Yes, You CAN Afford Healthy Food In College

Thomas Frank Health

“I want to eat better food, but I just can’t afford it dude.”

I hear this one a lot. A lot of students think they can’t eat healthy in college because it’s too expensive.

In a way, this could be true. When you look at a lot of paleo dieting guidelines, you read things like:

“Buy only grass-finished beef from a local supplier.”
“Only eat wild-caught fish. Farmed fish will melt your insides and you’ll never find true love.”
“All of your produce needs to be organic.”
“If you’re going to eat butter, it has to be grass-fed butter that you buy from an Amish farm in person.”
“Buy Bazooka-Proof coffee dude, it’s made in Chili and has 800% less toxins than Starbucks.”

If you’re dead set on following all of this advice, then heck yes it’s going to get expensive! Fresh-caught fish and grass-fed beef alone would obliterate anything you make working a part-time job in no time.

However, none of these things are absolutely necessary to be healthy. Read More →

What It’s Like In Japan

Thomas Frank Travel

So, I feel a little bad.

At the end of my junior year, I informed you that I’d be taking an epic journey during the summer, traveling to San Francisco, New York, and Japan.

With a trip like this being probably the most epic experience of my life, I fully planned on creating tons of content around it.

Well… that didn’t exactly happen. While I did write a lengthy post about my San Francisco trip, and while I did write an in-depth analysis of health and eating in Japan vs. the U.S., I still didn’t do what I planned on doing.

I had all these lofty goals to write mega-huge posts on learning the language, hacking travel, and all kinds of other related stuff. But I never got around to it.

So, I’m sorry for failing to fill your brains even further with awesomeness. However, there’s one thing that I just can’t fail to do – and that’s to simply share a little taste of Japan. And so here we are.

This post isn’t about some tip to make your to-do list do backflips and make toast for you. It isn’t a list of apps that’ll beam test answers into your brain or make lecture less boring.

It’s just me showing you around Japan, because Japan is fucking awesome. So, if you’re interested in seeing this amazing country and learning a few things, let’s go! Read More →

Turbo-Charge Your Reading Speed With Spreeder

Thomas Frank Productivity

A while back, my friend Stefan Knapen published a post called, “The Ultimate Guide to Speedreading“. This article is a fantastic introduction to speedreading and provides a lot of tips for getting better at it.

For those of you in the dark, speedreading is a technique for reading content faster than normal. It’s especially useful for reading content you need to learn in order to pass a class, such as a history textbook.

The goal with speedreading is to increase the amount of words you can read in a certain time while still retaining (or even increasing) comprehension and learning. To do this, you employ many techniques, including:

“Chunking” words together – ignoring individual letters and words, and instead working to comprehend multiple words at a time
Using a finger to quickly guide your eyes over the text
Working to eliminate “inner vocalization” – that voice in your brain that “reads” the words aloud to you and slows you down

With practice, you can learn to read at 3-4 times your normal rate and still retain comprehension. Read More →

A Speck, On A Speck, Hanging Out With Specks

Thomas Frank Experiences

Last Friday evening, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture from none other than Bill Nye the Science Guy. This was quite the special occasion, as our university had been trying to get him to come for 10 years.

To say the event was packed would be an understatement. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen tailgating at a science lecture before, but I now have. When the doors opened, people flooded into our auditorium faster than I’ve ever seen – in fact, I don’t think I’ve actually ever seen people skip the aisles and just run over the seat backs en masse before…

Craziness aside, hearing Bill Nye speak was awesome. As a long-time educator and entertainer, Bill is a master at giving an effective and engaging presentation. He also taught me some really important lessons during his talk – lessons that applied to me even though I’m not a scientist or engineer.

These are what I want to share with you today – my takeaways from Bill Nye’s presentation, which can be applied to your life no matter what your major is. Read More →

Need More Music? Check Out College Info Geek Radio!

Thomas Frank Music

Alright ladies, gents, bros, hos, kids, tools, and caffeine-addicted computer nerds who only read the first few sentences of my articles before going to 4chan… I have a confession to make.

After being a long-time Grooveshark user, I’ve recently switched to using Spotify. Why? Well, to be honest, the only thing Grooveshark has going for it is an abundance of music that nobody else (other than YouTube) has. I liked Grooveshark for a long time because it’s got lots of video game soundtracks, anime music, and other obscure stuff that I couldn’t find anywhere else.

However, the site itself is incredibly disorganized. After doing some research for an upcoming (and much-needed) update to my streaming music site guide, I’ve decided that Spotify will suit my needs much better.

Though it may not have quite as much music as Grooveshark, Spotify does literally everything else better. It’s much better organized, runs smoother, and has a much, much better mobile app.

Anyway, enough about Spotify. I’ll wax poetic about its awesomeness again when I actually get that streaming music post updated. Today I want to talk to you about something else, and that’s College Info Geek Radio. Read More →

5 Life Lessons I Learned from Bungee Jumping in Macau

Pamela Nguyen Experiences, Guest Post

This is a guest post from my good friend Pam Nguyen, who runs Surviving College (another awesome college blog). So no, I didn’t personally go bungee jumping in Macau – but now I want to

I am going to tell you a story about one of the most spontaneous moments of my life, which happened when I was on an exchange program at a business school in Hong Kong. (Hong Kong, by the way, is one of the best study abroad locations if you want an opportunity to travel throughout Southeast Asia.)

I think the entire exchange program decided to travel to the Philippines or Thailand that weekend. I had just turned 20 years old, and was one of the people in the group who didn’t go. The remaining 6 of us who didn’t commit to traveling the world that weekend decided to make a day trip to Macau, a Chinese province that is notorious for its casinos, egg tart desserts, and amazing Portuguese-Chinese fusion cuisine.

My good friend Jenny had been feeling a bit rebellious at the time. She was intending to go bungee jumping while we were in Macau without the permission of her parents, who had been funding her study abroad budget. (Insert gasp here.)

Macau is home to the Macau Tower, which is the second highest commercial sky jump in the world. At 731.6 feet, it’s not exactly a beginner’s bungee jump! Jenny didn’t want to do it alone, so she asked the 5 of us if we were up for joining her.

I’m pretty sure everyone else instantly said no, but I hardly gave it a second thought before jumping on board. Read More →

How To Take Notes With A Smartphone And Gain Zen Master-Level Focus

Martin Boehme Productivity

Classes are back, and they’re bringing with them a slew of information that you may be accustomed to keeping in the form of notes. You may even, if you’re generally awesome at things, be keeping these notes in Evernote, taking advantage of the many beauties of searchable data.

Perhaps, though, you’re not. Why is this? Maybe:

You don’t have a laptop
You’re not comfortable taking your precious laptop to class
You’re already carrying around 5,000 books and don’t want to destroy your spine

I happen to fall under the last two. I use my laptop to record my music, and risking my ability to record music every day isn’t exactly enticing. It’s also extra weight I certainly don’t need on my back, with the amount of coursework I’m taking this semester.

Luckily, there is an easier solution for note-taking that adds almost no weight, is much more replaceable, and brings a few other benefits your laptop wouldn’t have.

Your smartphone. Read More →

5 Things You Can Do Today To Make Yourself 2 Billion Percent More Hireable

Thomas Frank Employment, The Best Stuff

Outlandish claim time: This post will make you a million dollars and will make your life 600 times better. Yup - I even sent my friend Chris to the future to verify this and he said I was totally right.

Okay, maybe that’s not true. But. I will say that this post does have the potential to get you closer to those two things.

This post is about making yourself the most irresistible candidate possible for any internship or job you might be going for. It’s about standing out from the crowd and being impossible to overlook.

Think about it: you might be incredibly freaking awesome at whatever it is you’re studying. You might be a badass programmer, or know the details of every court case since 1894, or have a ton of experience in forensic accounting. You know that you’d kick ass doing the job you want – but the problem is that other people aren’t so aware of that talent.

That’s why you can’t rely on your talent and raw experience alone to stand out. Other factors count, and they count a lot.

In this post, I’ll detail not 2, not 87, but 5 things you can do (or at least begin) today that will help you to become an irresistible hire. Remember, the key here is doing them - just reading over this post won’t get you anywhere. Challenge yourself to actually do a few of them now. Read More →