It is the end of the semester and the work is piling up. The workload for most college students is unbearable. Three fifteen-page papers, three finals and two in-class presentations are on the agenda for this week alone. Not to mention finishing up that other essay due from two weeks ago that you needed an extension on. You are scheduled for twelve hours to work in the dining hall this week. The holiday season is upon us and you haven't finished your Christmas cards. Not to mention gathering all the presents you are expected to give. There is a month-long break coming up and your room needs to be ready for it. There are dust bunnies the size of Godzilla that are about to eat your month's worth of dirty laundry that still need to be done. You haven't packed a single sock and your mother is calling about trip arrangements. If it hasn't happened already, the dreaded all-nighter is coming for you!

We have all heard of the tremendous wealth and generosity of Bill Gates (founder, owner, and CEO of Microsoft). He has donated millions upon millions upon millions of dollars to multiple charities. However, not many people have heard of the marvelous gift given by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay. He and his wife, Pam Omidyar, donated $100 million to Tufts University (their alma mater).

What happens if you take a group of student bloopers made in history classes around the nation? This article. Read on if you want to laugh.

Many of us have a rough idea of what we want to major or even what career we want to follow. But, at the same time there are plenty of those who do no know what they want to do with their lives in the near future. College is suppose to be about taking different classes and experiences. Right?
In this article, college freshman face major dilemna, it talks about how it might be to your disadvantage if you delay on figuring out what you’re going to major in. It is suprising to hear that 80% prospectives are undecided. That is a huge amount! For those who already come to college with a major in mind, those students end up switching 2 to 3 times before graduating.

With finals around the corner, many college students are hitting the pharmacies. If they don't have prescriptions for the drug Adderall, then these pill crazed academics go

In an artilce, I read that at the University of Kansas, a new course is being offered titled "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies." This is an amazing step of a class that I find as a brave venture in a world that is so uninviting. There will definitely be complaints. The man that created the class, Paul Mirecki, has already been called a laughingstock.

I'm sure we have all thoroughly enjoyed choosing our courses for this coming spring semester! If anyone picked up on my sarcasm, props to you!

I am interested in seeing what courses people are taking in the spring.

I am taking 4 credits:

* Introductory Piano-- I am so excited about taking this course because I have always wanted to learn how to play.

* Intensive Spanish again... bien, bien.

Being a freshwoman at Bryn Mawr College means having to take a Wellness class during your first year. Most of the Wellness topics are very interesting and provide insight for bettering our lives physically, mentally, and emotionally.

On the other hand, I firmly believe that the papers that we must submit as part of our "grade" for the class are simply BUSYWORK. We as students attend the lectures and participate in class. We do not need another paper to write! It is my opinion that we sit there, and that is where we obtain the information! I do not receive anything from typing a two-page essay about how I adapted to the Bryn Mawr culture except fulfilling a requirement (a pointless requirement).

In September 2004, Drs. Joshua Freedman and Marco Iacoboni of the University of California at Los Angeles, scanned the brains of 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats. They showed the participants images of John Kerry, George Bush, and Ralph Nader while measuring cranial blood flow.

Democrats experienced extreme neural reactions in the areas facilitating empathy when viewing Kerry. Republican's brains lit up in a more "intrapersonal" way, said Freedman, "like when you smile at someone and they smile back." Both Republicans and Democrats showed neural activity in the prefrontal cortex when viewing images of the opposing candidate, showing that they were consciously choosing to dislike a particular candidate.

An article in the NYTimes recently talked about the not-so-new phenomenon of 3 day weekends at many universities and colleges across the nation. The administration at many colleges are learning the term "thirsty thursdays," and, for the most part, aren't pleased.

Colleges traditionally have fewer classes scheduled on Fridays and in the morning and, in many cases, students try to make their schedules without Friday or early morning classes. Administrators see this as a problem in two ways: the rise in campus parties that result from a three-day weekend... and the wasted opportunity in not scheduling classes on Fridays. Colleges feel like they could add new courses if they opened up the week a bit more with Friday classes. As the article says:

In this article I found today: check it

It lists the most expensive schools in America. The list includesm, GW, Vassar, Sarah Lawernce and Kenyon. The list is made by tuition alone not room and board ect.
Also the article discusses how much of an increase the tuition has done in just one year alone.

Being at a single sex school has often been said to be more beneficial for learning than a coed school. Well last week in Newsweek there was an entire article about how beneficial an all womans school is. But the part that I found to be pretty exciting was that Bryn Mawr was the only womans school mentioned throughout the article. It talked about how by being at Bryn Mawr the author herself, was a

This is a tangent that I was thinking about, and am therefore branching off of Judge Hatchet's blog. With regards to children and dressing older than their age, there's another issue entirely when dealing with clothing.

What do you wear to getting a job? We've all been told that first impressions last a lifetime, but what do people do when they can't get those interview worthy clothes? There are hundreds of websites give a set of rules and guidelines for how to dress when searching for a job. But if you already don't have the income to afford to follow those guidelines, where do you go?

I've been a member of several fandoms, or groups of fans interested in a certain aspect of pop culture, for about 7-8 years now--pretty much ever since I've had access to the Internet. Recently, there has been an insurgence in the studying of fandoms on the part of academics and quasi-academics across the world. My question is: Are these studies legit, or are they just ridiculous and not worthy of any attention?

My sister attends a private boading school in Montana, and recently, a situation involving the possision of cigarettes on campus grabbed my attenetion. The situation started when a resisdence assistant, RA, smelled smoke coming from one of the unoccupied rooms in the girls dorm. She then went to find the dean who opened the room to find nothing but a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

I was just on the Sparknote's Site, yes Sparknotes, I know, but they can be really useful to review for tests. So, during my procrastination, I clicked on a link to Spark Life to see what it was all about, and it took me to a sort of blogroll of sorts.

On it, there was an article about getting into college. You all thought you'd heard all you were going to about getting into college, but the article stated that many Ivies like Harvard and Yale are still discriminating against some college applicants. It's not because of race or religion though; its on looks. Yes, if you are not what they perceive to be the college "Look," you're not getting in.

Reading the Barely Legal Blog this afternoon made me realize that there are some aspects of college that are totally an improvement on high school, and others that still haven't changed.

In his post entitled "Random Rant," of which I feel our blog contains many, Russ talks of the students in his Monday/Wednesday class who constantly fly into a panic when the teacher says, "We will pick up there tomorrow." I agree with his rant. Everyone should be mature enough to know that the teacher means, "At the next class," but no; everyone has to snicker or say, "You mean Wednesday?"

Today is the day that I catch up on everything that I've been putting off this past week. My catch phase for this week was "I'll do it tomorrow." Research for a paper? I'll do it tomorrow. Studying for a mid-term? Oh, I'll just do it tomorrow. It's a vicious cycle, isn't it?

Procrastination catches up with us all, whether you be the student who waits to study until the night before (or until 1 am before) your big test, or waits until the day before a paper is due to write that twenty page research paper.

Now that I am in college, I don't have to worry about dress codes like I did in high school (not that there was really anything to worry about). My high school only did a double take if someone's skirt was like see through or they were wearing a t-shirt that advertised an alcoholic beverage. Other than that, it was pretty much fair game for what one wore to school.

My sister now attends a very conservative boarding school that has some very strict guidelines pertaining to dress. No spaghetti straps, no bellies, no outlandish hair styles ect.

This week's Chronicle of Higher Education has an article on academic blogging, written by an actual academic blogger. It's a really good explanation of what blogging has to offer to the academic environment, comparing it to the Republic of Letters in the 18th century. Blogging, Farrell notes, is faster than publishing a journal article, allows for a freer exchange of ideas, allows those at the bottom of the hierarchy to be heard, and generally serves as a complement to existing publishing conventions.

Is the technology of the word developing so fast? This seems like something from the future, but the future is here now I suppose. When I came across this, I was amazed. The videos are very interesting, and the idea behind it is just like weblogs only you can see everything that is going on. In class, we discussed one of the problems with weblogs; it is difficult to extrapolate the tone of the writer. Though punctuation such as exclamation marks and question marks, it is sometimes difficult to understand exactly what the person is trying to say. Insinuations are sometimes overlooked while reading the words rather than hearing or seeing the person say them.

For those of you who may want to connect with some other students blogging, here's the blog of a group of freshmen at Middlebury. Actually, each student has their own blog, but they're all linked from here. Go visit, comment, invite them back here if you like.

The main goal for the majority of students, the one thing that they all strive for, is receiving an A in a class. It shows that you are intelligent and hard-working, that you have not only learned the information of the subject but you have mastered it. However, at one of the most prestigious colleges in the country, they are attempting to change the grading policy. The entire article can be found here

Over the weekend, I ran into this post about the work ethic among academics. I think this idea that we always have to be productive applies to more than just professors. I've been in the corporate environment and I remember in graduate school, we were always talking about how much reading we had or papers to write. I don't remember being this way in undergrad, but I suspect I was. Do you feel guilty when you're not working or do you try to see down time as necessary to recharge?

Women are vastly underrepresented in computer science, much more so than in other male-dominated fields, such as engineering. Why is that? Here at BMC, we have a hypothesis that subtle sexism permeates the field. And so we explore alternate assignments, curricula, and other ideas (also available as PostScript).

I'll admit that I never really thought about "the other side of the screen" before, but Chris Pirillo makes a brilliant point when he talks about the importance of supporting websites that provide free services. I can't count the times that I've visited sites for song lyrics and fonts, and to generate text banners. Most of them had ads that I thought were annoying, and that I never clicked on. Pirillo provides the perspective of the people who maintain the websites that allow us to get free stuff, and it's not pretty. A lot of them put in substantial effort, but don't get adequate support from users who just use the services without clicking on the ads or buying website merchandise. I'm probably one of those people who should support sites more often... but while I understand Pirillo's perspective, I'm also skeptical of clicking on ads, especially ones that flash "Win $1,000,000!" or "Who Is This Celebrity?" Some of them look like scams, and others just seem pointless. If there were safer and more purposeful ways of supporting websites, like buying merchandise, I think people would be more inclined to show their appreciation; I know I would. Ad hosting is probably lucrative for websites, but I think alternatives need to be derived. Sometimes, a message on the website reminding users that they can show their appreciation is effective. I know PinkMonkey.com used to have a similar message, and I knew several loyal users who sent them money.

Scroll down the homepage of robotwisdom.com and beneath a picture of the solar system you'll find topic after topic in yellow followed by link after link in blue against the stark black backdrop. You'll also find a list of what I assumed to be the jorn barger's top fifty song list... including Barbara Streisand and Joni Mitchell as well as Billy Joel and CSNY. Jorn Barger the creator of the site is described in the book "We've Got Blog," as a "long -haired, thick bearded former artificial-intelligence (AI) programmer" and eats nothing but vegetarian pizza and cheap supermarket coffee to maintain his blogging lifestyle.. and his website.

Being someone who does not know that much about blogs, I decided it would be a good idea to post about the chapters entitled, the state of the blog past, present and future. These 3 chapters are interviews with Evan Williams who’s product was blogger. In blogger past it deatailed how this phemonemon of a blog was really a awesome accident. Orriginally he put blogger up just to have people then upgrade to pyra. Yet blogger caught on and per month was witnessing a 20-40% growth per month. Evan was needless to say more then happy. Blogger present talks about what a blog is to Evan. He says that a blog is 3 things;frequncey, brevity and personality.

Chapter 16- 'Been Blogging? Web Discourse Hits Higher Level"

Basically this chapter is an overview of how people can get feedback on their beliefs and responses to things going on in the world today. Blogging is making journalism into a different job description because of the instant response available on the web. More columnists are going to the web to post their beliefs that would usually only make it to the editors door and never into news print. The internet is a new way to convey ideas and to spread information. Blogging is more helpful because more people can access it and use it. Websites like Blogger are making it so easy that you don't need to know HTML codes to have your own personal blog.