In North America, students can apply for credit when they attend a post-secondary institution, even without verifiable income. The credit available to them ranges from low limit credit cards to education loans that can reach into the tens of thousands. A person can use this to their advantage, credit decisions made as a student can make a…

It’s hard to believe, but the Spring semester is upon many of us already – I have colleagues who are already 3 days into the semester, and my own classes start back in just a few days. Outside the US, students are still working on their Fall terms, but they’ll be starting Spring soon…

I graduated from UC-Berkeley in December, 2000 with a far less than stellar GPA.   But, I took everything I learned from my mistakes and  guided my younger sister to  graduating with honors in a much more challenging major. Looking back I really wasn’t prepared for the challenges of college life and if I had been…

I recently took possession of a pair of older PCs – the natural consequence of nagging one’s older relatives to get something a little more “post-Columbian” – and of course my first instinct is to refurbish one as a Linux PC for my nephew and niece, ages 7 and 5. My nephew, especially, is computer-obsessed…

  This is the fourth part of a 12-part series I will be posting through the end of December and into January 2009, examining the current understanding of productivity and where the concept might be heading in the future. I invite Lifehack’s readers to be an active part of this conversation, both in comments here and…

Imagine a darker age when students had to use the archaic pen and the notebook — a tool some may remember as the descendant of the scroll before it was made obsolete — and had to use “cassettes” in a “tape player” to listen to music they actually paid for. While these times have passed…

Back in July, I wrote about StudyRails, a web application for students. That post is here. Since July, the team behind StudyRails has made some significant upgrades. With the fall semester just starting up, StudyRails has a special offer for Lifehack readers: a free semester of StudyRails, running through January 31, 2009. The…

This week or next, your kids will be heading back to school. If your house is anything like mine, that means terror, trauma, and chaos – and that’s the good stuff! The first few weeks of school are probably going to throw you some curve-balls, too: your child gets bullied, the bus schedule is rearranged at…

Lately, I’ve been simultaneously using less and less of what I learned in school while discovering more and more skills that are vital to success which were never even offered in school! If I were to be 100% honest, probably the most valuable skill I learned in college was how to talk to girls (certainly a…

In high school, I had a great routine. About five minutes before I had to leave to get to school on time, I would be hitting print on the paper, project or homework assignment due that day. If I truly had timed things perfectly, I might be printing out anything due in the afternoon in…

Does your textbook make your eyes glaze over? Is the desire for a degree or diploma the only thing keeping you focused on your classes? I’ll admit the lecture format most schools use to teach material isn’t the best way to hold your attention. But I think there is a more important…

Life isn’t fair. Why should tests be? Virtually all tests have have hidden biases. These biases aren’t usually large and most instructors will do their best to minimize it. However, knowing the bias of a test can be an added tool for allocating study time. What is a Testing Bias? Testing bias is when a…

You read over your notes. Then you read them over again. Then you read them over a third time. Then you take the test and are surprised at just how much you missed. Despite reading everything three times! A lot of study time is wasted because of one problem: you fail to…

Note-taking is one of those skills that rarely gets taught. Teachers and professors assume either that taking good notes comes naturally or that someone else must have already taught students how to take notes. Then we sit around and complain that our students don’t know how to take notes. I figure it’s…

When it comes to reading, lifehacking tends to focus on speed — more words, fewer minutes. That might be fine if reading is understood as a matter of moving information with maximum efficiency from the page to the brain. The faster the connection, so to speak, the better. But there are other kinds of reading. No…