Student Loan Blog : College Life

NextStudent Web Marketing Team Shifts Direction of Student Loan Blog

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:02:00 GMT

To better serve you and carry out our mission of being your one-stop destination for all your education financing needs, the NextStudent Web Marketing team is moving our Student Loan Blog in a whole new direction.

In the days ahead, you’ll see the Student Loan Blog shifting from a focus on general-interest news and trends to what’s happening in the world of financial aid, student loans, and the congressional legislation that affects you and how you’ll be able to pay for school.

You’ll still be able to find the college advice, smart shopping tips, and lowdown on student life we’ve been bringing you — we’re just moving things around a little bit.

Keeping You Up-to-Date on Financial Aid and Your College Financing Options

Our news-savvy writers on the NextStudent Web Marketing team will be scanning the latest headlines to keep you informed about the legislation changes that could affect your education and the financial aid options that help you pay for school.

We’ll let you know about schools that are trying to make a higher education more affordable, from offering free tuition to low- and middle-income students to eliminating student loans from their financial aid packages.

We know you’re busy and have a million things battling for your time. That’s why we’re making our blogs shorter and more direct, so you can get the news you need faster.

The NextStudent Web Marketing team is committed to helping you make informed decisions about your education through our revamped college-related blogs.

Student Life and Your Pop Culture Fix

But if you think you’ll miss our old stuff, don’t worry. You’ll still be able to find our stories about things like death by popcorn and the short life spans of rock stars.

These blogs will be going on our sister site, The Students Blog, which focuses on college life and technology. Read about how to pimp out your Firefox browser, five free online tools to help you cite your research papers, or the six college dropouts who made millions.

You can also check out our NextPath online newsletter for tips on everything from traveling the world rent-free to buying a digital camera.

So sit back and enjoy the work of our Web Marketing writers who spend hours trolling the Internet to bring you the trends and stories that are fresh and new.

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Refashioning IKEA: Do-It-Yourself Low-Cost Makeovers

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 17:55:00 GMT

When you first shop at IKEA, you may be seduced by its modern furniture with sleek lines and space-saving features. You can’t help but “ooh” at the glass-enclosed displays of furniture-battering electric arms that show off just how much force IKEA furniture can withstand. This demonstration of durability may sell you on a stalwart red armchair you may otherwise have skipped.

And as you wander throughout the store, you may find yourself shelling out for decorative and complementary accessories like coordinating photo frames, kitchen bowls, shower curtains and floating shelves.

Once home, you rip open your flat boxes with giddy abandon and assemble life into furniture with inscrutable names like “skruvsta,” “leksvik” and “dalselv.” You applaud yourself for transforming your space from drab to fab.

But at some point, the love affair with your hip items sours.

As your sense of décor evolves, the luster of that red coffee table, plain pine bench or white armchair that you couldn’t wait to get home two years ago wears off and your furniture may seem more shabby than chic.

But if you think that means your IKEA investments are headed to the curb or the Craigslist free section, think again.

With a few do-it-yourself modifications, you can put your own modern spin on your Swedish goods and reinvent them into something that suits your new style. Give yourself a whole new living room without buying a single new piece of furniture.

If you think it can’t be done, take a tour through IKEA Hacker. This blog dedicated to the radical metamorphosis of IKEA pieces will prove it’s possible, and IKEA aficionados throughout the world are doing it.

Breathe, er … Hack, New Life Into Your IKEA Wares

Thanks to blog creator Mei Mei Yap, a 37-year-old copywriter who works at a Malaysian ad agency by day and trolls for IKEA hacks by night, you have a library of ideas for how to revamp almost anything IKEA.

Having trouble picturing what to do with your ribba frame? Add a kort art card and an alarm clock, and you’ve got your own funky, one-of-a-kind clock.

Tired of your Benjamin stool? Chop its legs off to convert it into a portable laptop desk.

See your pine tabletop reborn as a blond electric guitar.

Make old IKEA shower curtains into a dress and IKEA linens into a shopping tote.

Or use the colorful patterns to transform a plain white IKEA orgel floor lamp into a luminous work of art.

Recycle and reconstruct your furniture to make something completely new, or repurpose items like stolmen wardrobe cabinets into a floating media storage solution.

Yap categorizes her IKEA hacks by function: accessories, audio-visual, bathroom, bedroom, furniture, craft, media storage, and work station. She also features ideas for wall décor, pet furniture and lighting.

Whether you’re stuck on a budget or in an interior decoration rut, try her creative remodelings, or use her ideas as a launching point for ingenious transformations of your own.

You may find yourself agreeing with a blog visitor who goes by the name of Baly who describes the blog as an “instant obsession.” And like Baly, after one look through IKEA Hacker, you may feel your “crafty glands waking up again.”

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Meningitis Puts College Students at Risk

Student Loan Girl — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 21:46:00 GMT

The close quarters, the shared drinks, the all-nighters that weaken your immune system, and other aspects of your college lifestyle can make you more susceptible to meningitis, a virulent disease that, in its bacterial form, can kill you within days and sometimes even hours. If you’re lucky enough to survive, you still stand a 20 percent chance of suffering brain damage, arm and leg amputations, deafness, and vision loss.

Meningitis, an inflammation of the membranes and cerebrospinal fluid near the brain and spinal cord, can strike in both bacterial and viral form. The disease is transmitted by direct contact and through your saliva when you sneeze, cough or kiss.

It’s often difficult to diagnose because its symptoms are similar to the flu: high fever, severe headaches, stiff neck, rash, nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light.

Reported cases of meningitis are rare but more common on college campuses, where the cramped quarters of shared dorms are ideal breeding grounds for potential outbreaks. States are split on whether to make the vaccination voluntary or mandatory for college students.

Onset of Disease Looks Innocent but Quickly Turns Deadly

Do a quick Google search, and you’ll find numerous accounts of otherwise healthy college students who have died or barely escaped death after contracting meningitis.

ABC News tells the story of Evan Bozof, a baseball player and pre-med student at Georgia Southwestern University. One day in 1998, he thought he was suffering from a migraine; 26 days later, the 20-year-old died after meningococcal meningitis ravaged his body. Both of his legs and arms had been amputated, he had lost all liver and kidney function and seizures led to irreversible brain damage (“For Parents, College Meningitis Deaths Still Evoke Pain,” Sep. 6, 2007).

Then there’s the MSNBC article on Ashley Lee, an 18-year-old at Indiana University Bloomington, who thought she was coming down with the flu (“Killer at College: Meningitis Threatens Students,” Sep. 5, 2007). After vomiting every half hour while at a frat party, she went home to rest. The next day, she collapsed and her family rushed her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with meningococcal meningitis. Two years later, Lee’s still alive, but she’s undergone multiple surgeries, had a foot and three fingers amputated, and she lives with severe and permanent skin damage.

In Bozof’s case, his parents weren’t aware of the meningitis risks or that a simple vaccine could have saved their son. Hoping to spare others the same fate, Bozof’s mother went on to found the National Meningitis Association, which promotes education of the disease and universal vaccination.

In Lee’s case, her mother had taken her to get the vaccine before she left for college, six weeks prior to her contracting the disease, but the vaccine was out of stock at her doctor’s office. Lee, like Bozof’s parents, was unaware of the viciousness of meningitis and kept putting off getting the vaccine once she got to school—and then it was too late.

“I just didn’t know the severity of it,” Lee said in her MSNBC interview. “I thought it was just, like, another vaccination.”

Debating the Need for Mandated Vaccines

ABC News reports that there are 1,400 to 2,800 cases of bacterial meningitis in the United States each year. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the death rate for bacterial meningitis—around 13 percent—is more than 20 times higher than that for the measles, the number one childhood killer worldwide.

While some 10 to 20 percent of the population can carry the meningococcal bacteria in their nose or throat, 99.9 percent develop antibodies and never get sick, according to a CDC official quoted by ABC.

Increased awareness of the risks posed by meningitis as well as of the readily available vaccine has ignited a national debate, much of it centered on college campuses.

MSNBC reports that:

20 states currently require college students to either get the meningitis vaccination or sign a waiver that says they’ve read about the disease.
3 more states mandate the vaccination for college students but allow exemptions for religious or medical reasons.
11 states require only that information about the vaccine and the disease be provided on campus.

But a growing grassroots movement, led mainly by parents who have lost or nearly lost a child to the disease, want to see more states require the vaccination. The CDC recommends the meningitis vaccine, Menactra, for young people ages 11 to 18, but only 12 percent got the vaccine last year.

The vaccine is covered by some insurance companies and costs about $120 on college campuses.

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Starbuck’s New Record Label?

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:17:00 GMT

Last week I blogged about the recording industry and how they were going after college students for allegedly illegally downloading music from the internet.

This week I found out that Starbucks, you know the place you and your friends go to get your daily caramel macchiato fix, has their own record label. No kidding! It is called Hear Music. Ever heard of Paul McCartney of the Beatles? Well, he was the first to sign with the label, doing so on March 21, 2007, and agreeing to a one-album deal.

A few weeks earlier on March 12, 2007, your favorite coffee house and Concord Music formed the new Hear Music label, “which will forge relationships directly with artists and distribute recordings at Starbucks locations as well as through traditional music channels,” according to the March 12, 2007 press release entitled “Starbucks Launches Hear Music Record Label” found on the www.starbucks.com website.

The cool thing about this is that now you can not only go to your favorite coffee hangout and relax in the company of good friends, but you can do it in an atmosphere that stirs your soul, musically that is.

Here Is How It All Came Together (According to Starbucks.com):

1999: Hear Music acquired by Starbucks.

2004: Hear Music launched Hear Music Channel 75 on XM Satellite Radio.

Starbucks opened their first Hear Music Coffeehouse in Santa Monica, CA.

Starbucks integrated Hear Music media bars for burning custom CDs in select Seattle, Washington and Austin, Texas locations.

2005-2006: Starbucks Hear Music Coffehouses were opened in San Antonio, Texas and Miami, Florida.

Great Coffee, Sweet Music: A Winning Combo?

It seems that Starbucks is now intent on expanding their Hear Music Coffeehouse experience into several cities across the country (at least I hope so). By installing “music media bars” where you can select several thousand titles or burn your own custom mix on-site in Santa Monica, Seattle, Austin and San Antonio, it appears that they are preparing to launch Hear Music Coffeehouses coming soon to a city near you.

Again according to the Starbucks.com Web site, “Music is a vital companion to your experience at Starbucks, and Starbucks Hear Music Coffeehouses represent the full integration of a classic coffeehouse experience with an extensive digital and physical music inventory. With over 5,000 physical titles and over one million digital songs in store, Hear Music Coffeehouses underscore Starbucks steadfast commitment to extending its entertainment initiative.”

Maybe it is just me, but I am pretty excited about this—what a great idea. Good coffee, nice music, free Wi-Fi, all in an atmosphere that is tough to beat. What more could a college student ever want?

Check It Out

The music: http://www.hearmusic.com/#NOW_PLAYING

The coffeehouses: http://www.hearmusic.com/#ABOUT_US

The Education Finance Advisors at NextStudent can help you figure in all your college expenses so that you get the student loan that best suits your needs. Don’t get caught short. Go to www.nextstudent.com for all your student loan needs.

Check back here next Friday for my next blog on Campus Life.

Student Loan Girl

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