College Life

Productivity

February 22, 2012 – 5:00 am

This is a guest post by Molly Cornfield, a senior at UCLA.

Last Saturday, my dad asked me how my post-college job search has been going.

“I’ve been so busy, Dad,” I told him, “Things have been crazy. I’ve barely had time to breathe.”

Ironically, at that moment I was paying fifty cents to hitch a ride on the Big Blue Bus and spend my afternoon walking along the beach. Idiotically, I disclosed this information to my father.

“If you don’t have time to look for jobs, then why are you going to the beach?”

And as I defensively stuttered my way through an answer, I realized that he was probably right. Maybe getting my life together should take priority over getting a tan.

On the other hand, maybe my sanity is worth a few hours of procrastination. Ever since learning about the merits of organic food in my Environmental Science Colloquium, I’ve been waking up early on Saturdays and/or Sunday to take a bus to Santa Monica, where I buy my groceries from local, Southern California farmers.

Over time, my pretentious weekly excursions have evolved into a cliché walk along the shoreline. While I’m not thrilled about the prospect of being a living personification of the popular comedy blog “Stuff White People Like,” my all-too-predictable ventures outside of the Westwood Village bubble are just the release I need to recuperate from a torturous school week and build up my strength for the one to follow.

Without my rejuvenating urban nature walks along the less than pristine Santa Monica Bay, I doubt I’d have the mental stamina to tear myself away from my Facebook wall and get back to my job hunt. Though this seemingly fruitless hobby (excuse the pun) may jut into my workable hours, I’d argue that it enhances my productivity during the long hours that I do spend staring my computer screen.

For most college students, the days are packed from start to finish, with tests, meetings, papers and even mandatory social activities. It often feels like classes and clubs are continuously piling tasks onto is an ever-growing mountain of “to-do’s.” Though there’s always something else that you should, or could be working on, it’s important to dedicate time to yourself. If you bury yourself in work without ever taking a breather, you’ll doubtlessly suffocate under all the pressure. So no matter how hectic your college life becomes, it’s important, for the sake of your mental well-being, to schedule in some time for the things you love.

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College Costs

College Tuition: Is It Worth It?

February 16, 2012 – 5:00 am

college tuitionIt’s no secret that the costs of a college education are skyrocketing to an all-time high. As the annual price tag of a private university shoots well beyond the average post-college salary, even society’s most educated are wondering: is it worth it?

Obviously, private institutions aren’t the only option. Public universities around the country serve the state taxpayer at a much lower price. Yet these schools are still exceeding the range of affordability for many American families, leaving community college as a remaining post-secondary option.

Though public schools and community colleges are certainly viable, affordable, and smart options, you mustn’t rule private schools out just yet. Private schools often offer advantages over state universities and community colleges, such as smaller classes, more support, and a head start in the workforce.

Though the price stated in college handbooks may make private schools look like an exclusive, rich-person club, they typically offer support for students without two-hundred grand in their college fund.

Private schools are frequently blessed with hefty endowments and generous donors, allowing them to supplement student tuition with financial aid. Many notable institutions, such as Harvard and Stanford, ensure that tuition for students from low-income households is covered by scholarships, grants and other funds, and they provide financial support for up to two-thirds of the student body.

However, this benefit is not a free handout at any school. Acquiring financial aid requires research, knowledge about your financial situation, and a bunch of extra applications. Though it may make an already stressful process even more laborious, it will, literally, pay off in the end.

It’s certainly not easy, but doing all the right paperwork can ease the financial burden of your college education and put you in a position to graduate from a quality private institution, free of excess debt.

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College Life

Just Say No

February 9, 2012 – 5:00 am

This is a guest post by Molly Cornfield, a senior at UCLA.

Sometimes it feels like everyone’s trying to convince me to say yes. Now, I don’t mean this in explicit or sort of way, as, judging from Hollywood approximations of college life, one might expect on a college campus. Rather, I’m referring to the continual equation of risk with innovation, creativity and success.

As a college student, or rather, as an individual who doesn’t live under a rock, I’m constantly being bombarded by sayings, mottos and propaganda such as, “just say yes,” or “just do it,” urging me to ignore my inhibitions and well, just go for it. Yet rarely do I hear about the value of saying no.

Obviously, it’s important to step outside your comfort zone. Trying new things is essential to our personal growth. Over the course of my college career, saying yes has helped me gain new friends, experiences and knowledge.

Yet it is equally important to know your limits. There are twenty-four hours in a day; you can only do so much with that time. On any college campus, there are hundreds of opportunities; you can’t take them all. Instead of “just saying yes” to every person who approaches you with a colorful flyer, weigh out your options and narrow down your selection to the things that are most important to you.

This principle extends beyond student groups and class projects into the realm of personal relationships. Over the last four years, without my parents close at hand, I’ve occasionally had to depend on my friends for favors, when I’ve misjudged my timing or made the assumption that I could single-handedly pack up my entire year’s worth of junk, take it to my friend’s place and hop on a plane in the span of eight hours. (As it turns out, I’m not superwoman, and my roommates had to clean up my mess for me, literally.)

Though as much as your friends may count on you to help them out, they’re also relying on your ability to say “no” when you don’t have the time. No one is (or at least, no one should be) expecting you to put your life on hold to simplify their own.

So as valuable as it is to say “yes,” a willingness to try new things goes hand-in-hand with the knowledge that you can’t do everything. Overcommitting yourself will stress you out, and diminish the quality of your final product, whether it’s a test, a project or a friendship.

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Higher Education

Sometimes You Just Have To Explore

February 2, 2012 – 5:00 am

studentOften, while on the arduous hunt for your perfect college, it seems like every university you tour expects you to know your ultimate life goal. Campus tour guides aiming to impress prospective students lecture about “passion” and give anecdotes of a driven pre-med, pre-law, pre-business, pre-etc. student whose unyielding motivation earned him a spot in a top professional school or pushed her to start a multi-million dollar corporation by the time she hit 23. All the while, the only passion your high school ever taught was a relative affinity for getting good grades.

As an undecided student, it might feel almost scary to be passion-less in college. It might seem that all your peers were admitted based on their unique and fervent passions, while you’d somehow managed to feign it on your applications. While others scramble to enroll in classes that count toward their already declared majors, you feel like a fraud for choosing your course schedule based on what sounds enjoyable.

Yet this relaxed, uncommitted mindset has its advantages. It allows you to sample many variations on the academic spectrum, trying out everything from courses on climate change, to philosophy, to comparative literature. Eventually, after a year or two of such sampling, when you do settle on a major, you are more likely to be truly happy with your choice – while in college, and later on as you develop your career.

However, one must be wary with this subject sampling method of underclassman college years. While intellectually stimulating academic exploration is doubtlessly beneficial for self-knowledge, mindlessly gliding through the easiest classes you can find probably won’t help you pick your passion. Passion doesn’t just tap you on the shoulder. You need to seek it out. The understanding, appreciation and possibly even love you can gain for a subject is proportional to the time, thought and effort that you invest in that class.

While course hopping during the first year or two of college may not be the most efficient way of finishing your degree, it provides you with an invaluable, well-rounded academic experience and an openness and respect for all subject matter. Not to mention, you are likely to accumulate several different “passions” along the way.

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College Costs

Why a College Degree is Still a Good Value

January 25, 2012 – 5:00 am

college studentAs we’re constantly bombarbed with news of the nearly exponential rise of college tuition combined with the heroic success stories of college-dropout technology moguls such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, it’s easy to become jaded about the value of a college degree. Though said minority of hotshots may make a bachelor’s degree look obsolete, we’re confident that a post-secondary education won’t be going out of fashion any time soon. Here are three reasons why:

1. Going to college is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to completely immerse yourself in an academic environment of intelligent, like-minded people your age. Not to mention, life on a college campus lends students the opportunity to interact with accomplished and often world-renowned professors. A university expands the minds of its students, and often changes their entire way of thinking. An in-person college experience can change the way you comprehend, interact with, and relate to the world.

2. The sad truth is that a college degree is the new high school degree. It is essentially a “must-have.” Though most often you’ll need a graduate or professional degree to advance in a career, it’s nonetheless quite difficult to stay the least bit competitive in today’s job market without a bachelor’s degree.

3. A college experience is worth far more than the education alone. For most Americans, college life is the first away-from-home experience. Come fall, hoards of coddled freshman across the country will suddenly find themselves responsible for their own laundry, meals, and sleep schedules. These new students will be thrown into a world without rules, where they are free to do as they please. Yet this push out of their comfortable, all-needs-met worlds forces them to control many aspects of their lives without the assistance of parental limitations.

This concept applies to academics as well as everyday life. Even if you’re considering a commuter university lifestyle, post-secondary learning offers a new level of academic independence, with the option to pick your own major and the responsibility to keep up in your classes without five different adults holding your hand the whole way through. College teaches us both how to live and how to learn.

While the rising cost of college likely has you questioning whether it’s worth it at all, a university education, and experience, is an invaluable commodity with which no price tag, no matter how hefty, should interfere.

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Becoming an Adult College Life

Learning From My Mistakes (Food and Otherwise)

January 17, 2012 – 5:00 am

This is a guest post by Molly Cornfield, a senior at UCLA.

I’m a self-proclaimed food snob. I regularly hit up the farmers’ markets, religiously abide by organic labels, and am willing to pay exorbitant amounts for a pesticide-free apple (with my parents’ money, of course). Considering the amount of thought I dedicate to the purchase of my vegetables, my food preparation skills are ironically lousy.

Don’t get me wrong, I try. Nor am I a complete failure; I make really good, vegetable-heavy pasta, and my Westernized stir-fry is unparalleled by my peers.

Yet I somehow manage to severely mess up the most basic dishes. No, not dishes. Simple, one-ingredient, foods.

For example, one day last winter, I had a hankering for some hard boiled eggs, a food so easy to prepare, even a frat boy could do it at the peak of his blood alcohol content. Since I have a particular aversion to runny eggs, I’ve established a habit of leaving my eggs on the stove for a little extra time. In this instance, I made the ever-intelligent decision to multi-task by taking a shower with the stove on.

Needless to say, my eggs met an unfortunate ending. Though the final product was indeed hardboiled, it was also fried, shell and all.

Today, my attempt at steamed broccoli had an outcome reminiscent to my great disaster of the hard-boiled eggs. After a mere few minutes of steaming a handful of the vegetable, I breathed in a whiff of some foul scent emanating from my kitchen. After frantically rushing toward the stove with an abundance of explicit exclamations spewing from my mouth, I found that my healthy afternoon snack had become nothing more than a mess of smelly steam and mushy, black broccoli.

Although I certainly should feel some sense of shame for my complete incompetence in the kitchen, I can’t help but laugh at my own outlandish mishaps.

Like all things in life, the essential life skill of food preparation is a process of trial and error. Sometimes I’m absent-minded, and I’m highly prone to mistakes, but as long as it doesn’t end with me burning down an apartment complex, I think my idiocy in the kitchen will yield improvement in the future.

Over time, my dexterity with stove-top foods has improved. Much of my college experience has abided by this general structure, and to a large degree, I’ve learned from my mistakes. Along with my cooking skills, I’ve brushed up on my time-management, study habits and self-knowledge over the past four years. As a common English idiom tells us, “there’s no use crying over spilled milk [or burned eggs].” My life in college, perfectly-good-food-gone-to-waste included, has proved the perfect environment to learn from my mistakes, and advance productively forward.

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College Life

Top Five New Year’s Resolutions for College Students

January 10, 2012 – 7:09 pm

Are you in the habit of making New Year’s resolutions? For many of us, a brand new year signals an opportunity to take a look at how things are going for us, and – if needed – make necessary changes. Here are a few college-specific ideas:

1. Get more sleep. While this is probably not on many college students’ lists, we think it should be. As Molly wrote last week, “school is a much more enjoyable (not to mention, doable) experience when I’m not struggling to keep my eyes open.” Lack of sleep can mean lower grades, even if you study hard. Don’t underestimate the importance of getting enough sleep – 6 hours per night is the bare minimum, but 8 is what you really need.

2. Eat healthier. Again, not directly related to your degree, but something that influences your general well-being and may influence your grades too. A steady diet of greasy, sugary, high-sodium junk food will make you tired, give you headaches and make it harder to focus on your studies.

3. Better manage your student loans. It’s important to carefully budget and identify how much money you need to borrow, after exhausting all your financial aid options. Research and find affordable student loans, and don’t borrow even one dollar more than necessary.

4. Stop procrastinating. How much time do you spend on social networks each day? An hour? Three hours? What about TV, games, texting? Spending all these hours doing unproductive activities means your’re not studying effectively, which can affect your grades. See if you can set reasonable time limits, such as allowing yourself to browse Facebook 30 minutes each night, after you’re done studying.

5. Get better grades. If you follow resolutions 1, 2 and 4, your grades should start improving even if you make no additional changes. Keep in mind that it’s a good idea to decide on a specific and realistic goal. So, instead of “I’ll get better grades this semester,” or “I’ll be a straight-A student from now on,” you could resolve to never get lower grades than a B.

Whatever your New Year’s resolutions are, it’s a good idea to write them down, and to follow up on your progress once a month or so. Happy New Year!

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