so all these things are rushing thru my mind and its like i have this constant feeling i have to decide right at this moment. and it doesnt help when you have people constantly asking what you want to do with your life and where you want to go. most of the time anymore i dread meeting new adults cuz it inevitably leads to the question: what grade are you in? which leads to: where do you want to go to college?

·         Talk. Really. Talk about your homes, your families, your friends. It will give you all a better understanding of how each person is used to living.

·         Collaborate. Make your room/suite/apartment be an expression of each of you. Allow everyone to contribute to the decoration of your space.·         Set some ground rules. If you are having trouble compromising on a daily basis, write up a contract. ·         Make a chore wheel. I know of very few people who enjoy cleaning. And when you live in a small space, the littlest mess can seem a lot bigger. Make a chore wheel with all of your names and all of the chores that need to get done. Spin it every week so everyone trades off.·         Get lost together. No joke. You’ll learn a lot about your roommates and your new surroundings by wandering the campus/city together. Find cool places that you like to hang out at. Make it a mission to go out some place new each week, or go out for lunch every Sunday. It will create traditions within your new family.·         Give it time. Don’t expect to hit it off immediately with your roommates. If you do, that’s great! But if you don’t, give it a while. You’ll grow on each other.  

Anyway, I hope you all are well and have successfully started another school year. To kick things off, I’ve just got a few random tips to help make this year great!

 ·         Organize – If you don’t already, keep a daily planner with all of your assignments and appointments. Also keep a weekly schedule that visually blocks out periods of time that you regularly have scheduled, like classes and weekly meetings. Keep it up on a wall or bulletin board; some place where you can easily see it. Also keep a monthly schedule. This will give you a big picture look at things so you know what obligations you have coming up. That way you won’t all of a sudden realize you have way too many things to do in one week.·         Get involved – Trust me on this: life is better when you’re leading a full one. Find organizations that pique your interests. It will keep you active and give you a chance to meet new people.·         Nip it in the bud – whether it’s homework, relationships, or the dishing, get it taken care of before it all piles up.·         Sit up front – If you find yourself missing things in class, not following, or just falling asleep, sit in the front row. You have a better chance of hearing and seeing everything.·         Keep in touch – It’s easy to get caught up in your own busy schedule, but remember to keep in touch with your friends on and off-campus. Even the littlest of things will help to keep you close. Text someone you haven’t seen in a while and ask if they’d like to join you for lunch, or watch your favorite TV show (i.e. Gossip Girl Mondays in Sara’s room!)·         Ask questions – If you don’t understand that passage in The Iliad, ask your instructor. If you wonder if that toaster is allowed in your dorm room, ask your RA (it probably isn’t), and if you want to know how you’re friend’s relationship is going, ask him/her about it. It’s always good to stay informed! 

I hope this year goes great for everyone!

As always, words of wisdom:

“The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.” – Ben Stein

As I may have mentioned before, my mother is a high school counselor. I’ve gotten used to being her guinea pig for various surveys, programs, and presentations. Her latest is a presentation to be given to students in ROP (Regional Occupation Program) classes to inform them of the long run benefits of an education, which she had me proofread and edit. And I think some of this info will be very helpful to some of you.

As I hope all of you aware, a college education will earn you money. That is to say that you make more with a degree than you do without. Now I know plenty of people will think, “yeah yeah yeah, but I can do just fine without one!” Can you? Can you, really?

The following data refer to annual costs in Santa Cruz, California (my hometown)

· Housing (2bd 1 ½ bath) - $1,202
· Utilities (cell, electricity, DSL, cable) - $235
· Food (Eat in some and Eat out) - $350
· Transportation (Gas, insurance, car payments, basic maintenance) - $721
· Clothes (A few basic clothes) - $75
· Health Care (Basic Health Insurance) - $58
· Entertainment (Have fun, go out a little) - $100
· Personal (Basic needs) - $25
· Miscellaneous (Travel, other expenses) - $100
· Savings (average 5% of income) - $143
Total: $36,108

Before we even add these up, think about how accurate these numbers are. I don’t know about you, but I spend way more money on clothes than $75 per year. I just spent $50 last week! $25 for personal needs? I think not. And with gas prices skyrocketing, $721 probably doesn’t cut it. But, if we assume these cost estimates are correct, that brings annual expenses to $36,108. If you work full time for a full year, that’s 2000 hours. 36,108 divided by 2000 = $18 an hour. This means that in order to get by, even in a thrifty manner, you need to be making $18 an hour and working full time. (Oh, and by the way, these estimates don’t included taxes. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200. Instead, subtract 25%.) As you are hopefully aware, minimum wage is not $18/hour. More like $8/hour. This means that it is impossible to get by on minimum wage.

So how do you make more than minimum wage (and therefore survive?) Education!

The following are estimates of the hourly and yearly wages per each education level.

· No High School Diploma - $10.70/hour - $21,400/year
· High School Grad - $15.10/hour - $30,200/year
· Associate Degree - $18.50/hour - $37,000/year
· Bachelor’s Degree - $24.60/hour - $49,350/year
· Professional Degree - $35.60/hour - $71,350/year

According to this data, you need at least an associate degree in order to support yourself. Really, given that even $36,108 a year is cutting it close, you need to be making more, which means a BA is in order, and the only way you can get a BA, and therefore survive in this world is to go to college.

“These days an income is something you can’t live without – or within.” – Tom Wilson

We’re saying this now, but in college will we still be saying this? In honesty I think college is a lot more helpful because you rely on yourself more. I hope I won’t be saying that exact thing as soon as I hit college.
Can’t wait till that happenes.

Meanwhile I’ll still be asking myself, “Why are we still here in high school!?”

Community colleges have so many qualities that make them perfect for some people: they’re local, so students can live at home and commute, they’re cheaper than most 4-year universities, and they’re flexible. Community colleges understand that their students may want to transfer, so they let you know exactly what you have to do to get the most out of your community college education and then transfer to another university. And that’s where it gets hard. My friends in community college have more general education requirements than I do because their school specializes in provided such a wide range of academics, whereas mine is more focused in particular areas of study. Also, because many of my friends are looking to transfer, they have to work their butts off to get the credits they need to do that as soon as possible. It’s hard! And I admire them so much for doing what it takes.

But not all people realize just how much work community college can be. If they see their school as a joke, they will treat it as such. People may think that they’ll really start working once they transfer to a four-year school, so they slack off in community college. What they don’t realize is that they only way the can transfer in the time they’d like is to pay attention, ask questions, and create a plan for acheiving their dreams. This can’t happen if they’re slacking.

My advice for those of you looking into community college is to take it seriously. It is real school. Maybe you’d like to spend four years at a community college, maybe just two and then transfer. Either way, it will only be worth it if you get as much as you can out of the experience. (That goes true for any other school in the country.) And if you think only “nobodys” go to community college, take a look at these people who did (provided by collegeboard.com)

• Gwendolyn Brooks, Pulitzer prize-winning poet
• Eileen Collins, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) astronaut
• Joyce Luther Kennard, California Supreme Court justice
• Jeanne Kirkpatrick, former United Nations (UN) ambassador
• Jim Lehrer, news anchor
• Robert Moses, choreographer and dance company founder
• Sam Shepard, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright
• James Sinegal, CEO of Costco
• Maxwell Taylor, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

If they can do it, so can you!

“I would visualize things coming to me. It would just make me feel better. Visualization works if you work hard. That’s the thing. You can’t just visualize and go eat a sandwich.” - Jim Carrey

As TeenInk Raw stands testament to, teenagers are brimming with ideas that cannot and should not always be edited for the general public or younger audiences. High school is edited. College is not. High school students certainly talked to each other about “unedited” subjects, like drugs and sex, and in an “unedited” vernacular language involving many of the words discussed by the late great George Carlin. However, a high school teacher would probably not talk to their students about unedited subjects in an unedited language. But a college professor would.

In a single year of college courses, I think every single one of my professors used “the F word” at least once, and one of my required reading book was called “The History of Shit” (an pretty interesting read, should you feel up to it.) My professors were also perfectly fine with discussing drugs or sex, including their students’ personal habits in both areas. As one professor put it “We’re all adults here.” He was right. In college, you are an adult, as are your professors, so the age difference doesn’t matter as much. In high school, I had many teachers whom I felt like I could speak with as equals. I respected them, they respected me, no problem. In which case, I never felt like there was a distinct student/teacher authority line that was shattered upon reaching college. No, nothing that dramatic. But the difference was still noticeable.

As always, words of wisdom: “Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there.” - Clare Booth Luce

Alright, yes, this myth is technically two myths, and myths that are exact opposites as well. However, I think the debunking of each of these common beliefs about college is the same for both.

Now, I’m sure you have all heard the long-winded saying about school in general that is often favored by many a sharp-tongued cynic: You go to elementary school to prepare you for middle school, and what you learn in middle school is supposed to prepare you for high school, and you’re supposed to do well in high school so you can go to a good college, and you want to go to a good college so you can get a good job, and you want to get a good job so you can make a lot of money, because money = happiness. So if we’re talking about college, then we can say the purpose of college is to get a job. Well, yes…technically…but not quite.

Yes, you should always do your best in whatever you do, but not necessarily so you can make it to the next phase of your life. Yes, you should work hard in high school because your performance in high school affects your options for whatever comes after high school. But high school is not about getting into college. This is something that I didn’t really understand until after I had graduated, and I found myself wishing I had done more things that I wanted to do, rather than all the things I did simply because they looked good on a college application. High school should be about learning (as should college), but true education cannot come solely from a classroom; it comes from experience.

My point is that education is not as simple as “do X to get to Y to get to Z.” Education is what you make of it. Yes, you are limited in your course of study while you are in high school because high school curriculum is fairly standardized, but this is less so in college. You have a wider range of courses to choose from, and fewer conditions to meet. Even so, the things you learn in college should not all come from your professors. As I said before, learning comes from experience. So while reviewing your notes from today physics lecture may be quite educational, you may learn more from a conversation with your next door neighbor. College cannot be all about work.

Similarly, and yet completely opposite, college cannot be all about fun. Work hard, play hard, my friends. Yes, you will meet lots of people and make new friends, and yes, you will have the freedom to do essentially whatever you want, and yes, chances are you will have fewer classes early in the morning which means you can afford to stay up until 3 because you can sleep until 10 BUT…pace yourself. To quote my mother quoting a zillion Zen books: “Everything in moderation.”

Your college experience should be enjoyable, but that doesn’t mean it should be four years of parties 24/7 like many an exaggerated tale and episode of Greek could lead you to believe. School is hard work; it’s just that simple. You will spend just as many nights up until 3 in the morning writing a paper as you will partying with your friends, if not more (I hope.)

Striking a happy medium can be difficult, and believe it or not, sometimes it’s harder to go out and have fun with people than it is to stay at home and study. In fact, nearly all of my friends who just finished their freshman year of college have said more about the difficulty of typically “fun” things, like meeting new people, than about the difficulty of their classes. But more on that later. For now, as always, some words of wisdom:

“A child only educated in school is an uneducated one.” – George Bernard Shaw