The following guest post from Dr. Debi Yohn could come in handy for college students and their parents

LifeHack.org is an amazing web site, probably one of the best on the net. They recommend these FREE computer programs:

OpenOffice.org: A top-quality, full-featured office productivity suite -- word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software, graphics editor, database, the works! Can save and open most Microsoft Office formats. If you have MS Works on your PC, ditch it and get OpenOffice.org instead. Available for most operating systems.
GIMP: A powerful, full-feature photo editing program, comparable to Photoshop. Available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.
KeyNote: Even after 2 1/2 years of being abandoned by its developer, KeyNote (not the Mac presentation software) remains the best free outlining software, with support for rich text formatting, plugins and macros, hotkeys, and a lot more. Can be run from a flash drive, too.

FreeMind: Great mindmapping program, useful for brainstorming, outlining projects, and keeping notes.
Mozy Backup: An Internet-based backup system, Mozy's free plan allows you to store up to 2GB of files. The software runs in your system tray and automatically backs up the folders and files you've selected. I have it set to backup my documents folder and my email, which comes in just under 2GB. To backup photos, music, and other big files, you'll need to upgrade to a paid version.
Zotero: A bibliography manager that integrates with Firefox, allowing you to automatically add webpages and, more usefully, resources from academic databases like J-Stor and AnthroSource to your bibliography. You can attach PDFs and images to your entries, as well as add your own notes. And all without leaving Firefox.
NVU: Mozilla's web editor, NVU allows you to write webpages either in raw code or using the WYSIWYG interface, making webpage creation simple. UPDATE: NVU is no longer in development; the current version is called Kompozer.
VLC: The VideoLan Client isn't pretty, but it will play just about any audio or video file you throw at it.
Pidgin: A single IM client that connects to just about every IM network: AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, MySpace, IRC, and so on. Available for Windows and Linux; Mac users can give Adium a try (I can't vouch for it, since I haven't used a Mac for 7 years...).

Share this with your college students, they may understand the significance of these programs even more than you...

Article by, College Parenting Expert, Dr. Debi Yohn, whose advice on successfully getting college students through college with an emphasis on graduation and rewarding employment is sought by parents from around the world. Now for the first time, she reveals 27 Winning Strategies for Success - a guidebook geared to parents of new college students. Get her free e-Book now at http://www.collegeparentsadvice.com/ and improve your child's chances of a successful college experience.

Posted by Candice Arnold on January 30, 2009 at 1:38 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

Pets are good medicine for college students experiencing stress, according to a new study. We have known this for the elderly, the sick and the housebound, but we forget about college students.

That's not too surprising, since pets have long been known to comfort the elderly or the chronically ill.

I am a pet lover and I am hoping that this kind of study will provide one more incentive for colleges to participate in a growing trend to allow students to have pets on campus.

For my own son, having a pet was a big turn around. He had to move off campus, so it was after his Freshman year, but the activity with the dog was all healthy. He went to dog parks, the beach and long walks. His dog went with him when he did errands. It filled a void of loneliness that I had never considered. I believe it also gave him a reason to go home when he may have been looking for companionship in the wrong places.

About 18 percent of the college students surveyed for the study said their pets helped them cope during difficult times.

That may be because pets provide a familiar face for students who are away from home for the first time.

Although not a substitute for human interaction, students who have pets are less likely to feel lonely or depressed, according to the study.

"We might not think of college students as being lonely, but a lot of freshman and sophomores are in an early transition from living at home to living in dorms or off-campus," Sara Staats, lead author of the study and professor emeritus of psychology at Ohio State's Newark Campus, stated in a press release. "College is a very stressful environment for them and sometimes they can feel isolated or overwhelmed with the change."

About 350 college students and nearby community members participated in the study, which was recently published in the journal Society & Animals.
The top reason for having a pet? Avoiding loneliness.

It makes sense to me but it also adds another responsibility to the student. Caring for a pet cannot be taken lightly but it remains a consideration for the right kind of student.

Article by, College Parenting Expert, Dr. Debi Yohn, whose advice on successfully getting college students through college with an emphasis on graduation and rewarding employment is sought by parents from around the world. Now for the first time, she reveals 27 Winning Strategies for Success - a guidebook geared to parents of new college students. Get her free e-Book now at http://www.collegeparentsadvice.com/ and improve your child's chances of a successful college experience.

Posted by Candice Arnold on January 27, 2009 at 1:54 PM | Leave a Comment (0)

OK, I admit it. I'm not a sports fan. It's an unpopular position, I know - especially with a major event like the Super Bowl coming up.

I may not know a lot about sports, but I do know a lot about education. And I'm pretty impressed when athletic superstars go the distance with academics, and become fully prepared for careers beyond the field.

So in honor of the upcoming contest of the exalted pigskin, I present a roundup of super-smart and academically minded professional athletes. Let the games begin!

• Recently retired MLB starting pitcher Mike Mussina graduated from Stanford University in 1990 with a bachelor's degree in economics. He completed his degree in three years and earned All-American honors for baseball.
• NFL quarterback Chad Pennington graduated from Marshall College in 1999 with a 3.83 GPA and a bachelor's degree in journalism. In college, he was a Heisman Trophy finalist as well as a finalist for a prestigious Rhodes scholarship.
• NBA power forward/center Emeka Okafor earned his bachelor's degree in finance from the University of Connecticut in 2004. He graduated with honors in three years, with a 3.8 GPA, as an Academic All-American.

Of course, not all professional athletes make it all the way through school. But you've got to give props to the ones who take the time to go back and earn their degrees:

• NBA center Shaquille O'Neal left Louisiana State University to pursue his pro basketball career, but returned to school and received a bachelor's degree in general studies in 2000.
• Football legend Joe Namath returned to the University of Alabama in 2007 - 42 years later - to earn his bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary studies.
• NBA All-Star Vince Carter made it back to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001 to receive his bachelor's degree in African-American studies.

Honorable mention: Myron Rolle graduated in two-and-a-half years with a pre-med degree from Florida State University. But instead of entering this year's NFL draft, he's pursuing a one-year master's degree in medical anthropology as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University. The aspiring neurosurgeon plans to enter the draft in 2010.

On the flipside, if you're interested in sports but are a disaster on the field, there are plenty of non-athletic sports careers to choose from, like sports management or broadcast journalism.

Impressive, huh? Maybe I'll watch more than the commercials on February 1 after all.

Article by, Robyn Tellefsen and courtesy of CollegeSurfing Insider.

Posted by Candice Arnold on January 26, 2009 at 6:01 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Let me begin by thanking Dan for the opportunity to participate in the Personal Branding Blog. I'll be posting on Tuesdays and thought I'd start by discussing my experience in creating the Social Media Marketing course. The goal was to develop a course syllabus that discusses a set of emerging marketing tools, targeted at professional adults and international students, that educates and informs, and above all is relevant to the business experience.

Overwhelming continuing education

I have been teaching Executive Marketing courses at the UCLA Extension since 2001. The first course I taught was a course I developed on Competitive Marketing. I had be come frustrated with some of the available continuing education for business people and decided that, given the chance, I would write a course I would take myself. I used Michael Porter's classic book Competitive Strategy and Sun Tzu's The Art of War as course textbooks.

That first semester was a huge success - in fact, one of the highest rated courses that fall. Fast forward to 2008 and I am pleased to say that Karl Kasca, my co-instructor, and I successfully launched Social Media Marketing on November 5.

Putting together the course materials was daunting. Presenting emerging trends, technologies, and concepts to a broad audience is no easy task. The phrase "drinking from the firehose" doesn't begin to cover it. Not only that, the popularity of the topic attracted over 50 students right of the bat. We capped it there and actually turned away about 15 potential students.

Blogging as a teaching tool
Based on a best practice from another Extension instructor at the UCSD Extension, Karl and I developed the Teaching Social Media at UCLA blog and the rest is history. The blog became a teaching tool as well as a resource location to supplement other class materials.

The second homework assignment was for students to create a blog. For social media practitioners, this may seem elementary. But the fact is that most businesses and business people are just now warming up to social media as a serious tool in the marketing mix.

I decided to ramp up my Twitter presence at the beginning of the course as well. I think I had about 30 followers in November. I'm close to 1,000 as I write this post. I decided to use the SMMUCLA blog and Twitter as personal branding tools because my personal goals are to ensure that 2009 will see a combination of revenue from consulting, teaching, writing, and speaking.

The blogs and Twitter have helped push my profile to a wider audience and I have provided a role model to the students on the power of social media.

Gold star resources
One of the key signatures Karl and I bring to the classes we teach is a list of 'gold star' guest speakers. My extensive business network and Karl's market intelligence network enable us to take our classes to a new level via the relevant experience of speakers who are living and breathing the topics we are discussing.

The Social Media course was no exception. We had Ethan Bauley from M80, Carrie Wilkerson - The Barefoot Executive, Rodney Rumford of FaceReviews, and Nic Adler to discuss The Roxy on Sunset case study. Turned out this was the best ticket in town!

The next class I teach is Global Marketing and Strategy in Spring 2009. Social Media Marketing will run the last 6 weeks of the Spring semester and Karl and I look forward to another great lineup of speakers and I'll be posting about them here and on the Teaching Global Marketing at UCLA blog.

Article by, Beverly Macy is the Managing Partner of Y&M Partners and teaches a social media class at UCLA. Y&M just launched the "Pay it Forward 2009" project.

Article courtesy of Dan Schawbel, the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y. He authors the Personal Branding Blog and publishes Personal Branding Magazine and authored the upcoming book, Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, Spring 2009). Dan has been called a "personal branding force of nature" by Fast Company and his work has been published in BrandWeek Magazine, Advertising Age and countless other publications.

Posted by Candice Arnold on January 13, 2009 at 10:52 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

For high school students, getting into the colleges of their dreams is as important as landing dream jobs is to recent college graduates. If Kathleen Kingsbury's article in the Daily Beast, "Dirty Secrets of College Admissions," is anything to go by, they needn't worry. According to Kingsbury, being rejected from a particular college could hinge on something as inconsequential as how well the admissions counselor's favorite football team fared in its last game.

Some of the counselors and former counselors who spoke with Kingsbury chose to remain anonymous, but others, like Michele Hernandez, former admissions officer at Dartmouth College and author of A is Admissions: The Insider's Guide to Getting Into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges, didn't mind being identified.

"Most of the time you can't predict what will push one candidate over the edge," Hernandez told Kigsbury. "Right now, for instance," she continued, "schools are showing a large preference for non-college backgronds - that is, applicants whose parents didn't go to college."

It's a little disconcerting to learn that one's child could be denied entrance into the college of her choice simply because both of her parents are college graduates. But what's even more disturbing is the fact that one admissions counselor confessed that some students may have been denied enrollment because he felt "sluggish" after lunch on the day he reviewed their applications. Another said he rejected all applicants from Buffalo, once, because he had gotten food poisoning in a Buffalo restaurant the night before.

The lesson to be learned here is that there's no guarantee - even for the rich and famous and powerful - that a student will get into the college of his choice. Period. Although children of alumni and of wealthy and/or well known families have the odds stacked in their favor, they, too, can be rejected if the college or university has reason to believe the student could potentially attract negative publicity to the school.

Does that mean students should become cavalier about admissions? No, of course not. It simply means that they and their parents should be less intense because when all is said and done, the admissions counselor's state of mind is as likely to determine whether certain students are accepted as are their SAT scores, GPAs, and great admissions essays.

And remember, going to the best, most expensive college or university will in no way guarantee being hired for internships or entry level jobs with the country's top employers. It can't hurt, but it's not an absolute certainty. It's more important to attend a school that's a good fit in terms of size, curriculum, culture, etc.

Posted by Candice Arnold on January 12, 2009 at 11:44 AM | Leave a Comment (0)

Every college student (and parent of college students!), should consider self storage as a way to ensure the safe storage of college stuff.

Self storage is also a good solution for college students traveling for a semester abroad. A self storage unit provides a great alternate to moving everything back to your home. Simply store your students items at a storage facility near campus and when they come back from traveling, they'll have everything they need to re-establish their college home.

Many students securing jobs out-of-town after college are faced with the prospect of having to throw out many of their prized collegiate possessions because of apartment size and storage restrictions.

Using a self storage unit to keep these items close to school (and out of your house!) is a great way to save your own home's organization.

So as you start this second semester and you are wondering about what happens this summer, do not fret. Self Storage is a great solution. If you have a student who is an entrepreneur, they can organize a storage system by renting a large unit and parceling out space to students that do not need an individual unit.

Self storage is the perfect solution for both parents and college students. Self storage units provide a safe, secure, and affordable way to store every valuable belonging.

Article by, College Parenting Expert, Dr. Debi Yohn, whose advice on successfully getting college students through college with an emphasis on graduation and rewarding employment is sought by parents from around the world. Now for the first time, she reveals 27 Winning Strategies for Success - a guidebook geared to parents of new college students. Get her free e-Book now at http://www.collegeparentsadvice.com/ and improve your child's chances of a successful college experience.

Posted by Candice Arnold on January 12, 2009 at 9:16 AM | Leave a Comment (0)