Archive for February, 2009

In today’s challenging economy, every student would do well to consider a tuition-free college. In the case of tiny Cooper Union, high-achievers interested in art, architecture or engineering have just such an option.

Believing that a high-quality education should be free, Peter Cooper founded the school in 1858. Housed in Manhattan, CU is one of the most selective schools in the country.

The smallish school is home to 900 plus students. About half are in the Albert Nerken School of Engineering with another 40% divided between the “Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture” and the School of Art. CU also has a very small number of graduate students in the fields of architecture and engineering.

Roughly 220 students form the freshman class at Cooper Union each year. They are selected from nearly 3,000 applicants with the greatest selectivity coming in the colleges of architecture and art. That 8% selection rate ranks them as selective as any school including Harvard.

Though tuition-free, the school estimates that students will need about $19,000 per year for fees and living expenses. Those costs are broken out as follows: mandatory student fees of about $1,600 per year, room and board at about $14,000, books and supplies at about $1,000-1,800, and other general living expenses totaling about $2,000-3,000 per year. Students must also prove they have medical insurance coverage or they must purchase the school’s health insurance services fee of $1,629/year.

Still, with a current yearly tuition valued at $33,000, those who attend CU for four years receive more than $130,000 in total tuition savings.

Interesting Focus

While the school offers a very limited menu of major options, the course of studies is not so limited. In fact, students must take core courses in the humanities and social sciences, requirements that give the school a bit of a liberal arts flavor.

Another critical component of the school is the opportunity for students to obtain hands-on experience within the city. Students have access to a number of city agencies and cultural institutions as well as the opportunity to gain valuable experience within one of the offices or studios of the many professionals who live and work in New York.

The grounds of Cooper Union are also steeped in tradition. Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech outlining his views on slavery on the Great Hall on the CU campus. Since that time, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, William Taft, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have spoken there as well.

And in 1866, Mark Twain made his debut on the East Coast with a lecture in the same hall at the school.

Flickr photos courtesy of Watz and Rollingrck.

When you open Pandora’s box, you never quite know what you will get – sort of…

Sometimes, one simply does not know what one is missing.

Such was the case with the Internet radio service Pandora.com, at least until this week. Upon the recommendation of a family member, we gave the site a look and now, well Pandora is playing as we write this post.

Create A Radio Station Featuring Your Specific Musical Tastes

Suppose your tastes include someone like Warren Zevon, the irreverent, piano pounding rocker that has penned some of the most satirical lyrics known to man (give Excitable Boy a listen if you are new to Zevon). After heading to Pandora.com, we simply created a new station and typed in the rocker’s name. We immediately got one of those Zevon songs that features the typical driving rock style he made famous.

But it is what happens next that makes this site different. After the tune finishes, Pandora moves on to another song from another artist that matches the Zevon style.

As each song begins you will see some of the musical aspects the site uses to make the associations. Over 400 different musical attributes are supposedly considered in the selection of the next song. These attributes are then combined to form more than 2,000 focus traits (rhythm syncopation, key tonality, vocal harmonies and instrumental approaches).

As songs play, you can give them a thumbs up or down, a step that provides the site further insight into your specific tastes within that particular musical category – with no further insight our selection brought us first to an obscure Zevon number to Tom Petty to John Fogerty (actually Creedence Clearwater Revival) to Johnny Cash before coming back to Zevon and the stellar “Werewolves of London.”

As you listen you of course also are provided the opportunity to buy specific songs from the iTunes store, Amazon MP3, or in the case of CDs, at Amazon.com (for CDs). After two free log ins, we needed to register as a user.

Free Subscription Available

In the midst of signing up we were hit with a couple of initial ads that we immediately bypassed. We started the music playing in the background and went to work on other matters, all the while inspired by our choice of musical genre, the other ads invisible as the song list progressed.

What makes the site so great is you begin to hear music from artists you have never heard from before yet offer music consistent with our tastes. In addition, you are free to create a number of stations, so you can make mood choices.

Adding to the beauty is that Pandora launched a mobile version of their software. Listeners may download and install the application on the Apple iPhone and the iPod Touch through the iTunes Application Store.

If you haven’t given the site a try, then like us, you truly don’t know what you have been missing.

Flickr photos courtesy of Will Lion and Minx Labs.

Earlier this year we offered our recommendations for a green new year. More and more, students across America are beginning to realize that if we want to preserve this wondrous world we have been given we must commit ourselves to a greener lifestyle.

The Sustainable Classrooms Contract

A great example for all of us to emulate comes from the students and staff of St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. In an effort to get professors and students to practice sustainable living habits within the academic environment, Green Up SMC and the Environmental Council, along with a new Office of the Sustainability, are working on instituting “The Sustainable Classrooms Contract.”

The goal is to make sustainable living practices a fundamental habit. By making them a part of the higher education learning process, the organizations believe these habits will carry over into students’ and professors’ daily lives.

The contract is broken into two fundamental areas.

Primary Initiatives

Offering a very short list of primary initiatives, these are easy to remember and implement.

• No disposable containers allowed in the classroom (i.e. paper coffee cups and plastic water bottles). Instead, students and professors should consider bringing their own reusable mugs, bottles, or food containers.
• Always participate in recycling by using the correct bins within the classrooms (no matter what shape or size; blue is always the recycling bin).
• Use both sides of notebook paper. Print double-sided whenever possible.
• Limit the use of paper handouts, through the use of electronic programs, including but not limited to eCollege and e-mail.
• Insure all lights are turned off when not in use and upon leaving the classroom.

Secondary Initiatives

The secondary initiatives represent some large and small scale items:

• Limit the number of lights used in the classroom.
• Use alternative means of transportation when going to and from class, including but not limited to walking, the CCTA bus, the campus shuttle and/or bicycles.
• Explore options to more efficiently use paper in type-written assignments (adjust margins and font, 1-1.5 spacing).
• Allow students to turn in assignments via electronic sources.
• Weave environmental themes such as global climate change, resource depletion, drinking water scarcity and food security into course curriculum when possible.
• Emphasize the importance of small scale efforts and initiatives (such as this contract) in the larger environmental movement. The small stuff is important!

Suggested Practice

While we would move the second secondary initiative to the top list in a heartbeat, we also like the overall philosophy of the sustainability contract. The folks at St. Michael’s note that all sustainability initiatives are suggestions and that each class can modify the contract to best fit their needs while still staying true to the purpose of this initiative. In simplest terms, the contract may be modified by professors and students alike.

Yet another aspect that deserves mention is the recommendation that each student and professor sign on to the Sustainable Classrooms Contract for each and every class. But the sign on process may be initiated by a professor or by the students.

And finally, most importantly, as it is a contract, both parties are expected to live up to the document. Therefore, each has the responsibility to self-enforce the agreement.

Replicate the Idea

This simple idea represents a critical step in moving towards a more sustainable culture. It makes everyone aware of the need to change certain behaviors and begins the process, one small step at a time, towards preserving this wondrous planet.

Flickr photos courtesy of Tobo and Woodley Wonder Works

High school students looking to learn more about the college application, admissions and choice process have a great upcoming opportunity next month.

CollegeWeekLive, the world’s biggest virtual college fair, has been set for March 25th and 26th. Featuring more than 250 colleges and universities from around the world, the annual event is expected to see as many as 28,000 attendees.

What makes CollegeWeekLive so unique is that it offers all of the standard college fair information that students seek when attending such an event but does so in an online format. Therefore, from one’s home or school computer, a prospective college student has access to a wealth of information in a cost-effective and convenient manner.

The bi-annual event (held each November and March) offers students access to some of the top experts in the field. Virtual fair attendees can watch admissions experts speak on SAT preparation, the application essay process and or how to pay for college. Attendees will also be able to ask various questions via live chats.

The event will also feature virtual booths for the various colleges taking part in the fair. These booths will offer student attendees electronic brochures, videos, webinars, and podcasts related to the school. In addition, students will have the opportunity to real-time Instant Message and/or video chat with admissions counselors and students from those institutions.

As for the specific, potentially-valuable presentations for students March 25th offers:

• How to Go to College in a Tough Economy – Dr. Katherine Cohen, Author, President of Applewise
• Perspective From the Admissions Office – An Admissions Office Panel featuring Dr. Patricia Peek, Fordham and Gil Rogers, U of New Haven
• How to Prepare for and Take the ACT – Andrea “Rae” Jones, ACT
• Getting Into College Support – Amy Newmark, Editor Chicken Soup For the Soul: Teens Talk Getting into College
• Being a Student Athlete – National Collegiate Scouting Association Counselor Lisa Strasman and Carla Pentimone
• Federal Financial Aid and the FAFSA Form – Department of Education
• Understanding the GI Bill – Patrick Campbell, Chief Legislative Counsel, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America

On the second day, March 26th, scheduled topics and presenters include:

• What Matters in College Admissions – Matthew Greene
• Choosing a College – Rob Franek, The Princeton Review
• Mythbusting the SAT – Laurence Bunin, Senior Vice President of the SAT Program, The College Board
• Writing a College Essay – Jaye Fenderson, Author, Seventeen Magazine
• The College Interview and Visit – Bev Taylor, The Ivy Coach
• Attending an International School: The University of Melbourne – Krista Northup, North America Manager, University of Melbourne
• Planning For Paying For College – Angela Nuzzi, NHHEAF
• Sports Scholarships – Dion Wheeler, National Collegiate Scouting Association

More details on the proposed agenda as well as relevant links to some of the presenters are available on the CollegeWeekLive agenda page.

Though the program should be extremely worthwhile, as an added incentive to folks, College WeekLive will be giving away a brand new 13-inch aluminum MacBook to one lucky attendee of the fair! . There is a video contest and the chance to win a $2,500 scholarship to the college of your choice.

And if you attended the November CollegeWeekLive and are still a current high school student, you can also complete a survey that will make you eligible to win an iPod Touch or a $300 donation to the charity of your choice. High school seniors will find the link to their survey here while underclassmen will find a separate survey at this location.

We recently published a guide to personal finance for students.

We would love to hear your feedback about it, and if you think your readers would appreciate it, please help spread the word.

In our prior post, we took students on a walk through some key components of personal finance. Our focus was on “good” debt (loans for college) versus “bad” debt (credit card debt) and what loans to consider, all with the idea of minimizing the debt students accrue while in college.

Today we spend some time with Kai Davis, a senior at the University of Oregon, who will graduate this spring with zero debt. Majoring in Economics and minoring in Business Administration, the Eugene, Oregon native offers readers some great insight into how to manage one’s personal finances.

To provide students a thorough look at how Kai has managed to earn a degree debt-free, we present our discussion with him in question and answer format.

As a freshman, did you make it a goal to graduate with zero debt?

No, it wasn’t ever a plan, but I was able to achieve it. I’ve always felt that having a smaller goal like minimizing my debt would be better than a hard and fast rule of no debt. I’ve found that I’ve made the biggest impact on my savings when I’ve adopted a few small rules. I only carry a credit card with me to earn rewards points and fill up my gas tank (I earn 5% back when I use my Chase Visa at a BP gas station). Instead I carry a small amount of cash with me. When I have the impulse to make a larger purchase I wait a few days, assess the need, check my budget, and see if I can afford it. I always want to make my purchase fully aware of costs beyond the price tag.

I think that understanding how to manage your money intelligently and aggressively is the most important skill that students can leave college with. A degree shows that you have the drive, intelligence, and ambition to complete 4 years of course work. It doesn’t give you a job in that field or even the desire for a job in that field. But understanding how to manage your finances is a skill that stays with you for life.

So, graduating without debt isn’t the skill to focus on. Graduating with the ability to understand personal finance is.

Everyone talks about the rising costs of college and how students today have to borrow money to be able to pay for school. How have you been able to graduate with no personal debt?

I was already planning on attending the University of Oregon due to its strong business program. I was able to save quite a bit of money by living at home for the first 3 years of college. I’ve worked 20-30 hours each week throughout college, either at work-study jobs or on start-ups with friends. I’ve found that spending a lot of time working during college doesn’t have to come at the cost of academic success. Rather, spending a good amount of time working during college has given me the ability to triage assignments by importance and complete my academic work in the minimum amount of time.

So your choice of school was critical to your current situation?

No, not at all. I’m lucky that the University of Oregon offered a strong Business Administration major and is an in-state school, so tuition was cheaper, but I’m fairly sure that any industrious student can manage their finances well in college if they take the time to learn the system.

Are there any other steps you have taken to earn additional money?

I’ve always worked on campus in work-study jobs. Its great for networking, learning new skills, and earning money while in college. I’ve also taken recent aggressive steps to manage my money by taking advantage of high interest savings and checking accounts. I switched from a bank paying me 1/10th of a percent interest annually to a bank paying 3.8% annually. If you’re committed to saving, the money quickly ads up.

Can you talk a little bit about credit cards and how you have managed to remain on top of credit card debt?

As a college student you’re existing on a small budget and lines of credit from the school and banks. Let’s say you spend your budget quicker than you anticipated and are left with only your credit card for the month. Every purchase you make on the credit card ends up costing you more to pay it back. I’m not saying don’t make purchases on your credit card – I often do – but be mindful of how long it will take you to pay it back. When I hit the cap on my monthly budget, the first thing I do is assess which planned purchases I can cut back on. I’d much rather go without seeing a movie than having to pay that purchase back plus interest. While seeing a movie might be with $7 cash out of pocket, it isn’t worth $7 + compounded interest on a credit card.

So you would recommend that students set up a budget?

When I first moved out, I set a budget to plan out exactly how much I’d spend on food, utilities, gas, everything. I quickly found out that a budget often serves more as a sketch for spending than the actual spending. Some months I spend more on food than I anticipated, some months I spend much less. I use a budget to figure out how much I think I’ll be spending on average, and then use the final budget total for my monthly planning. If at the end of the month I’ve only spent 90% of my budget, I take a look at what I thought I’d be buying compared to what I did buy and see if I can trim my monthly estimate. More often than not I’ll treat myself with the unexpected windfall or deposit some money into savings. Establishing a budget so you have a general idea of what you’ll be spending in a month is much more important than nailing down the exact values you’ll be spending.

Have you made it a point to focus in on your credit rating?

I think understanding how to use credit is as important as your degree. A horrible credit rating can harm you for a few years, but it doesn’t have to be the end of the world if you rebuild your rating. If you graduate college with bad credit, you have years to repair the credit before you start making those big purchases: a car, a house, a boat. One of my close friends graduated college without a credit rating. He was able to pay for his degree out of pocket and never bothered to open a credit card. By the time he was 26 he had a nice savings account – $50,000 or so. He decided to buy a house and let his savings appreciate there. He found a nice house at a wonderful price and went to talk to the bank about a loan and was turned down. Because he had no credit rating the bank saw him as too much of a risk and wouldn’t issue him a loan.

So is a credit standing as important as a degree?

Earning a degree elevates your standing in the eyes of potential employers just as a high credit rating helps you get credit to make those larger purchases. If you don’t know how to use your degree to effectively position yourself and get a job you want you won’t have as much success during your job search. Understanding how to manage a credit rating – even a bad one! – is one of the most important lessons you can learn in college.

Credit cards and student loans are not free money. Its very easy to think that you’ll just charge purchases to your credit card, make the minimum payment a few times, and be debt free in a few months, but it doesn’t work like that.

What are your thoughts about the importance of saving?

Learning to save now prevents problems later. If a student leaves college not knowing how to manage their money, how much will their lose before they learn how to save? If you leave college understanding the importance of having a check account, setting a monthly budget, eyeballing spending in certain areas relative to your income, shopping around for the highest interest rate on your accounts, and getting a credit card with rewards or cash back and paying it down quickly, you’ll be in great shape to manage your finances.

If you had the chance to offer an incoming freshman advice on personal finance, what would be the two or three things you would most emphasize with him or her?

I’d let them know that they don’t need to lose sleep over their finances. Yes, its an important thing to manage, but if you’re smart about paying your bills and keep to a schedule you’ll be fine. College is stressful enough without worrying that you won’t have enough liquidity come graduation. Take college one day at a time, try to avoid using a credit card unless it’s a purchase you know you can afford to pay off over time, and stay happy. At the end of the day, managing finances intelligently isn’t something you have to do perfectly, but just taking the time to read the fine print and understanding how to save and spend intelligently will make a large difference.

Flickr photos courtesy of Andres Rueda, TheTruthAbout and Eliane.

If you are a visual learner, then you likely have begun using the concept of mind-mapping to organize your thoughts when planning an essay or project. Because of its free-flowing nature, the mind-mapping process is spectacular for brainstorming ideas or making sense of the relationship between various components of any subject you are studying.

However, such a free-flowing process means that your hand-drawn mind map can become messy and cluttered very quickly. In the very same way that technology and word processing software has revolutionized the writing process, there are now many sites on the web that allow students to draw, manipulate and edit mind maps in a similar manner.

And because each is web-based, you can also collaborate with any classmates you choose to share the mind maps with, turning your creation into a wiki mind map if you so desire.

Bubbl.us
One simple and free web application that lets you brainstorm online is Bubbl.us. At the site you can create colorful mind maps and share those maps with your friends. In addition, you can easily use the site to create a visual that can then be embedded in a blog or website, be emailed, or saved as a standard image (and subsequently printed).

The folks at Tech Bites created a basic tutorial on Bubbl.us. If you have never used mind-mapping successfully, this tutorial also offers basic instructions as to how a mind-map comes together.

MindMeister.Com

Another option with a free section is MindMeister. However, three of the four sign up categories do have monthly costs associated with them. The free version limits users to 6 mind maps though with the free version you can collaborate on those six maps with your peers. Like Bubbl.us you can export the maps as an image or rich text file and publish your creation to a blog or website. And of course, you can always delete or download one of your maps to keep your total under the limit.

One really cool feature on MindMeister is a base timeline. When working in collaboration, it could be very helpful to scroll back to earlier aspects of a map to the time prior to a colleague making adjustments. The site has a scroll bar at the base that allows you to look back at the evolution of your creation over time, a feature that could prove extremely important when you are collaborating with other students.

Mindomo.com

Yet another option offering a free platform (subscription levels also exist) is mindomo. The site also offers a desktop downloadable version so as to be able to work offline. For those wanting to learn more about the various aspects of mindomo.com there is a visual that allows users to examine the various toolbars on the site.

Great Tool

If you have found the concept of mind-mapping beneficial you will definitely want to check out one of these three web-based creations.

On the other hand, if you have not been exposed to the concept, you owe it to yourself to check one of the numerous tutorials on the web to explain how the concept works (two possible options are Tutorial A or Tutorial B). Most students indicate that once they have learned how to use the concept, the linear outlining format becomes an obsolete relic dating to the pre-PC era.

Seth Godin, author of Tribes, Meatball Sundae, and The Dip, certainly yanked a few chains with his recent blog post, What is school for?

To create some dialogue, he offers his suggested list of 27 possibilities. Among them are a number that certainly will turn the heads of a few teachers, professors, school board members and university trustees.

How about:

• Homogenize society, at least a bit
• Pasteurize out the dangerous ideas
• Give kids something to do while parents work
• Teach future citizens how to conform
• Teach future consumers how to desire
• Defang the proletariat
• Make sure the sports teams have enough players

In fairness, he does offer these counters:

• Become an informed citizen
• Build a social fabric
• Create leaders who help us compete on a world stage
• Learn for the sake of learning
• Teach creativity and problem solving
• Increase emotional intelligence
• Increase understanding of a life well lived

Readers, where do you weigh in? Category one or category two? Any suggestions to add to either category?