Tag Archives: college

Gone, baby gone

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For the love of Christ, don’t put two condoms on. That is a terrible idea!

I am officially (as of last Saturday) in possession of an Associate of Arts degree from Oxford College of Emory University. It’s not actually in anything, as far as I can tell, but they gave me an inconveniently large piece of parchment with my name in a fancy font on it, so that’s got to be worth something. Thus ends my frequently-emotionally-conflicted tenure at the better of Emory’s two options for starting your degree*.

There was a lot of talk during the commencement speeches about community. That has been my favorite part about Oxford. When my car battery decided to scare me by almost going belly-up before graduation, I knew that there were people at Oxford who would help me tow my car or haul in a replacement battery or generally listen to me freak out. One of my friends helped me jump my car at 10:30 at night in the cold, and there is something–a very real something–to be said for friends who will help you out when they do not have to and when it is inconvenient and cold and late. There is something to be said for that, particularly when those people include not just your peers but your professors, your boss, and your chaplain (doubly so if you, like me, are an atheist–our chaplain’s awesome). That is wonderful. Continue reading →

I want to get it published.

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Paper monsterNews Paper Origami Dragon Monster / epSos .de / CC BY 2.0

I’ve been talking a lot lately about essays. This is partly because, as of today, I am done with classes at Oxford College (woo! and also, wah!) and so I and my friends are writing lots and lots of term papers now (including mine on Facebook and death). But mostly, it’s because several of my friends have had some very similar interactions in the last few days. They go like this.

SANE PERSON: Done with my paper!

CRAZY CLASSMATE: How long is it?

SANE PERSON: Fifteen pages. You?

CRAZY PERSON: Oh, 35. I want to get it published.

This has happened with us on papers with 12-page limits, on papers with 20-page limits, and on papers with one-page limits. Someone-typically multiple someones–turns in a paper 10-20 pages longer than the maximum word limit assigned by the professor. This bothers my friends.

It’s offensive to begin with because, if nothing else, turning in final papers twice as long as requested indicates that students do not value a professor’s time. The professor presumably knows how long it takes her to grade 20 five-page papers, and so that is what she has budgeted. When one person (or five) turn in papers of 10 pages, then the professor is put in a bind. Plus, speaking from a purely self-interested standpoint, turning in papers which are longer than requested takes away time from every other student in the class, meaning that their papers (the ones that followed the requirements!) are likely to receive a less thorough evaluation than they might otherwise. It’s not that the people who turn in extra-long papers are bad people, but they are being inconsiderate. There needs to be a reassertion that maximum word limits are there for a reason, not just for shits and giggles. Grading takes time. Turning in unasked-for huge papers wastes that.

More worryingly, approaching papers in this way seems to indicate an underlying problem of a culture which values quantity over quality. Students are encouraged to do more: more clubs, more classes, more honors societies. Little attention is paid–by faculty and staff or by students–to doing better. At best, this leads to substandard work and clubs dominated by the same small group of people who are minimally invested–the same complaint that I’ve been making at HackCollege over the last few weeks. At worst, as Lena Chen has been discussing on her blog this week, it leads to a college culture which promotes mental illness and anxiety disorders. Colleges need to look at what they are doing as institutions to encourage this approach to learning.

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Number Six

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This is the sixth-most-played song in my iTunes library (after, among other things, “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” and the Beastie Boys). It’s a cover of another song, which is number eight.

It’s weird to me that they’re both in my top ten. They’re both very much tied to strong emotional periods in my life, they way you have when you’re in high school freshman year of college, and you Feel with a capital “f.” The first song is a cover of the second, originally by The Knife, a weirdass Swedish band that wears bird masks and makes electronic music, which I was introduced to as a junior in high school by the boy who would later turn my heart into ground beef.

It was the summer after my junior year of high school, and it was one of those summers that actually mattered (and the last time I would have a free summer before being shunted off to Nerd Camp I, Nerd Camp II, and employment for different kinds of personal growth). Most of my friends were a year older than me, and I got sucked into their celebrations of having graduated in between being mad at my parents and brewing wine in a Nalgene in my closet (memories!). There was a lot of drinking Two Buck Chuck and finally feeling like I had people who liked me enough that they wouldn’t shun me if I danced around them, and taking long-exposure glowstick photos, and singing along to Kimya Dawson in the car without a whole lot to worry about.

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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 →

Back from New York

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I just came back from my whirlwind Fall Break weekend trip up to New York for Microsoft’s Open House. (The trip was sponsored by Microsoft and run by uniformly delightful people, so I feel bad that I’m writing this on a MacBook. Not enough to switch, but, y’know, bad.)

Managed to start the trip off with a solo subway trip from the swanky hotel (in which I was not able to work the elevator, because I am not wealthy enough for that kind of crazy) to the American Museum of Natural History. I managed to unintentionally stumble onto their 10th anniversary celebrations on 10/10/10 for the Rosa Space Center. There was acapella music done by astrophysicists in addition to the normal battery of amazing bones and things. I was delighted.

I even got to commune with my friend the giant ground sloth!

It was more fun this year (in addition to just being nerdy) because I’m in Biological Anthropology, and the Human Origins hall was basically just a collection of the things that will be on my next test, except that they may have actually been real and certainly weren’t made out of plaster. Turns out the American Museum of Natural History is better funded than Oxford. Shocking, I know. I’ll let you catch your breath. Continue reading →

Anthologize Heads the Next Generation of Self Publishing

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Anthologize is decked out in the soothing orange and cream color scheme of progress.

If you’ve got a blog running WordPress (the self-hosted .org variety), Anthologize is a plugin which will allow you to publish your posts as a PDF, ePub, or TEI (a scholarly file format). There’s also an RTF option, but the creators point out that it’s still buggy. There is not currently an option to export files as DocX or ODT, but the program’s creators say it’s a feature to look for in future builds, along with the ability to export comments left on the original posts.

Anthologize is targeted at academics–for instance, professors who kept a class blog, or someone who wants to distribute their notes about a conference, or someone who wants to publish field notes as part of a research notebook. The academic focus is a result of the plugin’s origin at the One Week, One Tool program, in which 12 humanities scholars come together and conceive of and build a useful open source digital tool within a week. The program, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, sees itself as sort of a digital barn raising: a group of people coming together to make something useful for the wider community.

Read the rest at HackCollege.

Riot Grrls Rise Up (Also, Vervets)

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So, in case you were wondering what I’ve been up to, it involves vervet skulls. (Yes, I do spend an inordinate amount of time in the skull lab. To the point that the work-study student there is sad when I do not visit. You too can hook up with a Huffington Post-published blogger/librarian/skull enthusiast! Fellas.)

Other than that, I’ve been in that weird state where I know I’m ungodly busy (I’m taking 5 classes, sitting in on another, TA-ing, and writing for HackCollege, a college profile book, and OpenStudy. Hahah, I make terrible life decisions.) but it doesn’t feel that way. Either this is what time budgeting feels like or I’m precariously juggling all my responsibilities right now and at any moment I’m going to go teetering off the precipice into despair and scholarship loss. Tune in to find out!

Other than that, I’ve mostly been musing about why I am so bothered about college blogs targeted at women. (I also have not been studying for Social Problems. Correlation?) I think what it is about it is that there is ample space for publications both print and intertubular to address 18-23-year-old women, but they so rarely are. Bust skews a little bit older (it assumes you’re out of school), and Jezebel isn’t focused on issues affecting women in college so much as in pop culture. My own beloved employer doesn’t address women’s issues because it’s not a focus of the blog, and the women’s college blogs that are out there are so completely derangedly unrelated to my experience as a woman in college.

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WebGreek Provides Information Management for Greek Life

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These ladies know that better information management gives you more time to perfect your grim staring and Gibson Girl hairstyle. Image courtesy of Albion College Special Collections. Licensed under CC 2.0 BY-NC-ND.

As we saw in Sean’s post, sometimes communicating with your Greek organization can present its own unique set of challenges. WebGreek is attempting to address them by making an information management suite targeted at Greek organizations.

The service isn’t free–$19/month for under 40 members, $39/month for under 100 members, and $59/month for everyone else–but they seem to be banking on the fact that Greek organizations will pay for ease of use.

Once a group signs up, it gets a chapter page on which users can see a group calendar, links to nationals, uploaded files, or whatever users have added to the public space. WebGreek has a built-in text editor and list maker, as well as plans to add a bill collection feature soon. Each chapter gets 10GB of cloud storage and 20GB of bandwith. Each individual member gets 1GB of storage to do with what they please.

Read more at HackCollege.

And by “care package,” I mean “bomb.”

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Beep, beep, beep... It's Hotmail! Image courtesy of Flickr user Cindy Seigle. Licensed under CC 2.0 BY-NC-SA.

Today Microsoft sent me a care package. It included: a pedometer, a thumb drive, a cork screw, bubble wrap, a book on origami, and an alarm clock. With the alarm going off.

You guys, Mail Services thought I had received a bomb.

Now, can you guess what product Microsoft was trying to advertise with this assortment of items? If you guessed the launch of the new Hotmail, you’re right. In addition, you must work for Microsoft’s marketing department, because there is no one else on Earth who could make that connection. It was a terrible package. For one,  the package was a giant waste of resources, shipping fuel, and manufacturing costs. The only part of it that I kept was the thumb drive–the envelope-shaped box, the corkscrew, the pedometer, the origami book, the alarm clock, and the bubble wrap all went to people sitting with me at lunch. Secondly, it was poorly-targeted. There is no demographic that likes all those things, and though they were all loosely tied to the launch (you can “hit the snooze button” because Hotmail is so fast, and the like), they were mostly confusing. I didn’t know what the box was for, and I had been sent an email about the launch three days ago with no mention of the box in it.

But the thing that set me off, aside from the general poor planning and execution of the campaign, was the god-damn alarm clock. Who in their right mind sends a beeping package through the mail? If nothing else, it was annoying the mail services employees, who are all lovely people and who are not paid to listen to Microsoft’s bad marketing go off all morning. But more than that, sending something that says “sketchy device! Maybe a bomb!” through the mail is a terrible idea. Continue reading →

Make Life Easier: Ask a Librarian

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Librarians: they're like superheroes in that they save you during finals and have secret lairs. Image courtesy of Flickr user Monika Bargmann. Licensed under CC 2.0 BY-NC-ND.

The school library (or, if you’re at a big school, libraries) are part of almost every college tour. Of course, in the age of digital information, the actual books contained in the library are no longer students’ most important resource at the library–instead, the librarians are.

Though often overlooked and under appreciated, librarians can make a student’s life much easier if they’re asked. Though your school may not have a program as intensive as Drexel’s personal librarian program, where freshmen get their own librarian to show them the research ropes, even the most unassuming librarian has training to help you find out what you need to know. If you’re looking for places to start, try these suggestions:

Instant Message a Librarian – Many universities have their librarians set up on Meebo, a site-nested instant messaging client that became unexpectedly very popular with the librarian community. If your university has a Meebo setup, you can anonymously ask librarians a silly or embarrassing question (where is the science building?), renew a book without going to the library, or ask them to help you when a professor has screwed up putting a book you need on reserve. A smaller number of schools even have a “text a librarian” feature for when you’re away from a browser. If your school doesn’t have either of these services set up, the Alexandrian Public Library, Texas State University Library, and Emory University Library all offer chat widgets that you can use for non-school-specific questions.

Read the rest at HackCollege.