Gearfire - Tips for Students

The Frugal Student: Get Microsoft Office 2010 for $80 The Frugal Student is a weekly column on personal finance for students, brought to you by Chuck over at The Thrifty Lifestyle. Check out TheThriftyLifestyle.com for more frugal tips! Money is often tight in college, and so students have developed many creative ways to save money. Unfortunately between productivity software like Microsoft Office and media software like Photoshop, computer software is often a big expense for students. Luckily software...

What to do During Summer Vaccation

Image Copyright Lynne Lancaster There are a lot of people finding the site, or coming back to the site looking for some ideas on what to do during summer. I’m not going to write another post on the topic, because it would be very similar to the one I published last year. What I will do is link to some posts from GearFire and other sites around the Blogsphere. Things to do During Summer This is a post of mine...

WolframAlpha: A new tool for online research

Ever student knows that they can go to Wikipedia for an overview of a subject, that they can go to Google for a wide variety of perspectives and popular media, Google Scholar for academic journal references, and Google Books for searching within books, both current and obscure. The new Google Squared even organizes output into a table of key concepts to help you organize your research. But there is a key weakness to all...

Exam Prep for the Visual Learner

I have 2 weekend, 3 weeks and 3 blue Post-Its until my first exam. Yes- 3 blue Post-Its. See: My first exam is the first blue blue Post-It in the third row, and there are three blue Post-Its before it. The green Post-Its are the weekends I have to study (far right), and the yellow ones are days where I don’t currently have any event scheduled that will require my mental or physical energy. (I apologize for the...

Reclaim Your Dreams

One of the bloggers that I follow, Jonathan of Illuminated Mind has recently released an eBook called Reclaim your Dreams which I have had the privilege of receiving a free review copy of. I have read the eBook and must say I am very impressed. Having been a fan of Jonathans blog for some time, I enjoy his writing style and found his book equally easy to read and digestible. The ideas in the book are definately worth reading,...

Sort your schedule

When planning revision, it’s a good idea to plan things out in advance. A tip for you all is try and make a list of what you need to get done in preparation for each exam paper, that is specific actions that will help improve your grade. When you come to planning what you are doing for the week (a habit I will talk more about at a later date), I certainly find it far easier to plan everything out on paper. Once you have...

Reader Feedback: What are you looking for?

It feels a shame to have to knock my last post off the top of the page given the warm reception it has received, however I need to take the chance to ask all of you as readers for some help and advice. The truth is I have probably neglected this blog a little lately, and I’m sorry. Now things are starting to get a little less stressful (despite exam season starting, getting rid of one of my most stressful extra...

Jump Off the Page

It may be rare for a student productivity blogger to draw inspiration from a film about card counting, but I have managed to do just that. I saw the film 21 a while back and absolutely loved it. If you want a little more background information on the film, (re)read “Do you dazzle? Do you jump off the page?” which I wrote last week. The part of the film I drew my inspiration from was when Ben faced a tough...

10 Study Abroad Tips and Suggestions

Studying abroad was the best decision I made while in college. It opened my eyes to a different culture and experiences, I met some amazing people, and I got to travel more in that 9 months than at any other time in my life combined. Although you will get a packet of logistical information from your study abroad program about visa requirements, registration, and other legal necessities for participation in the host country,...