More Than a Test Score

College is one of the best times in a student’s life.   It is a time to discover your interests, make new friends, go to football games, and spend long nights studying.  However, the economy is at a low, the cost of tuition keeps rising every year, and students have to pay for textbooks at ridiculously high prices.  The average college student at a four year college spent $1,077 in 2008-09 for textbooks according to the College Board. Textbook expenses have become a great burden for students in today’s world; textbook authors are constantly developing new editions to their books, and this makes it impossible for students to sell their books back at the end of the term.  After buying their textbooks, students often find themselves stuck with the textbooks after realizing they can’t sell it back or that the sell-back amount is too little.

With these textbook problems in mind, Chegg.com came up with a revolutionary way to help student save money on textbooks through an innovative rental service that saves you 65% to 85%.  Renting textbooks with Chegg is easy and with over 16 million books to choose it’s no wonder why students at more than over 6,000 campuses use Chegg.com.

As a part of their ongoing commitment to help college students, Chegg.com launched the Chegg Scholars Program–a scholarship program that rewards student achievers by alleviating them from the high cost of textbooks by awarding them textbook scholarships.

Chegg.com has partnered with Zinch to bring you these textbook scholarships live from the Zinch site.  To learn more and apply, high school seniors can go here, and college students can go here.

It’s funny how now, in retrospect, I think was that really me? I read through diary entries penned in pink marker and marvel at my own ignorance. I flatten the corners of Polaroid pictures (crisscrossed with veins of oxidation) and am unable to recognize my face in those snippets of paper. I hear, again and again, childhood anecdotes my mother has kept for me and cannot be like the girl she remembers – the one who crawled under restaurant tables, told jokes people actually found funny, sang in karaoke bars. Who the heck is she? It unsettles me that maybe, in three, ten years, I will also consider the person I am now to be completely indistinguishable. If I cannot remember myself as I truly am, then who will?

Time modifies me in subtle ways – the shape of my face, the length of my nails, the dust under my ears – but I am afraid of being replaced by an Emma that is, though alike genetically, completely different. You’ll laugh at this when you’re older, I remember someone telling me. But I don’t want this moment to inspire hilarity twenty years from now. I want to feel exactly the same. No, I want to stay exactly the same.

Making these anxieties known to adults would spark the usual dull advice – it’s all part of growing up, your worries are perfectly normal, all teens go through this phase, etc., etc., etc. I nod my head and smile as convincingly as possible, but it irks me that I have been categorized with millions of others in a “phase”. This, I know, is irrational, but being type casted this way makes me think that my emotions are thoroughly insignificant. But then again, that’s a feeling I already know quite well. Insignificance is everywhere, on television screens, in newspapers, in the faces of strangers. You don’t even have to look.

It’s at times like these when I’ll recall those moving sidewalks at airports. You know the ones, don’t you? And that distinct sensation of being picked up, stumbling before regaining your equilibrium, being taken away by a force that is no longer your own. That’s the world to me – gelatinous, shape shifting.

We all go through this, don’t we? Days of moping, and over-thinking. Sometimes it drags on, tainting everything with a gray shade, giving your voice an edge, your actions some cruelty. Though it’ll never leave, not completely, and we won’t ever get an answer to our a great deal of our unspoken questions, you know what? I’ve decided that I’m going to keep them unanswered. I will grieve and stumble, but eventually (hopefully) the smallest things will pull me back to my feet again – my baggy sweater, peppermints in my pockets, finding things I hadn’t know I’d lost, rusty playgrounds.

It’s like closing your eyes and feeling the warmth of daytime heat wander underneath your eyelids, in the roots of your hair. Something like a new beginning, dragging you back, finally, wonderfully, onto solid pavement.

As I type this, I’m flipping between several Internet tabs: ubiquitous Facebook, an article on yellow fever for an anatomy essay and dates of math placement tests for my local junior college. A year ago, I would have been loathe to admit that I was going to Santa Rosa Junior College. The sense of entitlement that comes with being on an honors track had led me to believe that I was somehow better than the junior college, above living at home and commuting to $20 a unit classes.
The reasons behind my switch from a four-year college track to a JC started to come to me when I was sweeping the floor of the chocolate shop where I work. My friend who attends the JC had posted another crop of pictures from her adventures on the Italian study abroad program and I as I eagerly clicked through the pictures of gelato, canals and the Vatican Easter Mass, I thought: I want this. Backtracking a bit: I applied Early action for a school, and once accepted, only applied to two other schools: a safety and a reach. When I was accepted into my early action school, I decided it was my dream school, despite the fact that I had barely researched other schools. I was happy as a clam for five months until thoughts started creeping around in my head: you can’t study abroad you can’t try anything outside your major and you’ll go through life wondering if you were destined to become a mathematician, and you’ll be drowning in debt by the time you graduate. After I found out that my dream school had rejected my financial aid decision and I decided I didn’t want to put my family $80,000 in debt, I made my decision: Santa Rosa Junior College.
The only flaw? I had to get over myself. I had to confront my misplaced snobbery about the JC. People go to schools for all sorts of different reasons. Going to a junior college doesn’t make you stupid or lazy, the same way that going to a prestigious university doesn’t make you a better person. I flashed back to six grade, my strawberry blonde teacher telling the class that, “you are no better or no worse than anyone else.” In the insecurity and bravado whirlwind that is the college admission process, it’s easy to forget that. If you are not the car you drive, if you are not the contents of your wallet, that goes double for schools- you are not defined by what colleges you get into or where you decide to go. I am going to the JC, and I am no better or worse than anyone else.

Why do you care?

It’s a common question. Maybe it tends to be a little defensive, but nonetheless still a common question.

But really there’s an even more common answer that is demonstrated by today’s youth. And that answer is, “I Don’t.”

There is so much apathy in today’s society, yet what do we do to stop it? Nothing. Nothing, because you can’t fight apathy with apathy, just as you can’t fight fire with fire. We don’t care, and we certainly don’t care enough to stop it.

It would be irrational to say everyone doesn’t care about anything. But ask yourself what it is you care about? It is the well being of others, or is yourself? While youth today had exceeded past generations in their service activities, studies show that youth service has actually begun a decline. Even with the importance placed on service due to college admissions and high school graduation requirements, there’s a decline.

While this anomaly can be pretty depressing, there is a big ball of sunshine behind these clouds. And thats you! Because apathy only goes as far as we let it. While I certainly didn’t enjoy reading “7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens” , you should do one thing. And that’s be Proactive. Do something. Join your school Key Club or other service organizations in your school and community.

Because quite frankly, this IS something we should care about.

High schoolers from the tip of Maine to the coast of California – and hey, maybe even those across the ocean as well – rejoice. The AP examinations are finally done. Without doubt, there are bonfires raging across America as newly college accredited students empty their backpacks to toss their beloved notes into the flames and sigh with content as they watch all the cramming done in the past two weeks wither away into ashes…*sigh*

Those that are smarter (and more frugal) than the fire fanatics are surely now organizing a year’s worth of notes chronologically and putting them up for sale, ultimately completing the purpose of high school – to make money off your education.

Take a moment to congratulate yourself. Whether it is completing four thousand years of world history merged into mere 70 questions, or writing an essay on the difference between the use of a comma as opposed to the use of anaphora, the course is done and you can now successfully hand the torch of agony – I mean higher learning – to an unsuspecting underclassman.

Non AP students always ask why we put ourselves through this “torture when you’re just gonna take the course again in college”. Perhaps it’s to stretch our limits. Perhaps it’s to satisfy our intellectual curiosity. Perhaps it’s to impress admission officers. Perhaps it’s to get out of the entry level course in college, despite what the non-APers say.

Personally for me, it was to appreciate all the historical allusions in Forrest Gump (just kidding).

Please, it’s an AP thing. You just wouldn’t understand.

Come June, for those of you lucky enough, take your threes, fours or fives and run. You’ve officially been rewarded for all your hard work, via a little numerical score on an unassuming letter.

Seriously, could they make that font any tinier?