It’s the start of a new school year and to honor that, we at CollegeCandy are bringing back the fan-favorite series, “We’ve All Been There.”  (We tried to get another national holiday/long weekend for you guys but it’s way harder than we thought so this will have to do.) Every week, Lauren – University of Michigan will comment on the common experiences all college women share – like trying to figure out if that boy is crushin’ too or stupid group projects. Read, relate, cringe and enjoy.

Your 10 page paper on the complete works of Shakespeare is due in less than a week. You vowed to spend all of Sunday at the library working on it, but an impromptu beer pong tournament broke out at your house on Saturday night and you were so busy eating Oreo Cakesters and chugging Vitaminwater that the entire day passed you by. Now it’s crunch time and you have no choice but to bang it out.

You decide not to waste any time, so you skip the long walk to the library and work at home. You tell your roommates not to bother you, lock the door to your room and settle in for some serious paper writing.

Only your desk is really messy. You can’t focus when you don’t even have space to spread out your books. So you clean it. Twenty minutes and a garbage can full of papers later, you decide to take out the trash. But before you do that, you might as well make sure there isn’t anything else that needs to be thrown away. You begin to clean your room. Once it is clean, you tell yourself, you will be able to focus. Read More »

Your 10 page paper on the complete works of Shakespeare is due in less than a week. You vowed to spend all of Sunday at the library working on it, but an impromptu beer pong tournament broke out at your house on Saturday night and you were so busy eating Oreo Cakesters and chugging Vitaminwater that the entire day passed you by. Now it’s crunch time and you have no choice but to bang it out.

You decide not to waste any time, so you skip the long walk to the library and work at home. You tell your roommates not to bother you, lock the door to your room and settle in for some serious paper writing.

Only your desk is really messy. You can’t focus when you don’t even have space to spread out your books. So you clean it. Twenty minutes and a garbage can full of papers later, you decide to take out the trash. But before you do that, you might as well make sure there isn’t anything else that needs to be thrown away. You begin to clean your room. Once it is clean, you tell yourself, you will be able to focus. Read More »

Everybody makes friends in college. Sometimes it’s through a group, sometimes it’s by a chance encounter, sometimes it’s just because you were too hungover for class last Monday and you need the notes to catch up. When you’re scanning the lecture hall for help, there is one person you need to be aware of.

That would be the completely anal, extremely irritating, absolutely crazy Overachiever.

This one is easy to recognize. Watch for it on the first day of class. They’re right there, in the front row (no matter what kind of class it is). They might wear glasses. Though they’ll be dressed neatly (no pjs for them!), it probably won’t be stylish; look for business attire, like suit jackets and pencil skirts. Unlike the rest of the class fighting to stay awake, they will sit up straight.

Their desk will have an open, blank notebook on it, ready to go. There may also be a tape recorder, a neat row of pencils, pens, and highlighters, and a planner opened to the current date. They’re totally prepared….for a shortage of school supplies. If their desk doesn’t have these implements, there’s a laptop already open to some note taking program with a title and date at the top. The textbook will be on their desk, even if the rest of the class doesn’t even know what it looks like yet.

Once class begins they will highlight important dates on the class syllabus. They will write everything down. They will ask questions about everything pertaining to the class. Five page research paper? They will ask if it’s okay to go over. Need four sources? They want to know if eight is too many. This is the kid who did the extra credit in high school for “the learning thrill,” not because he needed it. Read More »

Now that the New Year’s Day hangovers are a thing of the past, it’s time to trade in the warm sofa for cold, hard desks as the spring semester approaches. If you are wondering how you will possibly make it through this semester after barely making it through the fall semester you are in luck, because a new semester brings new beginnings.

I have made quite a few mistakes over the course of my college career, which have taught me quite a few things. Learn from my mistakes and this semester will be easy breasy. (I bet you expected me to say CoverGirl, right?)

Tip 1: Procrastination will kill your grades:

Trust me, writing a 10 page paper at 3am the day it’s due is never the best way to get your assignment done. Yes, you like to work under pressure, and, yes, at least you actually did the paper, but doing it in a hurry means you rarely have time to spell-check, let alone stay awake long enough to turn it in.

Tip 2: Try To Take Shorter Classes.

You may think it’s worth it to take that 3 hour class on Wednesdays so you get that full 4 day weekend, but sometimes longer classes are worse for your GPA. Let’s be honest: when was the last time you could pay attention to anything for longer than an hour? Whenever possible, try taking a 50 minute class three times a week (or whatever shorter options you have at your school), instead of a longer class that meets only once. You will be able to focus more in a 50 min class, not to mention be more on top of things when you have to prove yourself to your prof 3 days a week instead of one.

Tip 3: Don’t skip class.

Seriously. Unless you are dying from some rare and contagious disease, go to class. Some profs only take a couple points off your final grade for absences, but when you think about it, 2.5 points added to an 88% score could mean the difference between an A and a B. Oh, and the whole point of college is going to class and learning, so it might be a good idea. Professors often make it worth your while by, I don’t know, teaching you things and making it all easier to understand. Read More »

Mr. and Mrs. Spencer Pratt. I just barfed.

Even your lips can Go Green.

Tips for bullsh*tting an essay so you can go out and still pass that class.

Britney’s looking goooood on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Shampoo can clean more than just hair.

The most expensive college dorms (and they probably still suck).

The ins and outs of walking in heels.

Gratuitous hottie link. We couldn’t help it.

The Pink Sari Gang – standing up for women’s rights.

The best site for fashionistas on a budget. (That’s us!)

Tom and Katie have only been married for 2 years?

I have no problem admitting that I’m kind of a nerd. So you can judge me all you want when I tell you that in college, I graduated with almost double the required number of 200-level English credits. I like to joke that I double-majored in English and English. Har har har.

I really enjoyed my major in college, which is why I couldn’t not sign up for classes like “Literature Goes to Hell,” a survey of literature prominently featuring the devil; or “Representations of Italians in American Cinema,” a class in which we watched movies like The Godfather, Reservoir Dogs, and Goodfellas, and then analyzed the crap out of them.

Almost every semester, there was some funky English class that I just had to take. So, when I was finally finished with the classes I actually needed, I figured that moving on to grad school would mean I could take even more unique classes, while expanding my resume.

Two years later, I earned a Masters degree, having taken four literature classes. FOUR. And only two of those classes I actually liked. What the hell did I do in grad school? I took “The Art of the Bibliography,” that’s what. And two critical theory classes, and two classes on teaching and pedagogy. If I had any intentions of being a teacher, that would be great. But when I went into grad school, I was under the impression that English is a versatile field– English majors can succeed in almost any field, from journalism to marketing to politics, with our skills–but I soon found myself feeling pigeon holed. Read More »

We’ve all been there. It’s a little past 2am and you’re 3 paragraphs into a paper due in a few hours, on a subject you only vaguely understand, for a class you go to only when it’s on the way to happy hour.You’ve typed every word that relates to your paper topic into Google, and you’ve come up with nary a Wikipedia entry.

So what’s the problem? Well, besides your knack for procrastination and admirable laziness, it could be your research skills.

Before you give up and accept defeat (and an F), pour yourself a hot cup of coffee and check out these research sites that have saved me more than once:

Spark Notes: You may not have used this site since high school, but I assure you, it’s even more useful now. From novel summaries that you’ve been using since 7th grade English class to summary-style subject reviews, you can find help for almost anything here, from Shakespeare to physics. I’ve gotten A’s on papers on books I didn’t read because of this site, and it saved my butt when I was cramming for a psychology final and couldn’t for the life of me, understand a specific topic. Their review for specific subject are great at explaining something simply and thoroughly. Read More »