Monthly Archives: January 2012

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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College Life

Sleep is Just as Important as Study!

January 3, 2012 – 5:00 am

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

Most of us have our advice to live by. For some, it’s an all-encompassing quote by a well-known author, for others, it’s nothing more than a silly pun that can’t be traced back to any real source. My college experience has been guided by a quote from my father: “better well rested than well read,” an elegant phrase meaning that “if it’s 1 am the morning before your final and you haven’t finished reviewing the material, you should probably just give it up and head to bed.”

While many college students choose to cozy up in the library with a pot of coffee for the night, I’d prefer to heed my father’s sage advice and rest my mind for a decent eight hours. This may sound like nothing more than a convenient excuse to halt all efforts to learn and sleep away the stress, but these invaluable words have benefitted me tremendously throughout my university time.

Sometimes, it’s hard to find the time to knock-out at all, let alone for an entire night of blissful, uninterrupted sleep. Between school-work, extra curricular, social activities and physical exercise, eight hours of unconscious life may be low on your list of priorities, if even within the realm of possibility.

However, I write from the first-hand perspective of a part-time victim of this unfortunate, self-inflicted phenomenon. At various points throughout my college career, I’ve entangled myself in time-consuming extra-curricular activities, social commitments, and tedious schoolwork, and resorted to relegating sleep to my leftover downtime.

Through these self-subjected, (accidental) sleep deprivation experiments I’ve learned that I, personally, am incapable of even holding an everyday conversation on minimal shut-eye. As one might expect, my capacity for productive thought shuts down even before my social awareness, and a test on any material will not go well with my brain functioning on back-up generators.

After years of trial and error testing of my dad’s rest hypothesis, I’ve determined its thorough usefulness. From my in-depth studies (on myself), I’ve drawn the conclusion that school is a much more enjoyable (not to mention, doable) experience when I’m not struggling to keep my eyes open.

Hence, I have taken to doling out this advice myself, often warning my friends and classmates of the eminent dangers and unnecessary risks in mixing sleep deprivation with schoolwork. Even real scientific studies other than my own, one-girl experiment have proven the truth in my father’s timeless saying, showing that academic performance is enhanced on a complete night of rejuvenating rest.

So even if I don’t have the time to balance, I always make sure that sleep is high on the list of priorities. After all, what good is a night of studying with a clouded mind? Better to be well rested and maintain my analytical abilities, than to be well read up on materials I’ll likely forget before the test.

Photo credit: umjanedoan

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