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Scholarship Opportunities: They’re Everywhere

deadlineman — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:17:15 +0000

Financing college is an increasingly difficult proposition. Tuition and fees rise annually, while the economy stays in the doldrums. Furthermore, smart students know that only celebrities or geniuses can forego training and certification beyond high school.

Fortunately, the number of potential sources of funding has also increased.

We’ll examine some of the more unusual scholarship granters in this and upcoming articles.

Researching these opportunities reveals that it pays to look to your own town, nation, religious affiliation, family history, and passions, first, to find targeted scholarship money.

You can qualify for a prize of 5,000 dollars by registering with and completing surveys with Ipsos I-Say.

Although not a traditional scholarship, this money is fungible, isn’t it, and represents a nearly effortless way to try for a nice chunk of change.

Craving a swim with the sharks? Residents of the Maldives (440 miles south of Sri Lanka, for the geographically challenged among us) can compete for a ship-board training program in shark ecology and natural history. Scholarship recipients will learn to become Reef Checkers, acquiring an intimate knowledge of the coral reefs and their notochord residents. The course and scholarship are sponsored jointly by a wildlife conservation organization and a resort corporation.

The scholarship is intended to increase the number of local citizens who can help the government in preserving the incredible local ocean fauna. Biosphere Expeditions runs a variety of other programs with less restrictive residency qualification requirements, also with the potential for scholarships. These expeditions are all oriented towards an understanding of fragile species such as the snow leopard in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, and dolphins and turtles off the Honduran coast. Even if your college did not approve this for credit, such an experience would look fabulous on your CV/resume.

Can you knit? No, this is not a joke! Lucky you, if you have acquired this useful skill! A quirky wool and knitting company, headquartered out in Nevada, is offering a total of 18,000 dollars to six lucky and talented recipients. Called the Beans for Brains Scholarship Program, it requires that applicants send in a photograph of a knitted item from your original pattern. For you enthusiastic knitters out there, this is a custom-designed, bespoke opportunity to get free tuition money! The company reserves at least one scholarship for residents of the Reno Nevada area.

Do you feel a connection with the Holocaust? Perhaps a family member or a neighbour was affected in some way? Maybe you read The Diary of Anne Frank or saw Schindler’s List? If you can write a winning essay on the assigned Holocaust-related topic, you can garner as much as 5k in tuition funding. The Holocaust Remembrance Project of the Holland and Knight Charitable Foundation sponsors this scholarship program as a living memorial.

This is a very modest investment of effort for money with few strings attached, and for a worthy goal. Winners get a trip to a major center of study of the Holocaust as well; Washington, DC, and Boston, for example.

If you have a good idea for an essay, but need some help with editing and polishing, you know that you can get professional help with such issues.

As you can see, your personal characteristics have a good chance of qualifying you for some sort of scholarship program, and others are entirely open. Check back next week for more great scholarship ideas!

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How to Prepare for Exams at Night: Staying Awake, PART 3

deadlineman — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:41:00 +0000

Even the most devoted students occasionally find themselves cramming before exams. This means needing to stay awake, way, way, way past your usual bedtime. How can you keep alert, and on task, when your head and the desk seem to have a fatal attraction for one another?

Earlier, we discussed the need for a good bank of sleep and shared some ideas for modifying your diet to allow for optimum wakefulness. Here, we will look at some other ways to keep the eyes open and the brain working when the clock says. “Go to sleep, sleep, and sleep”. Where were we? Must have dozed off there!

You’ve got to move it, move it!

Exercise has all sorts of powerful effects. Some of these are paradoxical, as well. Nonetheless, it seems clear that consistent exercise can help over the long run by keeping the circulation of oxygen to your brain going.

Short term, some people find that exercise is very stimulating, perhaps because of increased blood flow. However, the timing of exercise seems to impact whether it puts you to sleep or perks you up. You should perhaps experiment with vigorous exercise substantially prior to exam time to figure out how it impacts you personally.

Additionally, the type of exercise affects its impact on your alertness. Aerobic exercise (e.g., jogging) kick-starts your circulatory system. A set of easy stretches/calishthenics, do-able quickly in the confines of a dorm room could also help you escape an energy slump.

Strike a pose!

Yoga, on the other hand, depending on the pose, may actually encourage sleep (good to know when you finally want to take a snooze break before the exam). Find out from a reliable source what moves to use. The shoulder stand is said to encourage wakefulness, for example.

Avoid an oxygen deficit!

Breathe – deeply in through your nose, expanding your abdominal cavity, and out through your nose, contracting your abdominal cavity.

Get those magic fingers going!

Massage can relax, but it can also stimulate. For example, massaging the scalp is said to be a powerful wake-up call for the brain. At the very least, digging your thumbs into those indentations at the top of your neck (where the occipital condyles bilaterally connect the skull to the spine), can untie the knots in your muscles from staring at your textbooks or the computer screen. Other places to try massaging include just below your knees, your earlobes, and the web between your thumb and your index finger.

Chew, chew, chew: Your high school principal would be appalled, but try it anyway!

The exercise of chewing gum is, intriguingly, a noticeable asset to the brain’s ability to retain information. Who knew? There apparently exists on the British market a gum that contains B-vitamins called Active, which is claimed to have additionally stimulating effects by the maker, Olympus Sports.
Chewing on ice does it for many people, as well.

Heat it up!

Your body temperature tends to drop precipitously as bedtime approaches, and hormonal signals prepare the body for repose. However, if you stay warm – not hot – but keep adding clothing as needed to keep from getting cold, you will be combating the inevitable hormonal fluctuations imposed by our biorhythms.

The best path is to study far enough ahead to avoid all-nighters – of course! Good luck with your exams!

Be sure to check back next week for more great articles! Be sure to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to receive the latest news and updates!

How to Prepare for Exams at Night: Staying Awake, PART 2

deadlineman — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:30:20 +0000

Exam time is hellacious. You need to be able to study hard, long, and effectively. How can you stay awake and keep your brain working, especially with several exams ahead of you?

In a previous article, we discussed the paradoxical fact that in order to be able to stay up, you need to have had some good sound sleep in the days leading up to your study sessions.

Here, we will discuss some other ways to keep your eyes open and your brain in gear during study time.

The effect of food on wakefulness is under constant study in mainstream and alternative medicine. We have known for over a decade that the cafeteria-style diet induces sleep (and, by the way, over-eating – how discouraging!).

The take-away lesson (no pun intended) is that when you are trying to feed yourself for a long night of studying, steer clear of the usual cafeteria mystery meat patties, white flour buns and pizza, and fried everything.

If this is the case, it might be best to stock up on alternatives in your dorm refrigerator. But what should you choose to put in your sleepy mouth and how?

Vegans swear by their approach to eating. This means avoiding foods with animal sources. Alternatively, those who shape their diet according to the alkaline- , or acid-forming, tendencies of specific foods recommend alkaline-forming items to boost energy. These foods largely include the fruits and vegetables.

Remember that eating vegetarian or vegan is not merely a matter of cutting meat from your diet. You need to substitute protein sources that provide complete combinations of the essential amino acids. This would, happily, include multifarious and delicious combinations of legumes and grains such as tofu (made from soy beans) and rice, Tempeh (compounded from rice and beans – slightly fermented), agar-agar, and avocados, tree nuts and legumes, and peanut butter and whole grain bread.

Simple sugars and all highly processed carbohydrates (white flour, for example), sadly, tend to provide a rapid and very seductive spike of energy followed inevitably by a crash.

Herbal medicine fans recommend traditionally used plant materials such as ginseng, gingko, and bee pollen, and the more exotic gutu kola, guarana, and maitake. Everyone agrees: heavy meals can make you sleepy. This is the Christmas dinner effect. Small amounts of (nutritious) food at any one time are a better idea.

Drink plenty of water. Apart from the fatigue and headache that often accompany dehydration, water forces awake intermittently, if you know what we mean. Additionally, dorms, libraries, and study lounges world-wide seem to be overheated and Sahara-dry. Foods containing brain nutrients include blueberries and ocean fish.

Chocolate contains caffeine and sugar, both short term stimulants, but also containing anti-oxidants (a good reward for sticking to it, if not over-used). Tyramine, an amino acid supposed to stimulate the brain, is in fermented, aged, and pickled items such as aged cheese, smoked meats/fish, fermented soy, and bacon/sausage. Zinc may help brain function.

We’ll look at other wakeful tips in upcoming articles. Also like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to receive the latest college news!

How to Prepare for Exams at Night: Staying Awake

deadlineman — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:05:18 +0000

Even if you have been scrupulously nerdy about your studies thus far, exam time is a strain. Preparing in depth for multiple subjects, with concurrent deadlines for other assignments, all devour time. How can you stay alert to study and take your exams?

A key way to prepare for exams is SLEEP, as counter-intuitive as this sounds. Nonetheless, recent research suggests that sleep deprivation is as damaging to intellectual performance as getting really quite drunk. Would you show up for an exam with a serious buzz on? Ok, bad question! Well, would you do so if you had any sense? No, of course not.

And yet, many of us have taken exams just as impaired from lost sleep as if we had a blood alcohol level that lose us our driver’s license, if we were caught behind a steering wheel. Why do we do this to ourselves?

Another bad question, no doubt. Well, from the first day of the semester, we should be trying to keeping this sort of sleep deficit to a minimum. Research suggests that to a very limited extent, you can bank sleep. In other words, if you have been getting good substantial sleep for weeks, one all-nighter of studying will do less damage to your brain function than if you have been pulling this stunt night after night since the first day of class.

The activities you engaged in during a late night also affect how damaging lost sleep is, as well. Indulging in substances that affect your central nervous system (you know what we mean), will more negatively affect your sleep.

This means that an all-nighter knocking back vodka shots, or the local poison of choice, hammers your cerebral cortex much harder (and for longer) than an all-nighter sipping spring water and taking notes on Aristotle (or, for that matter, dancing, away from tobacco smoke, and sipping spring water). So, sleep when you can in the weeks before exam prep time, and go easy on the hearty partying. How can you make the sleep you DO get count for the most it can?

You need the darkest sleep environment that you can manage. This is because light affects the hormones that determine your sleepiness and how restorative your sleep is, depending on the timing of exposure. The potential (very complex) reasons are under study by scientists. Just try to get the room as dark as possible – no TV, no computer screens, no closet lights, and as little light from the hallway as you can arrange (Ha!). Glasses sold claiming to reduce the impact of blue light on your brain; perhaps worth a whirl. Maintain good relations with your room-mate to ensure cooperation. Could green light suppress sleepiness-inducing melatonin productions? One article suggests so – you’ll look zombie-like, but what else is new at exam time?

Quiet your racing thoughts to get to sleep promptly. Even in cancer cases, mindful breathing is being used to improve peaceful sleep. Instructions are all over, these days.

Complex carbohydrates encourage sleep, and some people find that the tryptophan content in turkey does so too.

Avoid caffeine, “energy drinks”, and illegal drugs. The 1960s showed that studying under the influence, to be effective, demands taking the test under the exact same influence. Risky! Get sleep ahead of exams! We will look at more ways to stay awake for studying in upcoming articles, so stay tuned and check back in a couple of days.

Also like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to receive the latest college news!

College Cooking: Fun With Alcohol, PART 3

deadlineman — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:30:47 +0000

Check out the previous article out of the college cooking series before reading on.

Hard cider is a fabulous addition to many foods and can make some items palatable when nothing else will. The combination of sweet fruitiness and that bite of alcoholic content tenderizes meat and takes the edge off of bitter greens and other vegetables. Let’s look at some ideas for using hard cider in cooking.

Perry is the proper term for fermented pear cider, and some places, Maryland, for example, will offer cherry cider at certain times of the year. Try them all! If alcohol is forbidden to you, boiling it briefly will disperse the offending volatile.

Hard cider is less widely available in the USA than in the UK right now, but this was not always the case. Up until the temperance movement, more apples were used for hard cider than for eating or pies. If you don’t have hard cider from your nearest specialty beer distributor, unpasteurized, unfiltered cider will happily ferment in your fridge. Leave the cap loose – carbon dioxide expands!

Add it when sautéing any greens such as kale, collards, mustard, cabbage, or Swiss chard, along with a bit of onion, garlic, and olive oil, to make a delectable dish of these highly nutritious veggies. Some folks (even notoriously picky kids) will eat these often unpopular deep-green-leafies this way when they turn their noses up otherwise. Since greens are a relatively cheap way to obtain super-duper nutrition, this is a great trick.

Don’t overlook this great healthy and money-saving tip for campus cooking!! You can substitute finely chopped apple, but the hard cider is so sophisticated.

Hard cider also is a great cooking liquid for pork or beef, in a slow cooker or on top of the stove or in the oven. Add herbs such as parsley, thyme, and rosemary to the mix. A salted ham also will benefit from cooking with hard cider and a few raisins.

If you have boneless skinless chicken pieces, sauté in olive oil until nicely colored, remove, brown some onions then deglaze everything with some hard cider. Voila, instant dinner, with the addition of some brown rice and a salad.

Substitute hard cider for the called-for water in a boxed yellow cake mix. Add cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, clove, and allspice to get the wonderful taste of cider donuts. It also can add a depth to boxed carrot cake mix. If you are making banana bread, add as the liquid for a more complex flavor.

Hard cider is also a wonderful liquid in which to poach dried fruits. This is a wonderful, old-fashioned way to use the concentrated nutrition of dried apricots, prunes, and raisins. You can store dried fruit for months in a refrigerated tightly closed container (there is, unfortunately, a moth that preys on dried fruit – cold prevents their development).

If you are lucky enough to have access to applejack or distilled pear brandy, consider adding a spoonful or so to a fresh fruit salad. The aromatics will turn your tinned peaches or out-of-season fruit into something very special. These products are sometimes available directly from some orchards, and tend to be regional brands.

Apple or pear brandy is also a great addition to sweet potatoes. This is not the cafeteria’s sweet potatoes with marshmallows!!! Either boil them and then peel, or peel and boil until softish, cut into dainty slices, and lay in a roasting pan with a small amount of brown sugar, butter, ginger, and brandy. Bake at 350 until the sugar begins to caramelize. It’s very sophisticated and very nutritious.

Be sure to check back next week, when we’ll offer you the last article out of the series.