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College is a lot more than just going to class. This week on The Civil War Graduation Countdown, we’re sharing our experiences as volunteers.

Jens — Univ. of Oregon
Living a life of true meaning involves more than just personal material gain. Since starting college, I’ve helped a local youth group that my brother-in-law pastors. One of the best experiences I had was when we took a group of high-schoolers to Carmen Serdan, Mexico. The Mission at Carmen Serdan is an orphanage that takes in physically and mentally disabled children who have been abandoned by their parents – either out of neglect or because their lack of facilities and finances. Carmen Serdan is a tiny village with no paved roads and only a little corner market.We helped out The Mission staff by caring for the kids and doing maintenance work.

It definitely puts things in perspective to see people who devote their whole lives to caring for others. It was an honor to give a week to help support people and a place that helps fill such a big need. But to help others you don’t have to go to another country.

In 2004 I volunteered with a local elementary school in Corvallis as a “Lunch Buddy.” I went twice a week to have lunch with a group of second graders. It’s awesome to see how happy kids are to hang out with older buddies. I spent recess, lunch, and Spanish class with them – they could talk circles around me in Spanish, but I used to crack them up with a New Mexican accent I picked up from my childhood in Santa Fe. The Buddy System is designed to show kids they can succeed in school and inspire them to learn.
Susie — Oregon State Univ.
I’m sure we’ve all heard this before far too many times: Want to meet more people? Join a club! Get involved! Maybe these statements never bothered you, but I’ve always been a shy person. Since I came to Oregon not knowing a soul, the idea of walking into a room full of people who were already a group was extremely intimidating.

To say the least, I was very lucky in the string of events at OSU. My roommate in the dorms instantly became my best friend, and she was an outgoing risk-taker. We learned we had both been a part of Key Club in high school (a community service club – part of the larger Kiwanis organization) and one day came across a booth in the quad for Circle K (the college branch) and decided to check it out. Going into a club of mostly people who know each other was easier with a friend by my side. We jumped right in freshman year and stuck with the club for three years, making friends and having a great time with our various community events.

I learned how to loosen up a lot thanks to the fun and welcoming people of Circle K, and the events the group took part in. I stood in the cold asking for donations during the yearly food drive. I served pancakes and got to know the people of Corvallis. I helped children plant flowers at the Farmers’ Market on weekends. I also helped plan and participate in our Relay for Life team. Over my three years in the club I was treasurer and vice president, and gained skills that definitely helped me in college and will continue to help me in the future.

So, from the both of us — take a little time out of your own life and help enrich someone else’s. To get involved, look for resources at your own school or seek out volunteer network sites like VolunteerMatch.

Also, check out what brass CEO Bryan Sims has to say about volunteering.

– Susie and Jens

Coming next week from our Duck and Beaver fans: The Job Search

Going green is becoming increasingly popular in the public spotlight thanks to the fashion and entertainment industries, and there are simple, clear advantages to paperless bill pay in terms of the environment. According to NACHA–The Electronic Payments Association, for every 38,000 bills paid by direct electronic payment, one ton of paper is saved, 1,941 pounds of solid waste is avoided and 5,058 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions are never created.

Even if saving the world isn’t at the top of your to-do list, just think about how much easier it could be managing your bills with online documents instead of having paper envelopes piling up every month.

– Susie

I’ve been following a Freakonomics blog series on The Economics of Happiness. Blogger Justin Wolfers explores this topic from multiple perspectives, including whether richer countries are happier than poorer countries (part 2) and whether raising the incomes of all would make everyone happier (part 5). Here are some interesting points made in part 6 of this series, where he jumps more deeply into just what it means to be “happy” and how that relates to a country’s GDP:

• Richer countries are less likely to experience physical pain, depression, boredom, and anger, and more likely to eat “tasty food.” They also are more likely to report having been treated respectfully and feeling ownership over their time.
• On the flip side, reports of being well-rested and taking pride in recent achievements don’t seem to be related to economic development.
• GDP doesn’t seem to correlate to how much a country’s population worries.
• As it turns out, money can’t buy love–it’s likely to be experienced in countries all across the GDP map.

As Wolfers points out, the issue of wealth and living conditions as it relates to happiness and life-satisfaction affects all facets of society including economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science. A few months ago I read about an entertaining study/project where a psychologist produced a “World Map of Happiness.” Defining happiness is not an exact science, but as this article explains, the three biggest indicators of national happiness according to a recent survey included (in order of influence) health, wealth, and education. See a list of the 20 happiest nations in the world according to the World Map of Happiness here (the U.S. falls at number 23).

In light of all this discussion on levels of national happiness, writer Eric Weiner decided to spend one year researching the world’s happiest places for a book called The Geography of Bliss. Check out this slide show on nine of the places spotlighted from Weiner’s year of happy exploring. According to this article, the book reveals a few commonalities between the happy people in Weiner’s destinations: family, a sense of community, and a sense of humor. You can read the first chapter of his book online, courtesy of the New York Times.

From all of the current dialogue on the contributing factors to happiness, I think it’s clear that having lots of money isn’t a first-class ticket to perpetual bliss. However, the ability to stay healthy, get an education, and have a say in the direction of your own life and community are significant factors. The ability to make, manage, and multiply your own money skillfully and conscientiously–whether that’s paying for health insurance, taking out a reasonable loan for school, or donating to charity–can definitely help keep the good times rolling. Knowing how to make money work for you helps you avoid troublesome situations so you can focus on what keeps you smiling and satisfied. And for me, that’s grabbing another free bagel in the break room courtesy of brass.

Happy Friday!

- Sarah

This week on The Civil War Graduation Countdown we’re sharing our best college money-saving moves and worst money blunders.

Susie — Oregon State Univ.
College is all about having money issues. Textbook costs are rising along with cost of living (in dorms or off campus), and of course going out and having fun definitely crimps your cash flow.

The most useful money saving tip I’ve learned is to track my expenses. I’ll admit it wasn’t something I planned on. One day my mom sent me sheets of paper with grids on them and told me to start writing down my expenses. These days I use Microsoft Excel to make an easy electronic chart, and websites like wesabe.com can help you manage your budget online. Just realizing I had to be responsible for my spending was really helpful. I make expense categories for groceries, fun stuff, books, tuition and rent. Then, whenever I buy something, I deduct the amount immediately and know exactly what I can still spend. This is especially useful with groceries – I have a bad habit of starting with a list but then going overboard with impulse purchases. Once I realized how quickly I was wasting my money, I buckled down and started paying attention.

Oh money blunders. It’s those moments where you check your account, gasp and say, “Where’d my money go?” My biggest money waste came from not using the university textbook “buyback.” I never went to sell back my books that first year. I wasted a year spending around $200 on books each term and getting zilch back. Sure, sometimes you still only get $15 back anyway, but hey, it’s better than nothing! After I started using the buyback, I lucked out for a while, getting $70 or $80 back each time, which I used to pay for the shuttle to the airport when I went home for winter and spring break. So, my stories all come down to one giant tip: make your money work for you!

Jens — Univ. of Oregon
I spent my first two years of college eating a lot of microwaveable chimichangas, bulk black-licorice jelly beans, and canned food from discount grocery stores – one of which we affectionately called the grocery graveyard.

But speaking more seriously… my best money-saving move was to attend community college for the first two years. The average annual in-state tuition at a four-year college or university was $6,185 in 2007-2008, but only $2,361 at a community college. That’s almost $4,000 less per year. Transfering to university after two years saved me a bunch of cash.

There were times, though, when I wasn’t the savvy-savings guy. When I first started college, I bought my books only from the campus bookstore. After paying hundreds of dollars the first few terms, I learned you can purchase many of your textbooks from online wholesalers like amazon.com, half.com, and campusbooks.com.

In my experience the prices are much cheaper. And if you’re in a rush to get the book, the money you saved should more than offset the cost of expedited shipping.

For more offbeat money saving tips check out these brass articles on temp work abroad and free online sites.

Coming next week from our Duck and Beaver fans: Doing Good With Volunteer Work

I recently read an article in Mental_Floss magazine about the haka. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a dance originating from the Maori tribe in New Zealand. The dance is now used by sports teams in some countries as a ritual to get fired up. It was made famous by the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team, which performs the dance before every game.

The haka has spread beyond New Zealand, and is now practiced by several football teams in the United States. The University of Hawaii Warriors put their own island spin on the Maori haka. But the pre-game displays aren’t always received well–they are occasionally dinged with 15-yard penalties for “unsportsmanlike conduct.” However, in New Zealand, the dance has come to represent equality and peace, and most importantly, solidarity. And the dance must work, since the UH Warriors finished this past season with a near perfect record. Perhaps the most high profile coverage of the dance involved the team from Trinity High School in Texas who received coverage by CBS Evening News for their version of the haka. (Video via CBSnews.com.)(Update: The CBS video isn’t embedding properly, but you can see it here.)

Fact: When you get psyched, your body releases adrenaline, which literally preps your body for action by increasing heart rate, dilating pupils and boosting blood sugar levels. So dancing the haka can be more than a mere display — it helps spur real chemical shifts which ready you to tear into the game. Motivation can make a big difference, whether you’re out to accomplish something big or small. Find your own haka dance, what pumps you and others up, and use it!

–Jennie

Web surfing, sending personal email and using social networking sites like Facebook, and Myspace may feel pretty normal for us, but many employers are still coping with their use in the office. A recent study by the American Management Association on electronic monitoring and surveillance found more than half of all employers surveyed have fired workers for email and Internet abuse.

Some businesses are trying to block certain websites, and others monitor how much time employees spend online or if they’re using company email accounts for personal reasons. With so much content online and easy, high-speed access, it’s easy to forget ourselves and overuse our Internet privileges at work.

The study, released in February, states that 66 percent of employers monitored Internet connections. Viewing of inappropriate or explicit websites topped the list of concerns, followed next by game sites and then social-networking sites. While 84 percent of these employers inform employees of monitoring, only two states (Delaware and Connecticut) legally require employers to tell workers they’re being watched on the job. (Check out Fast Track to Fired:Are you a culprit? Avoid these 5 mistakes at work for more tips on job security. )

So, it’s a good idea to always think twice about checking your favorite blog or sending a quick email to your friends from work – it could protect your job in the long run.

- Susie

This week on The Civil War Graduation Countdown, (for what that means, click here) we’re sharing our best learning experience from college. Here were our “aha!” moments:

JENS - UNIV. OF OREGON

Look, going to college is great, but we all know that some learning experiences are better than others – it’s highly unlikely, for instance, that I will ever want to reminisce about my math classes.

But my favorite – or at least most influential – college learning experience helped set me on the path I’m headed down today.

I was a sophomore at Linn-Benton Community College when I started working for The Commuter, the school’s student paper. It was at The Commuter that I first got introduced to journalistic feature writing and photojournalism. I was able to photograph and write outdoor features on Silver Lake, Oregon; rock climbing; and, my favorites, surfing and night skiing and boarding. Working in a newspaper environment tied together the journalism classes I was taking at LBCC. It excited me with the idea that in the future I could get paid to talk to people, photograph them, and tell their story.

With that in mind I started looking around for journalism schools and found out about the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. I enrolled at the U of O in the fall of 2007 and am now only 59 days away from graduating with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. It’s a great school, but it was those six months at The Commuter that inspired me to pursue journalism as a career – that’s why it’s my favorite learning experience.

Also, check out this brass article for more reasons why a community college can be a great place to start your higher education.

SUSIE - OREGON STATE UNIV.

My best college learning experience comes from working on staff at The Daily Barometer, Oregon State’s student newspaper, for two years. I was a reporter, the Assistant News Editor, a copy editor, the Opinion Page Editor and a columnist. Talk about preparation: Diverse experiences give me fuel for just about any question a future interviewer could throw at me.

It may sound cliché, but I learned a lot about working in a team environment and facing conflict, as well as the value of sticking to my guns – all in the much safer (i.e. you’re not risking your livelihood) environment of a college workplace. I’ll narrow in here on one story: I started at the paper partway through my sophomore year, and after working in news for a few months I became the Assistant News Editor. That fall, the News Editor quit and I was facing pressure to assume the position. My resistance came because I needed that term to focus on applying for my summer internship. I declined to move up, worked hard that term and got my dream internship at Glamour. Now if I had the itch for hard news and was aiming for the New York Times, taking that position moving up would have been the right choice. I was lucky to know where I was heading professionally and made the right choice for me, while maintaining my original commitment to the paper.

Tune in next week for another entry in The Civil War Graduation Countdown series with your two favorite brass interns.

Katie Kacvinsky, our brass|STUDENT PROGRAM Curriculum Facilitator, has some experience with student loans. As a result, she keeps a eye out for info about easing student loan stress and wanted to share her latest find with you. Here’s the update from one of our favorite guest bloggers:

The latest numbers reveal that each graduate in 2006 owned roughly $21,100 in student loan debt. Ouch. Student loans are usually categorized as “good debt,” but let’s all be honest, there is nothing pleasant about making those monthly payments, especially when money is tight.

The good news is that there is help on your horizon of impeding monthly bills. Check out the Student Loan Borrower Assistance for information about many different kinds of student loans. You may be able to save money by changing your repayment plan, and there are a (very) few ways that you can get your loans canceled altogether.

One way you can lower your payments is to extend the term of your loan, but that isn’t for everybody. The catch-22 is that the longer you defer your loan, the more interest it accumulates and the more you pay in the end. If you want to minimize your loan to afford more brand-name jeans, maybe you need to rethink your budgeting strategy. But if you’ve been eating ramen for the past two years to save money and can feel your arteries getting clogged, maybe it’s time to make some changes. Read Destination Debt-Free to find out more about getting out of debt.

– Katie

Hey everyone. This is Jens Odegaard and Susie Bafico, the Editorial Interns here at brass. You’ve probably seen our individual blog posts by now.

We’re teaming up to introduce a new brass BLOG feature – The Civil War Graduation Countdown! Both of us are graduating from college this June –Jens from the University of Oregon with a major in Journalism (Go Ducks!) and Susie from Oregon State University as a Merchandising Management major (Go Beavs!). Our two schools are big rivals – the annual Civil War football game was rated one of the Top 10 college football rivalries – and this Duck and Beaver want to enlighten you on our college experiences and give you a peek at our jump into the real world.

Each week in The Civil War Graduation Countdown! we’re going to offer advice and tell stories from our college years, as well as share some of the challenges we’re facing right now. With 65 days until graduation, Jens is concentrating on the job hunt and Susie is starting to plan her move to New York–all while making it to class and interning at brass. Be sure to tell us what you think along the way–and any tips or suggestions are always welcome. Our schools may be rivals, but we’re definitely in this together…at least until football season starts.

Stay tuned for all the juicy details in the coming weeks!

- Susie and Jens

April 15th is looming — are you getting nervous? If you’re feeling a little behind, now is the time to buckle down and get organized. Remember: if your adjusted gross income was $54,000 or less last year, you can use FreeFile to file online. This outlet lets you file any time, day or night, and you can receive a refund sooner through Direct Deposit.

A more obvious reminder is the due date: Tuesday, April 15th. (Last year, the 15th landed on a Sunday so the day was bumped to the 17th.) While it’s never a good idea to wait to the last minute to file, your return is considered on time as long as it’s postmarked (electronically or snail mail) by the due date.

“Like mothers, taxes are often misunderstood, but seldom forgotten.” – Lord Bramwell, 19th Century English jurist

– Susie

Source: irs.gov