“What is the best piece of advice you can give a freshman?” It was a question that popped up over and over again during my time at Dawg Camp, an optional weekend retreat in the summer for incoming freshmen to the University of Georgia. Some of the answers were predictable, like make a lot of friends or don’t forget to call ...

Kristen has been contributing to Fastweb since August 2011 and has garnered a lot of attention from our readers for her personal and prolific pieces, like Accepting Rejection (or a Deferral or Waitlisting). So we thought it would be nice to introduce you all to even more of Kristen! What are you studying in school and what are the biggest challenges ...

In January, President Obama urged states to make college education a higher priority in his State of the Union Address. He also pleaded with institutions of higher learning to control tuition inflation. However, the President did not define how states and colleges and universities could implement his call to action. Instead, he has left it up to them. Whether or not ...

A college education is a great investment in your future. You need a college education to further your career, not to mention, it helps you grow intellectually as an individual. But are some colleges a better investment than others? Yes, according to calculations by Payscale, a site that collects career and salary data. Using specific methodology, Payscale researched and calculated different ...

On New Year’s Day, Samantha Garvey’s life changed for the worse. She and her family moved from their home into a homeless shelter just a few months after her parents had been injured in a car accident and forced out of their jobs, leading them to fall behind on rent payments, according to the New York Daily News. But just a ...

Ahh, hello, midterm break! It’s finally time to set the homework aside and unwind. During this brief respite from my freshman year, I've done some reflecting on my first two months of college life, and have had a few realizations I'd like to share. [gate] Long car rides by yourself aren't necessarily awful. I live about three and a half hours ...

It started out as a free-throw contest to unite a community despite its negative stereotypes. But it delivered a much bigger message when the free-throw contest winner forfeited all his glory and gave the winnings to the rest of the contestants. It sounds like something from a movie, and in a way, it is. According to the LA Times, Court Crandall, ...

It’s quite an easy thing to become lazy in your first semester of college. Nobody is yelling in your ear for you to get up (unless your roommate just cares that much), you can skip class more easily (depending on your professor’s attendance policy), and at any given time, you’re probably no more than 300 feet from an Xbox. A lot ...

This summer, a number of states and colleges have slashed grant funding and raised tuition prices, giving students and their families little time to prepare for the hikes that will go into effect soon. According to Smart Money, Texas and New Hampshire announced tuition increases from 6 – 10% at some public universities. California just proposed to continue to drive tuition ...

“She sells sea- She sells- She sells seashells by the seashore.” It was a problem- a minor one in North America, but big elsewhere. In Mandarin Chinese, there are five consonant sounds I still struggle with, especially when presented in rapid succession, and two of them appear in that line. Generally, I avoid saying certain phrases in English (“we were where”), ...

The fading sounds of applause echo across the huge hall, dying down into nothing as we begin our final set. Our first song of the night is a showstopper, the second a laid back interlude. Our last song, however, is much darker, striking a melancholy theme that will haunt the audience throughout the final moments of our performance. The hall is ...

Each year, UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies releases a survey to the country’s college freshmen class to identify who they are as a whole. The survey covers a range of topics, from political views to how they’re paying for college, in order to provide a complete picture of the Class of 2015. In summary, here are eight things ...

Textbooks and classroom materials are one of those college costs that are out of sight, out of mind until you’re precariously balancing 10 different hardcover books through the narrow aisles of your campus bookstore. And those textbooks signify an altogether different burden when the cashier asks you to fork over roughly $1,000. According to CollegeBoard, the average amount that college students ...

If you think you’ve got a lot of summer reading to do think again, five university students in the Dominican Republic have been reading for 300 hours, straight. According to huffingtonpost.com the students are reading aloud in an effort to not only break the previously set Guinness World Record of 240 hours but also raise awareness about books in a country ...

When you first start college, you are gung ho about following your passions. How fun will it be to get to study a subject you love in-depth, have great classroom debates about ancient philosophers, works of art and literature, or to analyze Sigmund Freud’s theories? Hindsight is often said to be 20/20. Some college students graduate excited to enter the workforce ...

Senioritis: we’ve all heard of it, but you never really know what it’s like until your senior year. Second semester seems to be the time when it strikes most vindictively, transforming even the most diligent of students into unmotivated clock watchers—college apps are done for the most part, ACT/SAT scores are in, and it really does feel like there is no ...

With the start of the school year approaching, some of you may be meeting your new roommates for the first time in just a few weeks. And while most colleges go through an extensive matching game to find the perfect roommate for you, sometimes they miss the mark. While bad roommates seem torturous at the time, they make for a great ...

In college, staying healthy is often the last thing on your mind. Just finding time to eat dinner seems like an accomplishment, and forgetting your essay and sprinting back to the dorm totally counts as a workout. But making sure to focus on your health means more than just driving away the Freshman 15 – it’s about making sure you’re at ...

Sitting in the dining hall and eating ice cream at 10 PM one night, my roommate excused herself from the table to get some cereal. When she was gone, one of the girls sitting with us laughed and said, “I don’t know how you live with her.” It was a good-natured joke, but also a good question, since we hadn’t met ...

Whoever said it doesn't pay to play was clearly mistaken. Apparently, the partier-to-impressive-post-grad-career combo is still on the menu for some schools. So, what’s the key element in finding these hot spots? [gate] It all started as most great studies do: by following the money trail. The Princeton Review. The key component to point out, however, is that the schools with ...