Just a typical Tuesday in class.

While every college girl shares many of the same college experiences (selling books, sexiled, one shot too many), she also carves her own path and has her own unique adventure. Have you ever wondered what it’s like for other girls? What it’s like to be an engineer? To get married?! To play an NCAA sport? Well wonder no more. Our one-of-a-kind CollegeCandy writers (and readers!) are sharing their unique experiences and opening our eyes to different college worlds.

It’s late on a Friday and I’m enjoying a night out with my friends at the local Steak ‘n Shake. I’m just about to dig in to a nice, juicy burger when a sudden realization hits me. I have a paper due in exactly one hour, and if I miss the deadline I will fail my web design class. I rush home and spend the next hour furiously banging out the rest of my paper about famous designers. With ten minutes to go, I hit the submit button. Crisis averted—for now.

This is a typical day in my life as an online college student.

I started as an online student with just one class. With a history of barely passing my on-campus classes, I needed a change. I knew it would still take a lot of work, but taking a class in my pajamas sounded like too good an idea to pass up. The result? I squeaked by with an “A” and scored higher online than in any of my real classes. The next semester I took two more. After that, I was hooked. Last semester I started my life as a full-time online college student working toward a degree in web design.

Don’t let me mislead you into thinking online classes are easy. Sometimes they’re down right infuriating. You can only talk to your classmates and professors by email, and working on a group project is like trying to herd cats. You’ll put in just as much time and hard work into your assignments as you would in any other class, and you’ll still find yourself chugging energy drinks in the library and cramming for finals. Read More »

So some of you may be a little bitter this school year. Instead of heading off to your dream school, you are stuck attending your fall-back as your friends suddenly turn all intellectual and boast about the awesome classes at Harvard, Princeton and NYU.

But little do they know, you’re getting the much better deal. While they rack up the student loans, you can enjoy the intellectually stimulating lectures of Ivy League professors without even having to get out of bed.

Two new websites, academicearth.org and openculture.com, are offering videos of lectures from top universities and – prepare yourself – they are totally free! Both websites are organized by topic and by school, offering courses from Berkeley, Harvard and Yale, among others. Want to see how a Princeton professor teaches Bio? Go for it! Want a motivating lecture on poly-sci? They have that too!

Ah, don’t you love living in the era of technology?

Finally all of us “average” people (i.e. those of us who couldn’t score a 2400 on our SATS or find the time to volunteer at eight different organizations during high school) can bask in the glory of partying it up at our party schools while we cyber “sit in on” the smarty-pants classes. If only we could print out that Harvard diploma, too.

When you think of community college what comes to mind? Cheap, slackers, immature kids with bad grades. These are the first things that popped into my head when I had to make the decision to go there for the semester before I transfer schools. I thought it was going to be pure hell, but instead it’s actually kind of my idea what college should be like, minus a few things. Here’s what to expect if you’re going to community college next semester or summer.

The Good:

Free parking! - I was pumped about this, since parking at my last college (NC State) was about 200 bucks. This is also a bad thing because everyone can afford to park, so I have to leave my house 40 minutes before class (and I live 15 minutes away) to beat traffic and find a spot next to my building

The Fests - Back to School Fest, Fall Fest, Latin Fest, Halloween Fest….there’s always some type of “fest” going on….and they all involve a DJ, a moon bounce and loads of free food!

Online classes with NO extra fees - Most colleges label online classes as Distance Education and slap a few extra fees on the courses so that you’ll actually come to campus and not sit in your dorm/apartment/parent’s house watching your lecture via laptop wearing your your favorite tee and a pair of sweats (heaven!). Well, because so many people go to good ol’ community college (mine has 4 campuses total and is 40,000 strong), they actually prefer if you take a class or two online. But be warned: most online classes don’t have deadlines and it can be tempting to slack off. I’ve been taking Ethics since August and haven’t taken any tests just because I don’t feel like it! Read More »