You know that really annoying friend of yours who feels the incessant need to point out that they were the first to know about a now really popular band? Every. single. time. it comes on the radio?

As annoying as they are, there is something exciting about the knowing of a new band, new clothing brand, great sale, awesome book or recipe, and sharing it with the ones you love. And by ones you love, I mean the ones you go back and forth with right here on the CollegeCandy message boards.

So here’s the deal: every week, we will feature 3 things that YOU think other CollegeCandy readers just have to know about. Anything at all. Nothing is off limits.

This week we’ve got a hot band (that you can officially tell your friends you’ve “been listening to since blah, blah, BLAH”), a great service that’s all about you, and another awesome site that will change your life. Get ready to brag to your friends, ladies, because you are in. the. know.

The Jakes.
I think we all need to send a big “Thanks, Alex!” for writing in to The Know and bringing these 5 pieces of double whammy eye/ear candy into our lives. One listen of their song Cough Syrup and I was hooked. And that says a lot from the girl who usually has to listen to a song 3 or 4 times to really like it. (And those songs are usually by bands like BSB and Destiny’s Child.) And with the first beat of  their jam, Texas Tea, I was already walking with more swagger in my step, more shasay in my bootay, as I walked down the street. True story. Read More »

I’ve heard of them all: Gilt Group, Hautelook, Rue La La, Ideeli… The exclusive, invite only “sample sale” sites that promise hot labels to a select group of shoppers at a reduced cost. Once you snag an invite, they seem like a win-win, right? Chi-chi clothes at recession prices! But like many things that seem too good to be true, the cons might outweigh the pros.

Love ‘em:
Obviously, there’s the appeal of getting cheap, cute, designer clothes without having to get out of your pajamas. Or bed. A few weeks ago, Hautelook had a Primp boutique and I flipped out. $88 thermal leggings for $20? Perfection. I figure I can wear them for future online shopping, um, trips. I also probably wouldn’t just waltz into Neiman Marcus or Bloomies sans makeup (and chic outfit) just to check out the Chloe dresses or Gucci purses without any intention of making a purchase…but doing so online is totally acceptable!

The sites also feature a large variety of designers. Sure, these sites feature well-known, crave-worthy brands like Marc by Marc, Seven For All Mankind and Oscar De La Renta, but they also have some surprising finds. Rue La La has offered Birkenstock and Lululemon boutiques, Gilt features Rachel Leigh jewelry, and Hautelook highlighted Ecoskin. It really can’t get better than old favorites and new finds. Read More »

Sarah Merion is a “Social Media” pioneer for Gen Y. She has her own website, SarahMerion.com, where she educates on Social Media and challenges people to think about using social media to benefit their business. She has a cult following on Twitter (check her out @SarahMerion) and has even hosted multiple workshops on using Twitter and LinkedIn at her campus at Northeastern and at MIT. Her RoofUp Tweetup was the biggest in Boston and Northeastern approved a grant she wrote to finance her trip to a Social Media conference in Chicago called SOBCon.

On top of all of that, she’s only 21 and still a student at Northeastern, studying Spanish, Management Information Systems and Finance, currently on internship in NYC doing data analysis for a mega media company. Not to mention, she’s sassy, hilarious and can we say: Coolest. Hair. Ever. When I discovered this girl, I knew I had to bag an interview, so I contacted her via YouTube to grab her attention (don’t laugh). It worked and we quickly began collaborating on this interview, on top of a few other projects in the works. Sarah Merion is an inspiration for college girls who want to be entrepreneurs while still in school and proof that maybe, just maybe, the finance world isn’t as screwed as we thought.

5 Questions We Ask Everyone:

1. What is your most ridiculous college memory/most trouble you’ve ever gotten into?
Haha, no comment. Definitely did not involve me dancing on a bar. Hoo boy.

2. What are five things you can’t live without?
1. MAC foundation.
2. iPhone! Hello Tweetdeck, I love you.
3. Pink and black Herve bag. I seriously carry it EVERY. WHERE.
4. Hanky Panky underwear
5. Classic cherry chapstick. Wait, no! Friends! The TV show. Oh also, vanilla Yoplait light yogurt. And Kashi GoLean. Kashi GoLean Crunch. Grande non fat cappuccino with one Splenda. Shoot, that’s more than five, isn’t it? Read More »

Monday night’s Gossip Girl season finale got me thinking. First, I started thinking about how depressing my Monday nights would be without my favorite show.  Then I started thinking about what I would do with that 60 minutes of emptiness… and decided that I’d probably just eat to fill the void.

And then I started thinking about the quest to out Gossip Girl (from the most anti-climatic ending EVER) and I had a teen-drama epiphany:

Perez Hilton is the real world Gossip Girl.

OK, so maybe it wasn’t some crazy life-altering “aha moment,” but I was tired and it seemed pretty groundbreaking to me. Read More »

Whenever we need to make a difficult decision, we make a list.

“Heels or flats?”
“Pizza or salad?”
“Prada backpack or Skechers?”

So when we are constantly faced with the awful decision of which fame whore is more fame whorey, we make a list. Yes, this is a decision we feel the need to make on a weekly basis. We have a lot of time on our hands.

Moving on.

This week’s showdown is between two celebs that continue to invade our lives, no matter how hard we try to avoid them: Perez Hilton and Ryan Seacrest. Which one would we like to ship off to a small island in the South Pacific first? Do we really have to choose?! Read More »

People can learn a lot about you from your Facebook profile. By considering your favorite movies, pictures, quotes and the things other people write on your wall, it is quite easy to get a good idea of who you are as a person. And knowing that, many of us are extremely careful about what we throw on there.

And I’m not talking about taking down all those drunk pictures from the Jell-O wrestling tournament so you can get that job with the government you’ve been coveting. I’m talking about leaving those up to show anyone and everyone who is looking that you are one cool girl who happens to enjoy wrestling in gelatin.

Your Facebook picture is especially important. It’s the first thing people see when they look you up, not to mention the fact that it comes up next to every wall post, Facebook message, chat, update, etc., that you do on that damn website. Naturally, you are going to put a lot of thought into your photo of choice. It needs to be a good representation of who you are, be it an artist, a class clown, or any other type of person.

I spend a lot of time on Facebook (is there a 12 step program out there?!) and I’ve noticed that of the 38 million people using the site worldwide, there only 6 basic types of photos that people post on their profile: Read More »

Valentine’s day is coming up and I am slightly excited to say that I have myself a Valentine. Yay! Even though I like the idea of having a romantic evening planned for me, I don’t want to leave it up to the boy because, honestly, guys can be really unoriginal.

Dinner and a rom-com? No thank you.

On any normal night, I’m typically the girl that says “I’m up for anything,” or “whatever you want to do, babe.” I know, I know, guys like girls who take initiative and speak up for what they want, but I don’t have enough time to figure out what to wear, let alone plan an entire evening. But Valentine’s Day is special (especially now that I won’t be spending it bashing boys with my girlfriends) and I want it to be treated that way.

So, now I’m left with zero time and pretty high expectations for a perfect night. Disaster waiting to happen? I thought so until I came across this doozy! Read More »

Today is Facebook’s 5th birthday. Can you believe it? Five years? We’ve been stalking our friends (and friends of friends of friends) for 5 whole years?!

I’m always astonished by how quickly novelty becomes routine, and how easily routine slides dismally into annoyance. When I first logged on to Facebook, you know, senior year of high school – damn! – there they were, Joe and Chelsea and Ian and Howie and, oh boy! When did I get so many friends? And when did everyone start looking so good in pictures? My excitement was boundless. I was so pumped, I posted on my own wall.

Since then, the spell has worn off a bit. Facebook has become at best a boring tool (the seventh simple machine?) and at worst a recipe for failing your finals. We’ve all spent those wee-morning hours clicking through photos of proms and parties past. We’ve lost (real-life) friends over comment arguments about “just how drunk Mandy was” in that one album. And now our mothers are on Facebook, and they’ve Bitten us. “Start Biting people, and raise your own Vampire Horde!” Thanks, Mom!

But c’mon, Facebook’s great, right? We really do love it. It’s like a drug. And if you took that drug away, the withdrawal symptoms would be severe. In a world where all our Facebook connections were replaced by tin-can telephones, what couldn’t we do? More importantly, would we be able to park our culture in the handicapped spot? Read More »

Don’t you ever get tired of not knowing how to do the crap that other people know how to do? Your computer cable breaks and you resign to just buy a new one because you don’t know how to fix it. You see girls wearing cute t-shirts that have been cut into elaborate halters, but you just buy the generic version of the shirt at the store because you have no idea how to turn so much fabric into something so little.

For all of you out there who have ever wanted to do all of that crap that other people know how to do, your prayers have just been answered:

Instructables is here to save your life.

This site is one of the coolest sites ever (second only to CollegeCandy…) and I can hardly begin to explain all of the reasons why. Ok, so I will try. Here goes: they walk you through the instructions of how to do just about everything.

Literally, everything! No more asking guys to help with “guy” things or calling up your sister to teach you how to get your hair doing that perfect balance between chic and messy.

The Instructables people break their projects down for you by category. Once you decide between Art, Craft, Food, Games, Green, Home, Kids, Life, Music, Offbeat, Outdoors, Pets, Ride, Science, Sports, and Tech, they send you on your way to DIY heaven.

Step by step. Project by project. It doesn’t get any better than that.

The next time you have a project in mind, but just don’t know how the eff to do it, I can guarantee you Instructables will. And they’ll show you, too.

I had a philosophy professor once tell me that the greatest thinkers were the synthesizers, the ones who took two or more good things and combined them.  And I think he’s got a point: peanut butter and jelly, sporks, hybrid cars…the world is a better place because of these things. And a new website is combining two of my favorite things: fashion and photography. Flickrista will change the world of fashion as we know it (a new kind of guerrilla fashion, all you Little Js out there?) while showcasing a rotating crop of eye-gasmic photos, as well.

How does it work? Flickrista is a daughter site of Flickr, the widely-popular photo-sharing site. Flickr members can submit their fashion photography to the Flickrista group pool, from which Flickrista editors will choose the best pics to feature on the site. The benefit to this process is that stylists, models, and photographers alike can all get their work noticed and Flickrista group members can interact with one another by sharing comments and suggestions.  And new photos are always being posted, which means more opportunities for inspiration- whether your weapon of choice is a camera or a kitten heel.

[photo courtesy Dezdemonchik via Flickrista]