Team Bell 2009

There's a fine line between meddling with someone's personal affairs and stepping in to save them from themselves. It's not even a matter of being self-righteous or butting into someone else's business, but I believe that prevention is the best cure for trouble.
Say you believe in opening your mind to different people and their lifestyles. Religion, nationality, political beliefs, sexual orientation, and bad habits—wait, what?

You're awesome. Take a moment to think about that and say it to yourself. The voice you want to hear when you're looking for approval is right here, right now, and it's yours as you read this. You're awesome. And I want to thank you for being you.
Every day, we go through rejecting ourselves in one form of another, as well as finding excuses or flaws in ourselves to do this. It pushes others away and makes them push us away too. We do this because there is a voice we listen to that tells us we aren't good enough and nobody will approve of us. Pay no attention to that voice.

I think if you have the money and time, you should study abroad. Whether it's a summer, a semester, or a year, studying abroad is an amazing experience. It goes beyond recreating yourself in a college environment to finding a part of you that is different in a new country, experiencing an education system unlike what you're accustomed to, and the fellow expats and locals you may befriend.

OKAY party people. This is the final-est version of this thing that I came up with.

@teri: Thanks so much for asking me to be a part of this project. My only regret is that I did not more fully participate.
@barney: I included stuff about the allergy of the body. Thanks for your edits, and thanks for Christie Banks' number. I called her and we had a great talk.
Please encourage the publisher to hack this, edit the grammar, and do whatever they see fit if the piece in fact goes to print.

Year by year, classrooms and lecture halls across the country are becoming more and more integrated with and - at times - inundated by new technology for use by craftier professors and to be ignored and/or futilely fuddled with by less tech-savvy teachers.

Sales/freebies:
http://www.slickdeals.net/
http://www.dailyfreebies.com

Books:
http://www.dealoz.com

Still editing, but most of it's here! :)

You wake up to the sound of your alarm at 7:00am; walk the same route to campus; stand in line to get your usual cup of coffee; attend classes for the day; go to the gym to work out; do some studying; hang out with friends; and go to bed. After a couple weeks of adjusting to a new school quarter, students no longer have to think about what they have to do each day, it becomes a secondhand routine. It’s like learning to write your name for the first time, it takes a lot of thought, concentration, and emotion.

We live our lives day-to-day masked with a fake persona. Rarely to we genuinely expresses how we feel; instead we build walls and mask ourselves with a smile. When people ask, “How are you?” it is almost a robotic reply, “Good. How are you?” We are spiraling down a whirlwind of depression, however we never fail to put on a “happy” face when we are out in public.

Today’s college student spends an obscene amount of time on the Internet. The problem is that students become so involved with their virtual identities, that they become “one” with their profile’s. Texting, cell phone calls, e-mail, MyUCLA, Facebook, Skype, MySpace, Twitter, iChat; it seems like face-to-face interaction is a thing of the past. Consequently, I find students are becoming socially awkward and not integrating well with peers.