Let’s say we are writing a research paper on rocket science. The beauty of research papers is that they are simply an extended outline of well thought-out ideas in a flowing text. If you’re left brained by nature, make the outline your focus. If you’re right brained, make the flow of ideas your focus. Concentrate on your strengths and make them shine in the paper. While professors look for content and ideas expressed in class throughout the paper, presentation and flow can sway when a lack of solid left-brained research is absent. Likewise, if you’re left-brained and have the ideas but not the flow, a solid outline structure of the main ideas will go a long way towards influencing a professor that you know what you are talking about. Not everyone is gifted enough to write well and explain the concepts of a research paper; however, everyone can focus on their strengths and make the research paper shine in the area that they are best suited for.

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iPad - Perfect for College Students

Since Paper Masters is all about making life easier for the college student, we get pretty excited when something new comes out that is destined to change the playing field for students. Yesterday, January 26th, Apple announced the launching of its latest stroke of genius, the iPad. The iPad is a step up from the iTouch but not quite a mac book. Apple touts it as an e-reader, an app platform, e-mail client, web browser and photo viewer. What we are so excited about is the e-reader and app platform on the iPad, destined to be perfect for many student related activities, such as note-taking, text-book access and organizing class information.

First and foremost, Apple is working with textbook companies such as McGraw-Hill to provide textbooks on the iPad through their iBook Store. This will be a substantial savings to students and convenience, as the iPad will have numerous capabilities of highlighting, inserting notes and copying important text to a notepad. Toss the backpack and have all your texts in one place!

Apps will also be a major benefit of the iPad’s functionality for college students. Apps that serve as notebooks, note-taking tools, flashcards and voice recorders make in-class work a breeze, and again, all in one spot. Note-taking may be a challenge with the touch-screen keyboard but apple is also selling a blue tooth keyboard that can connect to the iPad for ease of typing. As far a space is concerned, the iPad could use a bit more but the most expensive unit offers 64 Gigabytes and will run you around $699 for a wi-fi enabled unit. No word on how much text-book companies plan to offer their books at but it is expected to be a substantial saving to the college student, more than likely paying for the iPad in itself in less 2 semesters.

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Google Books for Students

Google books is a great service, offering hundreds of thousands of books online for free viewing. Keep an eye on their services as an invaluable tool for research results. As a student, your time is valuable and finding great resources for research papers from your computer at home instead of having to go to the library is invaluable.

Google books are also available via Barnes and Noble eReader called Nook. The Nook is a great way to access Google Books and many of them are free to download for the Nook. You have the ability to carry around any Google Book in your backpack, without an internet connection! Fabulous for students and great for having available for note taking.

Hats off to Google Books for making their educational materials so accessible for college students. While Google gets a bad rap for many of the information gathering and privacy issues that they overstep their bounds with, they are frequently ahead of the game on providing educational materials and print to the public with astounding altruism.

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Netbooks for College Students

Netbooks have received a vast amount of criticism over the past year but one area that they excel in without debate is for use in the educational setting. Cheap, compact and powerful enough for student applications like word and the internet, netbooks seem tailored for college students.

While cheap generally is connotative with “sacrifice what you really need”, I find this not to be the case. I work weekends on a netbook from a hotel room and not once have I ever run into a situation that I felt a lack of memory, power or screen space. I even do web development on my Toshiba NB205, and find the 10″ screen just fine for seeing the big picture.

For college students, netbooks are perfect. They fit well on small desks in large lecture halls. And speaking of small spaces, they are great for dorm rooms and having on your lap as you work on your bed, the one piece of furniture that you’re given, other than a rock hard desk chair. If you have the room in your dorm room, put in a 21″ monitor and just plug the laptop into when you’re stationary. Then you have all the benefits of a desktop system and a big screen for YouTube Videos! They also fit great in a backpack, something that a 17inch screen doesn’t really. I know I used to hate lugging my laptop and a separate back pack to the library. In fact, I’m relatively sure that is how I injured my shoulders, not 4 years of pitching softball.

And finally, the best part of netbooks for the college student…Price! At $350, yeah, it’s not going to last long but then you can get 2 netbooks for the price of one regular laptop and I would rather have the most up to date technology every two years than a bloated, hard to carry, overpriced full laptop that doesn’t fit the college lifestyle.

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Sierra Club Helps Students Fight Against Coal on Campus

College students are in a very powerful place in their lives to make change on a grand scale. The 18 to twenty-somethings are grouped together, educated and generally open to looking at the world in a new light, as they are recently freed from the influence of their parents. We encourage the college students we work with to become involved in active in the educational process beyond the classroom, that is, what is going on socially with their peers. Social change can happen on a grand scale, beginning with the college campus. Take the example of protests going on all over campuses over the use of coal. From Penn State to Georgia State, students are protesting the use of coal-based fuel, some of which produces the majority of power on campus.

Coal was among the first fossil fuels to be collected for producing energy or power. It lost favor when oil and gas were found to burn more cleanly. However, coal has once again become useful for generating power or providing heat or electricity. New technologies have reduced the harmful emissions that result from burning coal.  Students on the campuses that use coal are concerned that the harm to the environment isn’t worth the cost savings of using a non-renewable resource. Furthermore, students are upset over the message that colleges are sending. As institutions of higher learning, colleges should be ashamed of campuses that operate coal plants. Coal, just like wood and other fossil fuels, is a limited resource.  The over-use of coal, with its inevitable carbon dioxide emissions, is attributed to increasing the greenhouse affect. Keep an eye on how well students are doing in kicking coal off college campuses.

Students can make a difference on a global scale. Get involved in social change issues on your college campus and you’ll meet people, learn about change in a changing world and do something productive with the power you have.

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Obama Giving Back to School Speech

Partisan politics at its best! President Obama gives a back to school speech encouraging excellence and participation in politics in students and the GOP goes nuts! Tuesday’s back to school speech included encouragement from President Obama for students to write letters on how they can help the President or what they admire about him. Conservatives in Washington went ballistic with claims that the President is pushing a liberal agenda in schools and trying to sway students to liberal politics. In light of pre-speech backlash, President Obama canceled the lesson plan that was prepared by the White House to go along with the speech, as it aired in schools across the nation. However, amazingly, the President was able to send the message of “stay in school and work hard” to the students without any Republican backlash. Whew!

With the rise of partisan politics, the possibility to consolidate support has become a defining element of citizen involvement in the political process. Individuals became fiercely loyal to their part of affiliation, and these parties in turn try to curry favor from the individual in ushering in their own choice of political agendas. In this era of the “neo-politics of party” era, we can see that this partisanship is affecting every aspect of American life. Our children can’t even receive a school lesson from the President.

Creating and acting on a cohesive goal in such an environment has been becoming increasingly difficult in an era where partisan politics is the norm and bi-partisanship the rare exception.  Many researchers have argued that the oppositional two-party paradigm has led to chronic gridlock and consistent inability to establish any type of meaningful doctrine in the presidency.  While at times in the past the two leading political parties have been able to cooperate in furthering Congress’ own agenda, those days may be gone forever.

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Baby Chick Thrown into Grinder

I always appeal to the intellect of the nations youth when I read stories like the one from the Associated Press on ground up baby chickens. Are omelets, eggs over easy or my once beloved Huevos Rancheros really worth it? Undercover video was shot by Mercy for Animals showing how male baby chicks are ground up alive as a means of quick disposal of the unwanted chicks. Since male chickens produce no eggs and hatchery’s do not raise chickens for slaughter due to the length of time it takes to fatten them up, what else can they do but grind them to shreds alive. Some are pushed to the floor to be swept away and die slowly with the other debris in the hatchery. So what does this have to do with you, my college aged friends?

Everything. This story of the male chick is only one of the many ethical dilemmas that will come along as you move through college life. Do you recognize that every egg you eat contributes to the industry that carelessly disregards and wastes potential life. Whether it’s life for consumption and sustenance or life for the sake of being a living creature, the waste is unforgivable and there is something you can do.
Think about how bad you need that egg next time you go to the commons and choose your breakfast. Don’t support the industry that makes common practice of grinding baby chicks alive or sweeping them away like trash to die a slow death. United States Egg farmers should know better…send them a message that you know better too and you’re not going to stand for it.
Not convinced? Take a look for yourself – Hatchery video

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College campuses are advising students to do all the right things – eat right, keep your immunities up don’t share cups, razors or any items that germs can be passed upon. Basically common sense health care and diligence will keep college students safe from the spread of any flu virus. Swine flu isn’t that unique among flu viruses except for the fact that those with compromised immune systems can become extremely sick. Eat right, exercise and get plenty of rest and more than likely swine flu will not be a concern to any college student. Be careful of stress, as stress weakens the immune system and is responsible for a fair amount of sickness in young people today.

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PA College Students

All dressed up and no place to go, maybe. The state budget impasse in Pennsylvania has left 172,000 college students wondering if they will be able to get back to school in two weeks. Without grant money, students cannot pay the tuition and fees at Pennsylvania colleges. Without students paying tuition, more state workers, i.e. teachers, will be laid off. Its a vicious cycle that has been getting Pennsylvania deeper and deeper in the murky waters of fiscal fiascoes akin to those in California.

The new fiscal year began July 1st, and still no resolution. State workers have seen pay reductions, forced days off and layoffs for the past two months. However, direct pain to the private sector has been minimal, until now. College financial aide offices have been overwhelmed with calls and concerned students and parents flooding the office in an attempt to determine if school will start for them without their finances in order.

Who is really suffering here? Those that need the help the most. The impact of this curtailment may be profound. With the “social safety net” shrinking it will become vital for social workers to leave no stone unturned in helping clients to get and retain jobs and in doing what is possible to ensure that the children of of those in need get proper schooling. There is a kind of real politik at work here. The government is not going to help those that need it most and everything must be done to ensure that they be made more capable of helping themselves.

Of these issues it is education strikes me as the most important because it involves an emerging generation which must not be allowed the fall into the trap that is poverty. It is important that kids stay in school even though, as Kozol made clear a decade ago in his Savage Inequalities, the state of the schools is parlous; fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, which said that “separate” cannot be “equal,” thereby overturning Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” doctrine, education in this country is still both “separate” and “unequal”.

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Two unanswered questions stand out.  The first is, How is it that students are apparently unaware of the level of cheating that is going on around them?  Jordan (2001) found that students greatly underestimated the percentage of their peers who cheat.  Yet the literature shows that the majority of students are cheating.  Could it be that because students are aware that cheating is unethical they do not conceive of it being a widespread problem?  And if students believe they are in the minority when it comes to cheating, is there a level of guilt and or shame that they feel?  Could this be used somehow to decrease the incidence of cheating?

The second unanswered question is, Why is there so much cheating in colleges?  Jordan (2001) cites reasons such as extrinsic motivation and Stearns (2001) cites “mean” and “unfriendly” professors but cheating would not be necessary even in these cases if the students were familiar and comfortable with the academic material.  Therefore, the question becomes are students cheating because the material is too advanced for them or are they simply too lazy to put in the required amount of time and effort to write their own papers or take their own exams?  Or are there other factors involved such as the need to work to earn money to attend school or the modern day need for a college degree forcing students into college who might not otherwise have chosen to go?

Despite these unanswered questions, two very important and surprising facts are learned from the research.  First, students who cheat in college are more commonplace than students who never cheat.  And second, neither college administrators, teachers, nor the research experts know what to do to effectively stop the cheating.  My own viewpoint on this issue is that professors in each class should remind students of the dire consequences of cheating when giving out each assignment and before handing out each exam.  Students should be made to sign an honor pledge on their assignments and exams and understand that expulsion from school is the only consequence to cheating.

Given the amount of fraud one hears about everyday being committed by corporations and government officials though, it should not come as a surprise that there is so much cheating going on in colleges.  After all, the cheating students of today are the corporate moguls and elected officials of tomorrow.

Jordan, Augustus E. “College Student Cheating: The Role of “Motivation, Perceived Norms, Attitudes, and Knowledge of Institutional Policy.” Ethics & Behavior. Jul2001, Vol. 11 Issue 3, p233.

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