As we’re wrapping up for the semester, it’s important to stay organized and on top of the dozens of assignments coming your way. While this might sound daunting, time consuming and annoying- it’ll be worth it when summer starts and you have a great GPA for the semester.

The Stickie Note Method

One of the simplest ways I’ve seen students organize their finals schedule is using a space on their wall with stickie notes. Designate one note for each day of the week (in one color) and then in another color, place one stickie note under it for each assignment. Once you get an assignment done, rip the stickie note off the wall and tear it up. This is a bit more satisfying than checking a box on computer or scribbling through a line on a piece of paper.

An example of how to lay things out for the stickie note method.

The Calendar Method

You already rely on your calendar right? Well, use all day events in your Gcal or iCal to mark when things will be due. In most calendaring programs, you’ll have the ability to pin all day events to the top of the page. Every day, review what’s due tomorrow and get cracking. Delete each item from the calendar when their completed and turned in or already happened (like a test). This will also sync over to your phone so you can make sure you’re not falling behind and know what to do before leaving campus for the day.

Going Digital

Another reliable way to make sure you’re not missing out on things that are due or upcoming during the crazy finals week(s) is to use a digital to-do list system. For finals week(s) I recommend using the free Teux Deux website. Teux Deux makes centering your work around due dates incredibly simple and intuitive.

Another free app that you can use to keep track of when everything will be due is called Wunderkit. This web app features an iPhone companion and acts a command center for tasks and relevant notes. (Keep your eye out for a full review of Wunderkit in the coming days).

Good luck on your exams and papers. Do let us know what you’re using to keep sane during finals!

College spring semesters are wrapping up, and as you’re stressing over finals you don’t want to forget to plan how you will be getting home. Getting home for the summer can be expensive, especially if you are a freshman, because you were probably not allowed to have a car. So if you do not want to pay for a plane ride or a bus ticket, it may be wise to carpool.

Zimride is a handy website that allows people to carpool together by connecting drivers with people who want to carpool to the same destination. The driver states what college they are starting from, where their final destination will be, how many seats they have, what day they are leaving, and how much they want their passengers to pay for gas.  The person looking for a ride can check zimride to see if someone at their school is headed to the same area as them.  Once the carpooler finds the ride that will get them home, they can then “book” that ride. The driver will then be contacted and once the carpooler has been accepted, the two will get each other’s contact info.

This website is not only a good resource for people looking for a ride, but also for people giving a ride. Driving from San Diego to Sacramento can be expensive if you’re driving up by yourself in an SUV. However, if you don’t mind people carpooling with you, you could fill your car with other students and get paid to drive them, which would cut the cost of gas down by a lot.

This website may seem a little sketchy, but everything is done professionally with everyone’s safety in mind. Check out the safety features here.  Also, to post a ride leaving from a school one must actually have to have an edu email address from that school, so an actual student that goes to your college will be driving you home, not some old man in a van..  The website is also very easy to use, and is a popular website, so you will most likely be able to find the ride you want that can get you to a location close to home.

* Eat Slower

It’s as simple as that. If you’re eating quickly, especially while very hungry, the brain and stomach can’t register how full you are. Scarfing down food is one of the prime causes of over-eating: your body isn’t able to register that yup, that’s enough pizza. You’re so excited for the pizza that you devour it quickly. Your only able to realize in hindsight that, wow, too much pizza.

If you want that hindsight in advance, just eat slower. It’s like an over-eating time-machine.

*Substitute

Don’t get that bacon cheeseburger, but don’t get salad either. Get the regular hamburger. Fries? Get the small fries. No coke, just water. Okay, maybe diet coke.

The difference in those add-ons is almost as big as the meal itself. A bacon cheeseburger, large fries, and a coke is to a regular hamburger, small fries, and water what a regular hamburger is to a salad. But remember that a hamburger is much, much better than a salad. If you ignore the highly unhealthy add-ons, then treats like hamburgers or fried-chicken (ignore biscuits, etc at KFC if you can) aren’t as bad as you might expect. Keep your indulgences from being too bad for you and you’ll feel better.

*Eat Frequently

Eat frequently. It works ironically, but it works.

When you’re hungry, really hungry, that’s when cravings start. That’s when Taco Bell sounds like the best idea in the world, and that’s when you spend $11 at McDonalds and undo a whole days worth of basketball. But if you’re eating frequent, small, healthy meals then you won’t have the sort of cravings and urges that force you to work against your instincts. If you just had yogurt, you’re less likely to order pizza. If you just had a sandwich, you’re less likely to super-size those fries. Eat to avoid over-eating later. It’s a delicious solution.

*Be aware

Really, awareness of eating is almost as good as eating responsibly. Almost.

If I’m eating honey barbecue wings dipped in blue cheese, which I often do, I always makes sure a part of me says “this is a bad decision.” Then I go right back to eating them. If I’m aware, then that means eventually I’ll take ownership and control of it. It’s not eating junk that’s bad for you: it’s mindlessly eating it. Eat junk and enjoy it sure, but know that you are.

*Exercise 

If you want to be healthier with what you eat but simply don’t want to change the way you eat, you might as well exercise. Michael Phelps and other professional athletes generally have well-chronicled fast-food passions. If you want bacon every day, picking up a basketball here and there might be a good solution.

One of Google Chrome’s standout features is its omnibox, the smart address bar which also doubles as a search box. Chrome’s omnibox saves time and screen real estate by allowing you to search any website using a designated search engine keyword. For example, you could set Facebook’s keyword to “fb.” If you felt like facebook stalking someone or you were looking for a group or page on a certain topic, you could simply type fb followed by your search term in the omnibox.

This handy feature makes Chrome a popular choice among browser minimalists, but with the help of third-party tools, you can get similar form and functionality if you prefer to use Mozilla Firefox or Apple’s Safari browser.

To get an omnibox in Firefox, install the Omnibar add-on from the add-ons gallery. After installation, the Omnibar preferences will include an option to hide the Firefox search box. Adding custom search engines in Firefox is simple. Right-click inside any search box on a webpage and choose “Add a keyword for this search.” This keyword search will be added as an entry to your bookmarks– you may want to keep all of these entries together in a bookmarks folder to separate them from the rest of your bookmarks.

For Safari users, there is the SIMBL plugin Safari Omnibar. Safari doesn’t have any way to automatically detect or add search engine URL’s. You can add this functionality with the Keystone plugin. Or to manually add a search engine using the Safari Omnibar, highlight the text in the address bar, right-click and select “Edit Omnibar Search Providers.” Fill in the name of the search engine and your desired keyword for it. To find its URL, first go to the search engine and conduct any search. Copy the URL of the results page, but find the part with your search term and replace that with {searchTerm}. Say you searched for “hackcollege” on Google. Your results URL would be http://www.google.com/search?q=hackcollege, and to add Google as a search provider in Safari Omnibar, you would change that to http://www.google.com/search?q={searchTerm}

What search engine keywords have you set up in your browser? Share your favorites in the comments!

Summer’s finally here. The weather has finally caught up to the East coast and the homework and papers have finally faded away forever, or, at least until next semester. It’s time to kick back and enjoy yourself and your friends, and that means grilling. With that said, let’s get some tips on how to do it best.

1: Have Ambition

The grill is a playground to work with. It’s the easiest form of cooking and it’s celebrated in a way that, say, the stove isn’t. So get ambitious and experiment. What if you had cheese in the middle of some of the burgers? Give it a shot. How long would it take to grill one giant hamburger instead of a bunch of small ones? Now’s the time to figure it out. The grill is very forgiving: if it’s not cooked through, put it back. If it’s overcooked, who cares? Still a hamburger. It’s hard to go wrong, so you may as well see how far you can take it.

2: …But have a back-up

There’s nothing wrong with ambition but one of the grills best features is that it produces stability and good times. It’s comfort food and comfortable times that’s hard to screw up. So before you start messing around with salmon or talk about how roasting a pig shouldn’t be that hard, make sure you have some safety options around. Hamburgers and hotdogs are the solid backup. Don’t rely on fancy picks. Consider variety whenever you mix it up so you aren’t relying too heavily on one Googled dish working out perfectly.

3: Have a lot.

There’s never too much food. That’s a personal rule of thumb but it’s all the more true at a barbecue. You’re going to want a lot of food; might as well have a burger or two, and a hot dog, maybe a sausage, some corn, some chips, salsa, maybe another hamburger…it’s a ton of food and if you’re barbecue goes long (and it should) everyone is going to want “one more” of something or other. Plus maybe a friend comes late or comes with a friend of his, and they bring their girlfriend…whatever it is, you’re going to have mouths ready to eat. And if you have too much food somehow? You have leftover hamburgers already made for tomorrow. If your worst case scenario is having lunch made in advance, you’re doing it right.

4: Keep The “Must Haves”

Hamburgers, hot dogs, buns, ketchup, chips, salsa, corn, and a cold drink. Have all of those things, always. You can have any other things too, but those are the absolute standards. Include them with whatever you end up doing. They’re cheap, wholesome, delicious, and all-American. A cliche is a cliche for a reason sometimes.

5: Experiment

On top of those standards, mix it up. You can grill watermelon you know, and it’s absolutely fantastic. Likewise, pineapple and banana’s are great grilled and a great change of pace. Portobello mushrooms are also great and substitute much better than veggie burgers as a non-meat option for your poor, poor, vegetarian pals. They’re so good you’ll eat them too. Not to mention asparagus, that odd misfit, somehow tastes good grilled. See what I mean? Everything is good grilled. So give it a shot and see what happens. You might as well. If you got a few hamburgers around, play around and give your cookout a little flair.

The Kindle and other readers/tablets are quickly becoming more and more popular, and so is the idea of electronics textbooks. This term, I got two of my books electronically for my Kindle; in some ways I really liked them, but they were not perfect and probably won’t be the sole way I read textbooks anytime soon.

Keep in mind that electronic books will have different pros and cons for different devices. For example,  reading a textbook on a seven inch kindle with e-ink is a whole different experience from reading one on an iPad.

Pros

- One of the best reasons to have electronic books in general is that you can fit 2000 of them on one device. You can lug around all your books for your classes in ten ounces.

- Electronic textbooks are way cheaper to buy than NEW hard copies of the book.

- My absolute favorite pro of electronic textbooks is being able to search the whole book. You can type in the exact word you want to find and it will highlight all those words in the entire book (sort of like CTRL F.)  This did me wonders on online tests.

Cons

- They are limited. You cannot get any book you want on your e-reader. They simply do not make all books for them, especially textbooks.

- Even though electronic books are cheaper, you can obviously not get them used. If you are a bargain shopper, you can probably find a used hard copy of a book online for cheaper than the electronic edition.

- Electronic textbooks seem a lot less practical for a lot of reasons. It’s not as easy to just “flip to chapter ten.” You have to get out your reader, turn it on, select the book, and click your way to chapter ten. Not a huge problem..

- Textbooks usually aren’t just simply text, (because the have all sorts of diagrams and pictures) and that creates a problem, especially with the kindle. The book will show up on your kindle the way it would on the hard copy, meaning the text and pictures would be super small, and you’d have to zoom and scroll to navigate. The book may also show up with regular sized text and pictures but then the alignment of those pictures and graphs will be all messed up, or the pictures will show on a page to themselves. Either way, this is probably the most annoying part of e-textbooks. A textbook on a tablet would probably be the best solution as they could be more easily navigated and would be on larger screens.

In conclusion, you may want to stick with the traditional textbooks for now, as they can be cheaper, and the information shows up on the pages the way it was meant to.

Finals week is back with a vengeance. Five plus days filled with cramming, all-nighters and nail biters. It’s no surprise 70 percent of students confirmed in a recent survey that they are more stressed during finals week than any other time during the school year. This time around, do yourself a favor and come up with a de-stressing strategy before you hit the books. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Take a Break:

Sometimes just taking some time off from studying is to the perfect prescription to get you through the anxiety and pressure of finals week. Listening to music, getting in a quick workout and making that late night fast food run are the top three ways students say they reduce stress during finals. While it seems counter-intuitive, taking a little “me” time may actually help you relax and focus when you get back to studying.

Get A Bit Weird:

If you can usually be found studying in the same spot for hours on end during finals, it might be time to mix it up a little. Get out of your routine – have an impromptu dance party or visit your favorite breakfast spot in the middle of the night. Some schools even sponsor out of the ordinary activities to help students make it through finals week. The College of William and Mary Law School hosts midnight yoga and the University of New Hampshire and Boston College host “puppy parties” where students de-stress with pet therapy.

Simplify Studying:

When you do settle down to hit the books, make the most of your time and effort by ensuring you have materials and study tools close at hand. Students agree that the ability to create instant study guides and easily search for information would make studying less stressful. CafeScribe.com, a digital textbook platform, features these tools and more and you can use it with virtually any device. With it, you can access study tools, easily read, highlight and take notes – anywhere, anytime.
For more stats on finals stress and how to beat it, check out this infographic from Follett Higher Education Group.

Guest post by Elio DiStaola, Director of Public & Campus Relations at Follett Higher Education Group

Photo credit: studiobeerhorse on Flickr

Many people are self-proclaimed “sneaker heads.” I am not quite at their level. With that said, however, I can give you some simple sneaker advice that will keep your kicks kicking for the foreseeable future.

1: Use the Shoelaces

Shoelaces are the under-rated component of shoes. They keep the shoe balanced and unless you have velcro (and props if you do, I suppose) they literally tie the shoe together. But they are also an under-utilized part of the shoe. Dirty, worn shoelaces give the shoe an old tired look partially because while sneakers can be cleaned, the shoelaces can’t, and the contrast of slightly dirty shoes and dirtier shoelaces degrades the whole shoe. Keep your shoelaces fresh and similarly, feel free to tinker with the colors. You can update or play with the same shoe with only a minimal investment: switch white laces for green or orange ones, trade blue for green, whatever: see what happens. It’s a cheap way to get a whole new look with the same old shoe.

2: Elegance beats Flash.

I have some shoes. I have shining gold hi-tops and forrest-green half-boot monstrosities good for the slush and rain and little else. I had a pair of orange and black shoes with a “Chinese Halloween” feel. I am almost positive this was how the shoe was actually sold to me. These shoes were and are pretty cool, but ultimately none beat the simple model I stick with currently: simple white air forces. That isn’t groundbreaking or unique, but it works for me and it works solidly. I’ll look for simple colors and frameworks, something proven and simple before and then compliment it with the occasional strange pair. I’d recommend that policy for any sneaker head: three days in a row of the solid-gold high-tops and one tends to look like a space-pimp.

3: Clean Them

Simple as that. Get an old toothbrush and some toothpaste and scrub. Use the friction and get off some of the crusted dirt. Facial wipes also works too. This is probably the simplest advice I can give but simple doesn’t mean its bad. Look at your shoes now. Get some water on a paper towel and give it a quick buffer. Chances are that helped. If that interests you, go further with it.

4: Keep a trash-pair

For the gym, for the rain, and for the slush you’re going to want a pair of sneakers that look just acceptable enough to wear and just bad enough that you don’t mind wrecking them. For me that means keeping the same ratty pair I used to wear and demoting them to trash-pair duty. That way, at frat parties, I don’t have to worry about the beer and other debris that might end up on my shoes. I can instead wonder, Logan, did you just spike my beer with vodka?

5: Don’t Just have Sneakers

Ultimately, even the most devoted sneaker-heads will find the moment where they need or want a different pair of shoes. Maybe it’s boat-shoes or maybe it’s the time you realize that everyone at the wedding doesn’t find your Jordan’s as cool as you’d hope at age 23. Regardless, a touch of sneaker variety will only make your love for sneakers grow. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, as they say.

Over the next few months, as people draft their New Year’s Resolutions and 2012 predictions, I’ll be providing tools to help you Achieve Your Resolution – valuable webapps and web sites that I’ve found in the past year that help achieve popular New Year’s Resolutions.

But for many college students, there’s other options. I’m not here to write a magnum opus on whether or not file sharing is ethical or legal – that’s up for you to decide. But I can say that if I’m looking to find a movie like Woody Allen’s Chinatown, I’d have a much better shot of finding it on Netflix than through file sharing. And I can say that if one of your New Year’s resolutions was to become more cultured: Netflix and Redbox are the way to go.

I picked Redbox over Blockbuster’s on-the-go rental outlets for one reason. They’re making a larger appeal to college students. Redbox came to my school’s student government last year with a proposal to bring them on campus at little to no cost to the student body. It was an easy decision. I’ve never used a Redbox, but the concept is incredibly student-friendly.

Most of the newer DVD releases (at my last visit, I saw two newly released movies that appealed to me: Captain America: The First Avenger and The Descendants, starring George Clooney) are available at Redbox, and even some of the most popular games. Yes, even Skyrim was at my local Redbox. Take that arrow to the knee.

How much? $1/day for movies, and $2/day for video games. Not a bad deal at all if you’re going to just them for the one viewing or playing.

Now, Netflix came under fire this year for their disastrous PR moves with their price hikes. I was upset by them – I used to have both streaming and DVDs under my name in Gainesville. At the time of the move, I went DVD-only which was an unpopular choice. I was at the time an HBO addict without HBO – so getting my Sopranos and Eastbound and Down DVDs were incredibly important to me. By midyear, I put the DVDs on hold and shared my family’s streaming account. Although I was upset that I lost my personal recommendation profile (there’s a lot more Doctor Who on there now, thanks to my sister), it was worth it to remove one expense from my monthly load of bills.

I still realize that as the streaming library grows, I can continue to become more cultured – be it National Geographic documentaries, cult classics, or catching up on my favorite AMC TV shows (thanks to Netflix, fully caught up with The Walking Dead and The Killing this year). And with Redbox, I don’t have to stress about a $10 movie I want to see if I can hold out a few months to get it for a dollar.

Enjoy your summer vacations – for those on theirs and those about to be on theirs – and take the time to get more cultured.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user Sarah_Ackerman. Licensed under CC BY 2.0]

The pressure to find a job or internship in this market is overwhelming students across the nation. How are some of your friends finding such useful websites? Where are they getting the right resume help, and how are they finding these random applications?

Some of your friends probably had their jobs handed to them from their big, powerful CEO dads. Don’t waste your time caring about that.

Your other, more strategic friends most likely use sites and resources they have found online. You could spend the next few hours browsing Google’s feed to find something to improve your searching. However, I have created a list of helpful job & internship links for you. Just visit a few of these sites and you’ll find applications galore.

100 useful tools for teachers & students

Great search engine for education (colleges, tutors, MBA programs, etc)

Prizes for creative ideas and marketing suggestions

Entry level jobs & internships 

When companies search for you, what do they find? Find out here.

Career networking on Facebook

Don’t know what to do after you graduate? Click here.

Career info and company profiles 

Technology & Engineering job search

Be different, build a visual resume online for free

Create your resume, for free

Organize your job search

100 useful job & internship resources

Info about career choices

Control your Google results

I hope these suggestions helped! If you have any other useful links, please share them in a comment below.