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Posts by Ryan K.

Apr 1

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Middlebury Class of 2016: Accepted, rejected, waitlisted

Middlebury’s acceptance, rejection, and waitlist letters have gone out and the class of 2016 is coming together. Below is a look at how high schools seniors react to the news. First, acceptances:

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Jan 31

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Life Skills: Renting an Apartment

Life Skills is a series of posts by former MiddBlog lead editors. J-term is ending, so we’re drawing this series to a close. Clearly, not many students are going to go out and put our advice into action immediately (except maybe you graduating febs!), but know that these posts remain here as a resource to come back to or as a place to start thinking about all these post-grad variables. As I said in my first post, this is a good time to “wean yourself off the good life.” Hope you’ve enjoyed the series and love to hear about what else you’d like from grads on MiddBlog. -Ryan Kellett ’09.5

So, you’re FINALLY moving out of your childhood room, huh? Nah, just teasing. For some, ma and pa’s house is a great place to live (not kidding) regardless if you have a job or not. But I’m assuming you’ve made the call that you want to move into a place of your own (and not a dorm room) and that you’re most likely in a city some kind. First, congrats! Renting your own place is one of the quintessential “growing up” milestones. Only one small thing — no one ever told you how to go through this process.

Oh, your apartment has a communal swimming pool, right?

Under Pressure

My own experience is one of always having to find a place to stay under pressure. My advice: don’t put yourself in a situation in which you have to find a place in mere days or even weeks. The best search is one where you can go at your pace, do your research, and feel comfortable committing to a lease. As such, you should try to buy yourself some time to go through the apartment search you want to go through. Ways to do that: stay with friends (but don’t overstay), stay at a short-term group house, stay with friends of family or family (for rent or not), airbnb, or house sit for a bit. All those tricks you pulled out for intern housing over the summer? Use ‘em again here. It’s not glamourous but this you might have to rely on the kindness of others until you can find your way apartment-hunting. Some say it’s a right of passage to live somewhere really bad before getting what you want, but I’d attempt to avoid it.

Getting started

Reality check: that dream apartment is not a mere click away on craigslist (or padmapper). Like most things, looking online is a natural way to solve your problem. But I’d caution that it’s not the only way. Just like getting a job, strategies abound: Facebook, workplace, network, etc.  Read more

Jan 12

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Life Skills: Get on the Road to Financial Security

Read Brian Fung’s post last week on digital productivity, and check out all the “Life Skills” posts (an ongoing J-term series from previous MiddBlog editors).

by Brian Fung

You don’t have to be an economics major to know that achieving financial independence takes hard work and discipline, particularly if you find yourself living in a city with few support networks after graduation. In these situations, even a little advance prep can help. Here’s how to get on the road to financial security when you’re just starting out.

via flickr / alles-schlumpf

Get everything on the table

Before making any big decisions, it’s helpful to assemble the bits and pieces of your financial life into a single picture. Last week, I mentioned Mint.com — a free online tool that tastefully displays, among other things, how much you have in your checking and savings accounts, the balance on your credit card, and any other debts you hold. Once you sign up with Mint and populate the app with your financial information, new transactions get added and categorized automatically. Mint helps you track where your money is coming from, where it goes and, most importantly, how your spending patterns change over time — all with snazzy charts and graphs to help you understand.

If giving up your personal data makes you skittish, Mint is owned and operated by Intuit, the tax-prep company behind programs like Quicken. Mint can’t make transactions on your behalf, and only reads back to you what you’d find on your various bank websites if you were to log in there separately. Still, whether you should sign up depends on how highly you trust companies like these in the first place, and that’s something for you to decide.

Take willpower out of the equation

The biggest obstacle to saving is often our own selves. Putting cash under the mattress is a struggle — it’s inconvenient, there are bills to be paid now, there are things I want now, and so on. But saving doesn’t have to be an uphill battle.

Instead, consider automating your personal finances. That means setting up a system of rules with your bank(s) to manage your money — like a computer program for your income that you can set and forget. Not only does this system help you save cash by setting aside some of your paycheck before you have a chance to spend it all, but it also saves you valuable time and stress. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can even use this system to automatically pay your bills, which vendors appreciate and sometimes results in a little discount for you. And the best part? Automating your savings means you can spend whatever’s left with minimal guilt.

To see how such a system works, watch this explainer by Ramit Sethi, one of a growing number of smart personal finance bloggers.

Help! What’s a 401(k)/403(b)/IRA?

Retirement seems like a long way off when you’re in college. But people are living longer these days even as the future of Social Security grows less certain, which makes it important to plan ahead so that you have enough to live on after you stop drawing a salary. You probably don’t need to start saving until after you leave Middlebury, but the longer you wait, the steeper your climb will be. Someone who starts investing at age 25 will need to put away much less each month and will still end up having more in the long run than someone who didn’t start saving until 35 or 45. Read more

Jan 5

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Life Skills: Tools to upgrade your digital productivity

Editor’s Note: Just as you might be taking any number of J-term workshops that teach you things like winter survival skills, how to bake bread, or knitting, we hope that you’ll follow MiddBlog for a few lessons of our own this month. I’ve asked all the former lead editors of MiddBlog who have since graduated to join me in writing-up a series of life skills posts. Specifically, I wanted to know: “What are the practical things you didn’t learn while at Midd?” From how to dress yourself to post-dorm room decor to managing finances and keeping up with information overload — I know these former bloggers have lots of specific things that will come in handy if not now, then soon. While certainly not a lecture, I’d look at this series of posts as an online mini-course and discussion about post-grad life. For Seniors in particular, now is the time to wean yourself off the good life and I hope this series helps. Read, ask questions in the comments, and share with others. Thanks. – Ryan Kellett ’09.5 (MiddBlog founder)

This post is by Brian Fung ’10. Okay, so he’s not a former MiddBlog editor, but he was the editor in chief of The Campus while at Middlebury. Brian now works at Chairman’s Innovation Lab at Atlantic Media Company in Washington D.C. after a year of grad school at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Life Skills: Tools to upgrade your digital productivity

by Brian Fung

via Flickr / mentalman1369

For many of us, J-Term is a time for relaxation — a chance to savor long dinners with friends or spend an afternoon on the slopes. But the lull is also a perfect time to reassess your digital habits before jumping into the spring semester or, if you’re a graduating Feb, launching your post-college career. Here are a few apps to give your workflow that instant boost.

Dropbox: File management

Middlebury offers you ample storage space on its network. But what happens when you graduate, take a trip to New York or leave the country? Carrying your files on a USB drive is risky, and tapping into the College network from a VPN can be slow and intimidating for some. Dropbox gets around those problems by giving you your own, personal server space that’s accessible from anywhere in the world and on any device — whether that’s your smartphone, your friend’s MacBook or your mom’s home PC. All users get 2GB of storage just for signing up, and you can buy extra if you need more. But it’s unlikely you’ll ever need to pay. If you successfully convince a friend to join, both of you receive a referral bonus. Joining Dropbox using this link, for example, grants us both an extra 250MB of free storage. Even better, students who register with a .edu email address get double the bonus. So jump on it while you’ve still got your student account with the college!

Evernote: Notetaking and digital brain

Evernote is the perfect all-in-one note-taking tool. As with Dropbox, all your notes are stored on the Web and are accessible wherever you have Internet access. You can type your notes directly into Evernote, clip snippets of websites you want to keep for later — I use it to save interesting recipes and PDFs of research papers — and even upload multimedia such as photos and audio. What’s more, Evernote automatically scans your uploaded images for text and makes everything searchable. So if I upload pictures of a paper napkin bearing notes for an awesome fantasy novel I’d like to write, I can run a search in Evernote later that’ll bring up the napkin in seconds. Evernote’s also got great support for sharing, tagging and geolocation data — making it a fantastic tool for planning vacations, keeping track of business cards, compiling a portfolio of your best work or building a family scrapbook.

1Password and LastPass: Online security

Let’s face it — humans stink at picking passwords. Memorable passwords are often the least secure, and because we can only remember so much, we tend to use variants of the same password everywhere. Your best bet is to take the opposite approach: pick inscrutable passwords that are both impossible to remember and difficult for other machines to crack. That poses an obvious problem: how do you log into a site using a password you don’t yourself know? And how do you keep track of your passwords when they’re all 20-character jumbles of letters, numbers and symbols? That’s where password managers like 1Password comes in. 1Password helps you generate strong, random alphanumeric passwords and stores them behind a firewall defended by a single master password. At first blush, you might think this is akin to putting all your eggs in one basket, which might be dangerous. But in fact, it’s actually far less secure to protect your accounts on Amazon, Netflix, Google and Apple with guessable variants of “password123.” That’s four weak points of entry where a break-in at one virtually guarantees security breaches at all the others. Compare that to four strong points of entry that are not only isolated from each other but are also defended by an extra password that’s fairly strong and complex since it’s the only one you need remember. So whether you’re buying spring textbooks or a flight home after Feb graduation, think about upping your password game. Read more

Oct 24

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Your job search as a social activity

Did last month’s Senior Meeting cheer you up? 36% of Middlebury students in 2011 graduated with a job. 25% continued looking for a job post-graduation. And 11% got some sort of internship or fellowship. This is from a survey of 688 students in the Class of 2011 of which 69% completed the survey. And I’m going to take a wild guess that the other 31% of students who didn’t fill out the survey probably trended toward not having jobs.

How do those numbers help you? They don’t. They provide a “that could be me” reference point and serve to thoroughly terrify a good number of seniors into being overwhelmed.

The one good thing about the statistics is that it gets Middlebury seniors talking. And that’s a really good thing because it’s easy to make a job search a solitary experience. And I would argue that done right, a social job hunt would be better for a good portion of students.

Here’s what I mean. When you write a paper or take a test at Middlebury, you might do peer edits or study together but at the end of the day you and only you do the work. The baseline expectation in most classes is that your academic success is based on a solitary process (of hours in the Library or BiHall). And a lot of the time, Middlebury students are private about their resulting grades. It’s partly competition and partly wanting to keep the process kosher.

Why would you approach a job search in the same way? Sure, you might ask a friend to look over your resume or say “I applied to this job today.” But I rarely see groups of students approach the job search in a truly collaborative or social way. Read more

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