The fam and I are off on our annual two-week vacation to a hot place. Seattle in the summertime is somehow lacking; perhaps because there are no shimmery waves of Death Heat radiating up from the asphalt. So we feel the need to journey to hell and back in order to have experienced a proper summer.

I’ve posted a few older (but nicely refurbished) posts, as well as three new posts for your perusing pleasure.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Mindless food service industry jobs have only two redeeming qualities for a college student: nearly unlimited access to free food and a meager paycheck. To avoid smelling like a greasy steamed hot dog and getting paid not nearly enough to smile at horrid customers, please consider a fall internship.

There’s a good chance you’ll make some money (not all internships are the work-for-free variety) and you’ll learn something. It might be valuable knowledge pertaining to your future career, or it might be the priceless realization that, when up-close and ankle deep in what you had imagined was your dream job, it turns out—not so much. It’s always better to know these things in advance.

I myself had a sweet, romantic notion of ornithology (birds and stuff) until I was given the opportunity to replicate the bird population study my grandfather had done 60 years previously at UW’s Friday Harbor Marine Labs. It was when I started seriously considering the use of napalm to decrease the foliage so that I might actually be able to count the damn birds that I realized perhaps ornithology was not something I should pursue.

Internship Resources:

cbCampus.com
About.com: Top 8 Internship Sites
SimplyHired.com
Indeed.com
idealist.org

Further Reading:

Employers Seek Experienced Workers
Fall Internships at Washington Post, CNN, etc.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

This travesty was recently brought to my attention: vaguely ‘custom’ textbooks being published for specific courses and schools, thereby forcing students to but the books new and severely limiting the re-sale options.

For a while there, textbook publishers had college students over the proverbial barrel. Textbooks are horrendously expensive, even the used ones. And to limit the amount of reuse, which loses the publishing companies money, textbook publishers would publish new editions at astonishingly frequent (and unnecessary) intervals. I was never entirely certain what had been added or improved upon; I would still find typos and incorrect answers in the answer key of my 12th edition chem. and calculus textbooks, which makes it really effing hard to figure out whether you’re doing the problems right.

The publishing companies were making money hand over fist with every bogus ‘new edition.’ Students had two choices for saving money: buy used books (which is not always an option) or rent, as I have previously noted. Now (I’m trying to type while clenching my fists in frustration, which is not easy) those publishing bastards have come up with the perfect way to scr*w over college students. The publishers print up a custom textbook for one particular school, course, and sometimes a specific instructor as well.

All they’re really doing is just bundling a course syllabus or some lecture notes from the instructor or a description of the school’s writing program in with the actual text. But it now has a new and very specific ISBN and can’t easily be resold. Also, the custom books have this cheery note printed on the back: “This book may not be bought or sold used.” Did I mention the part about the kick-backs the schools are getting from the publishers? If there is such a place as hell, I would be willing to bet large amounts of money that one of the hotter circles is for anyone in the textbook publishing business.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I came across this stunning article about the daughter of West Virginia’s Governor, Joe Manchin III, being given an honorary ‘executive master of business administration degree.’ Heather Bresch was awarded the angry-crowd-inducing college degree from West Virginia University. What!? Why?

I’m confused—I was under the impression that anyone having an honorary college degree bestowed upon them was (a) already exhibiting superior amazingness in their field and so warranted a degree in that particular area of expertise for their work; (b) old enough to be solidly a grown-up, past average college age and pretty well into their career, thereby rendering them improbable future matriculation material.

I always saw an honorary college degree as something a college or a university gives to a mature adult who may or may not have earned a degree in their lifetime, but whose career and subsequent gathering of wisdom, knowledge and life experience has shown the world (and apparently the university in question) that they have learned lots of good stuff and have contributed to mankind in such a way that would warrant a matriculation-free degree. So you can see why I’d be confused by the daughter of someone special(ish) receiving an honorary degree. Are her genes worthy of a degree minus the matriculation part?

Bresch is well into her career, yes, and it could be argued that she’s beyond the average age of an MBA student (but that’s iffy, the MBA is a popular degree to come back to as an established professional). She could have maybe convinced me (and the ethics committee) that she was deserving of the degree that she had only done about half the work for if there hadn’t been a lot of covering up, transcript padding, grades added to previously incomplete coursework, and just overall sketchy motives involved with the awarding of the degree.

As it turns out, it was all a big ugly web of politics and lies and had nothing whatsoever to do with special qualities or life experiences. I’m not in the habit of wishing ill on people, but I find it comforting to know that it ended badly for all involved parties. Let’s all learn from their mistakes and not try to give or receive degrees based on doctored transcripts and possible political favors. You can read all the sordid details below.

Further Reading:

WVU Names Magrath Interim President After Scandal
West Virginia U President Will Resign to End Degree Controversy
WVU’s President Will Resign to End Degree Scandal
The Story of a Cover-Up
Criticism for Degree to Governor’s Daughter
Heather Bresch Didn’t Earn Degree From WVU, Report Says
Questions Raised Over How WVU Granted Mylan Executive Her Degree

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Author’s note: This is a refurbished older post. It’s still relevant and I’m on vacation.

No one can back up “Coolest” with facts, but I stand by my statement nonetheless. The non-sheep in me wanted so much for it to have been an actual college admissions essay. Alas, I can find nothing to back that up. The Urban Myth maintains that Hugh Gallagher wrote the infamous essay in 1990 when he applied to NYU and it was then printed up in several major newspapers as well as becoming infamous via the Internet. The Internet part is true, which means most people have already read it. If you haven’t, you really should.

Here’s the real story, according to Harper’s Magazine:

“This essay, by Hugh Gallagher, won first prize in the humor category of the 1990 Scholastic Writing Awards. It appeared in the May issue of Literary Cavalcade, a magazine of contemporary fiction and student writing published by Scholastic in NYC. Gallagher, who is 18, grew up in Newtown Square, PA, and will attend NYU this fall.”

He did attend NYU and graduated in 1994. I have no connections in the admissions office, so I have no idea whether he used his essay to get in. The Internet circulation in combination with his essay being published in Harper’s did open some doors for Gallagher’s writing career. He’s written for Rolling Stone, Wired, and his first novel, Teeth, was published in 1998.

Rampant, unfounded optimism usually pisses me off. And yet it’s my dream (which has every chance of not coming true) that someday colleges will choose students because of who they actually are and for their unique potential, not for padded high school transcripts or highly-coached college admissions processes and SAT scores. Whether Gallagher actually sent this in with his application to NYU or not, it still makes me happy and gives me at least a spider web of hope. Sometimes we all need to be reminded that not being a sheep can work in your favor.

ESSAY: IN ORDER FOR THE ADMISSIONS STAFF OF OUR COLLEGE TO GET TO KNOW YOU, THE APPLICANT, BETTER, WE ASK THAT YOU ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION: ARE THERE ANY SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCES YOU HAVE HAD, OR ACCOMPLISHMENTS YOU HAVE REALIZED, THAT HAVE HELPED TO DEFINE YOU AS A PERSON?
I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I’m bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don’t perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat .400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me. I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.

But I have not yet gone to college.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Author’s note: this is a refurbished older post. It’s still relevant and I’m on vacation.

For anyone who has just graduated, this advice may come too late. But if you’re still in the throes of your higher education, Lifehacker.com has a solid, reader-written list of everything they wished they’d been told before they left college for the real world. It’s a pretty long list, but contains useful tidbits nonetheless. Looking down from my worldly and wise vantage point (total crap—I’m 34 but most days I feel more like I’m 12) I can also see that a lot of the words of wisdom are correct. The picture of post-college reality I had when I was 18 turned out to be severely false.

While I was reading through Lifehacker’s article, I was wishing someone had let me in on all of this need-to-know information. I was irate for 0.7 seconds, and then I remembered the teenaged me and couldn’t imagine that charming young lady sitting still long enough or opening her ears wide enough to ever actually hear some adult’s sage advice. So for all I know, I was appropriately advised with regards to college, life, and reality and I just don’t remember.

It’s worth your time not to make the same mistake. Also, reading advice online is way less annoying than having to sit and listen to some pedantic uncle carry on about his glory days and why YOU should help him to re-live them by following in his footsteps. Or, conversely, Uncle Whatsit hates his life and whippersnapper you should follow his advice to the letter so YOUR life will be fabulous and he can finally achieve his smashing success vicariously through you.

Don’t be anyone’s puppet. Live your own life, make your own decisions and all that. But sometimes older people do have smart stuff to say (usually because they’ve screwed up hugely and have since learned from their mistakes). You can read the Lifehacker thing, pay attention to the choice bits and skip anything smacking of pedantic uncle.

A few choice bits:

“No one cares about what grades you got.”

“Learn that there are things that are very valuable and are not taught in school.”

“If you’re not ready for higher education, then travel.”

“Your major doesn’t necessarily determine your future career path.”

“Don’t get caught up in what other people want you to do.”

“Everything you just learned means nothing in the real world.”

“No matter how prepared you are for Real Life, you’re not. It’s hard, stressful, and sometimes cruel. When your parents said, ‘College was the best time of their lives’, they weren’t kidding.”

“Use your vacation…don’t be that guy.”

“Get to know something abut each of your co-workers. Even, or especially, the quiet or odd ones.”

“Never stop learning and studying.”

“Don’t be afraid to look stupid…..I’ve met plenty of people I didn’t like, but I have yet to meet anyone who didn’t have SOMETHING they could teach me about.”

“Get out there and do things. College gives you plenty of easy opportunities…”

“Real life isn’t like high school, but some workplaces are.”

“The most important skills to remember from college include how to write clearly, how to think critically, and how to get along with people who are not like you.”

“Don’t be afraid of anything.”

“It’s just a job.”

“People you went to high school with won’t matter in 2-3 years. Quit worrying about them.”

“Floss. Exercise. Like, a lot.”

“Build your own life, don’t leech off of someone else.”

“Just because you have a degree doesn’t mean you know everything.”

“Don’t get a credit card from those companies that come to campus and offer a free t-shirt if you apply. They aren’t really your friends and don’t give two craps about you.”

“Be completely honest with yourself and others, even if it means taking a risk. Tactful bluntness will carry you much further in life than telling people what they want to hear.”

“Time and time again—financial literacy.”

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Author’s note: this is a refurbished older post. It’s still relevant and I’m on vacation.

I’m managing to keep my crankiness under control regarding the new-found commonness of the term gap year. Where in the hell were those two words when I was a senior in high school? On another continent, that’s where. Young non-American adults are apparently encouraged (sometimes even expected) to take a gap year between high school and college. How nice for them.

In the land I am from, saying “I’m taking a year off before I start college,” means one of two things: either you’re a slacker and have no direction and do not wish to succeed in life, or your parents aren’t going to foot the tuition bill and you need a little time to think before you leap into the Student Loan Chasm of Doom.

So, clearly, as I was a spoiled girl (college paid for) with so much direction and focus it was coming out of my bottom (if you can convince yourself that you have a plan, then you can convince your family, too. It’s called suspension of disbelief. Sometimes it’s also called bull****), I went directly from high school to Cal State and did not pass Go. I took my break in the middle of my undergrad degree.

When I took my gap year, it was not referred to as such. It wasn’t even viewed as such. It was viewed by my family as “The year Alexa didn’t apply to medical school.” No, I was never planning on applying to medical school. Which explains my surprise upon learning that this was the plan as my grandparents saw it. So I didn’t see how taking part of a year off to work and travel was in any way going to interrupt my here-to-for unmentioned medical school application process.

Logic is not a language that translates well between generations, so my grandparents and I had to agree to not get along for a while. They came on board with the Europe Trip when my foster brother and I started sending very entertaining letters home. On paper. (It was like a blog, except that it was 1996 and it required postage stamps.)

Anyway, taking a gap year is normal if you grew up not in the U.S. And, oh happy day for everyone who isn’t me, parents across America are starting to accept the whole idea of their kiddos taking a year off between high school and college. I’m still reeling from the whole idea that my Year of Flake is suddenly a socially acceptable Gap Year. I‘m trying to recover from the reel and argue absolutely for taking a gap year if you are so inclined.

For the record, it was the best year ever. What do you learn when you’re not in school? A lot if your eyes are open. Don’t get me wrong, I love being in school, I love learning, and I’m better at being a student than I am at most other ventures. To be fair, I’ve spent more years as a student than I have at everything else except, you know, breathing. But sometimes you need to look up and see what’s happening outside the education furrow / rut you’ve been in for so long.

If you stare at books and the insides of lecture halls for years on end, eventually it all starts to blur together into one long road of memorization and red tape, punctuated by especially brutal finals or papers or lab write-ups. Looking at real life for even a few months gives you something solid to spackle your book knowledge to. Context and objectivity are pretty interesting animals. Who you are and how the world works when you’re in high school are changed completely when you hit college. The same goes for you in school vs. you in the world. Or you in the U.S. vs. you traveling across another continent.

And, yes, of course I grew, I learned, I came back a better version of me. I honestly don’t know how someone could do something different and manage to not learn from it. So I won’t go into the depth or the amazingness of the pre- vs. post-Gap Year Alexa. It was good, it was worth it, I highly recommend stepping outside of your comfort zone and seeing the world and yourself from another angle. And, as with everything in life, you’ll get out of it what you put into it. That’s right. Also, there’s no free lunch. I’m going to start my own inspirational poster company.

You probably shouldn’t go into it thinking that your gap year will be easier than school. If you do it right, it’ll probably be more fun, but not so much with the easy. I worked to earn the money for the trip. (That’s how I learned the valuable “food service sucks” lesson). I planned the trip (in cahoots with my foster brother). I had to work out traveling with another human (foster brother who may actually be an alien) and maintaining a good friendship.

If the red tape wasn’t properly dealt with prior to departure, I wasn’t going to be allowed to leave the country. If I pissed off a Turkish train conductor in Istanbul, I was the one who was going to be escorted from the train station before I ended up in a Turkish prison (the train guy started it). If all Americans and British passengers were going to be pulled off a Yugoslavian (it was 1996 and still Yugoslavia) train in the middle of nowhere and questioned (not in English) at gunpoint, I was the one who had to figure out how not to get shot. See? All kinds of learning experiences.

My “gap year” (which was less than a year) was amazing. It’s right in there with my senior year at Evergreen as far as how much I learned and how stupidly happy I was. I worked my ass off in both instances and am completely proud of what I managed to pull off.

I’m pro gap year, absolutely. But since I did it in the middle of my college career, and I also did it before it was cool, you might require a few more convincing (read: adult) arguments for taking some time off. Below are three adult arguments for taking a gap year in case you need some back-up logic to convince your parents (or yourself) that we learn better and grow more completely outside of the classroom box, and one excellent list of what to do and how to do it right (I had no big plan, I was flying strictly by the seat of my pants). And one really funny gap year article which you should not show your parents as it’s not that far off the mark.

Further Reading:

The Gap Year Advantage: Helping Your Child Benefit from Time Off Before or During College

How to Become a World Citizen, Before Going to College

‘Gap year’ before college gives grads valuable life experience

A Meaningful Detour: The Gap Year

Take this job and shove it…I’m taking a gap year

TransitionsAbroad.com: The Gap Year

Mind the Gap

Excellent battle plan, including websites and a book list

The hilarious gap-year emails that never reassure parents

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Given everything in the previous post, it will shock no one to learn that I started to read to my kids when they were in utero. They both have impressive personal libraries, but we supplement their kiddie-lit collections with twice-weekly trips to the library. We frequently discover new authors and check out every book he or she has written. Our most recent find is Jon Scieszka (rhymes with ‘fresca’).

My daughter thinks The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales is hilarious. We are also enamored of Baloney (Henry P.), an alien who’s late for school and has the best excuse ever. I, of
course, love Science Verse and Math Curse, and my son thinks the Trucktown book Smash! Crash! is loud and shiny. My daughter and I are starting on the Time Warp Trio series next.

In the midst of our Jon Scieszka streak I was reminded that he was recently appointed by the Librarian of Congress as the first ever National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. I’d heard the interview about it on NPR and was stoked that someone so happy, excited and humorous had been given this responsibility. He sounds very enthusiastic in all of his interviews (see below) and has a list of the stuff he thinks he should ask for as the Ambassador: cape, sash, bejeweled goblet, jetpack, Popemobile, Ambassador underwear, epaulets and a red phone.

Part of why Scieszka is such a vastly entertaining author is that he’s trying to get kids interested in reading. Boys have proven more difficult to convince. To remedy that, Scieszka started Guys Read, a site that promotes the following ideas to get boys to read:

–Letting them choose what they read
–Expanding our definition of “reading” to include:
–nonfiction
–graphic novels, comics, comic strips
–humor
–magazines, newspapers, online text

Anyway, it’s a cool site, Jon Scieszka’s a cool guy, and I think he’s a perfect choice for National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

Further Reading:

Stinky Cheese! Ambassador for Children’s Literature
‘Stinky’ Jon Scieszka has a read on kids
Here Comes Jon Scieszka to Make Reading Fun!
Reading Rockets Interview

Posted by Alexa Harrington