesse

The essay that that quote comes from (which a kind person has scanned, along with a variety of other excellent books, here) was sent to me this morning by a friend. It urges honesty in communication and, when speaking, true expression of feelings. If you’re excited, it seems to say, share that with people.

Read the rest at HackCollege.

Home for the Holidays: Explaining Your Major to Friends and Family

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Students are gearing up to head home for Thanksgiving and winter breaks, and that means getting back into the swing of life with family–including explaining what you’re doing at school to your parents’ friends and your extended family. For some people (engineering majors and pre-med people), this is not so bad! For others, it can be a little stressful. Here’s how to handle some of the most common less-than-positive results.

“So you’re planning to go to law school?” or “A future teacher, I see!” – This one tends to be tossed at Political Science majors (and liberal arts majors in general) by people who see law school/teaching as a backup plan. This can be frustrating for people who actually do want to be lawyers or teachers, since it implies they’re following a predictable path, and for people who are interested in other things (for instance, being the next Nate Silver) it’s equally irritating. It’s best to pick your battles–if it’s someone you’re only going to see once, laugh and say, “Anything’s possible!” before finding some more eggnog. For family members and people who will be interacting with you when you finish school, a little more explanation can be good. If you are, say yes and give a short summary of what kind of law you want to do or why you want to become a teacher. If not, something like, “Actually, no. But I am planning to try for the Peace Corps!” will usually do the trick. You want to make the point that there are other career paths than law school or teaching that you can follow. Don’t stress about one-off encounters too much, though–over the holidays it’s best to save your energies for people who you’ll be seeing again.

Read the rest at HackCollege.

People Can Be Horrible (Also: Arrowheads!)

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First off, new post at OpenStudy. Ten points to online learning!

Secondly: I spent most of this weekend at the Safe Society Zone‘s Sexual Assault in Our Schools conference. It was at times inspiring, at times depressing, and consistently heartbreaking because it is so, so infuriating that people think that it is okay to ever do that to anyone. And not even like it’s a small group of people–1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted. (Even better, 1 in 4 women in the military will be assaulted while they are in the military. And 96% of those assaults are committed by people who wear the same uniform.)

I know people who have been assaulted. They are the most amazing, most wonderful people and it makes me want to cut the asshole who did that to them because they do not have the right. It takes something that can be so, so good and it turns it awful and it hurts people and it fucks them up and they did nothing to deserve it.

So, those people can go to hell.

But it wasn’t all horrendously depressing. I learned about concrete actions I can take to help fix that. (Look out for changes in Oxford’s amnesty policy to accommodate sexual assault and an attempt to get No Zebras, No Excuses screened at frosh orientation next year.) I met the people at Central Michigan University, who have the most amazing peer advocate program. There are men and they are allies; there are women and they are strong. The entire program is well-run and victim-sensitive and just so very, very good. That doesn’t change the fact that I wish it didn’t have to exist.

Continue reading →

StudyBlue Creates On-the-Go Flashcards

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StudyBlue has the hippest layout since Tumblr and an excellent flashcard feature, to boot.

If you’re looking for a browser-based note-taking and flashcard tool, StudyBlue may be your new favorite site. Because the service is targeted specifically at students, it’s organized in ways that closely mirror the binders of notes that it hopes to replace: data is organized by classes, and the two content options (note and flashcards) closely mimic their analog counterparts. However, unlike paper-based notes, these are accessible from any browser and can include rich text, sound, and images.

The easy-to-use interface and text formatting tools are strong points for the service. Sign-up takes thirty seconds, and only requires visiting the site’s front page and clicking an email confirmation link. The formatting tools work just like they would in a desktop text editor, but they focus on what’s useful for note-taking: lists, indentations, colors, and super- and subscript. I know that the science, tech, math, and engineering students I know have trouble taking computer notes because equations are difficult to type out. The dedicated super- and subscript buttons could make typing out STEM equations worlds easier. StudyBlue has nailed a feature that is rarely implemented as well or as cleanly as it is with the service. There is also a non-English character button, but cycling through it to get to the right Greek letter is probably less efficient than just learning the keyboard shortcuts for the letters.

Read the rest at HackCollege.

Vaseline on the Lens of Your Memories

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The Dalai Lama wears a sun visor to block stage lights. He is delightful. Image courtesy of Flickr user Ferne Millen. Licensed under CC 2.0.

[photo source]

It has been a busy week, what with it only being Tuesday. First off, today I saw the Dalai Lama speak at Emory, which was pretty sweet. (He had a tiny sun visor!) Plus, tonight my residents managed to fill a UNICEF box in literally five minutes. They are the bomb! Plus, my OpenStudy blog post went up and I registered the Riot Campus domain and life is good.

While at Emory after the Dalai Lama talk, my cohorts and I ran into literally every frickin’ junior at the school that we knew. It was kind of insane. The non-Oxfordians were wondering who the hell the screaming people in the sweatpants blocking the aisles were, I’m sure.

There was an uncomfortable run-in with a member of our group and her Atlanta campus ex. She came to our table, somewhat irritated: “I wish I could quit feeling! I just want an off switch!” I do not know this girl that well, so I didn’t say much, but I wanted so badly to say that I felt her pain. I have been there! It took me six-ish months and a lot of my life becoming awesome to not be there! And even now, with the knowledge that it was a bad relationship and I am better off single and holy shit how awesome is my life right now, even with that, when I saw my ex’s best friend sitting in the chairs behind me today I started to feel physically ill. I don’t think it ever goes away entirely. Continue reading →

Microsoft Open House: The Review

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Windows phone 7 was the star of the event. It was, to its credit, very pretty.

As you saw last week, I was able to interview Steve Ballmer as part of the Microsoft Open House. But that was really a small portion of the overall event. Most of the day was spent on the launch and demonstration of the new, the shiny, Windows Phone 7. Microsoft will be releasing three of the phones on AT&T for $199.99 in the coming months, and there will eventually be 9 phones released–the next carrier set to get them is Verizon, which will see them next year.

Before we start anything: the new Windows 7 phones don’t have a copy and paste feature. They will get it starting next year.

Moving on: Microsoft completely overhauled the Windows Phone interface for Phone 7, and it shows. The focus of the new phones is on the devices as extensions of people. As a result, it’s possible to add individual contacts to your desktop as apps. Their app will update with their latest Facebook or Windows Live updates, so you don’t have to enter into the app itself to see what your friends are up to. Unfortunately, the contacts apps aren’t integrated into Twitter–and the Microsoft representatives were a little cagey as to when (of if) that would happen. There is a dedicated Twitter app; however, it’s not dynamic at the main screen level.

Read the rest on HackCollege.

HackCollege Interview: Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft

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Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. Image courtesy of Flickr user JD Lasica. Licensed under CC 2.0 BY-NC.

FTC Disclosure: Microsoft paid for my trip to New York, my hotel, and my food. Blogging is awesome!

It’s a weird thing to sit down with $14.5 billion, but on Monday I did just that. As part of the Windows Phone 7 launch at the Microsoft Open House, I had the chance to sit down with Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, and ask him about the future of Microsoft’s relationship with students–especially in light of their release of Windows Phone 7–the future of technology, and what students should be doing to break into tech fields.

We started off the interview talking about Windows Phone 7, as the press conference about the new phones had happened just a few hours earlier. Ballmer was, unsurprisingly, adamant that he thinks Windows Phone 7 phones are the best choice for college students. He said that user experience with Android phones is patchy–it’s hard to know an Android phone is an Android phone when you pick it up–and iPhones only offer one model, ignoring that some people might want a QWERTY keyboard or different speakers. He’s of the opinion that giving students a “consistently delightful” (yes, that’s really the slogan) user experience over a variety of phones will draw them back from competing smartphone options. Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen, but for middle-of-the-road users (people who don’t want to root their Android phone and who want something more rugged than an iPhone), he may have steered Microsoft towards a winning strategy.

Read the rest on HackCollege.