Before I start, I’d like to give a quick shout out to the Campus Clipper. The Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC, from the East Side to Greenwich Village. The company helps support students in so many ways, from their coupon booklet to their Official Student Guide. Now, on to the blog!

Since the number of older students enrolling in colleges and universities has accelerated in recent years, we’re shifting away from the title of “non-traditional.” These students are now commonly referred to as adult students or older students.

Community Colleges and Universities are responding to this change and most of them offer programs that are suitable for older students. Given the current struggle of the economy, and the high unemployment rate, it is time for these students to return to school so that they can be successful. Their achievement, as well as the achievement of traditional students, is important to the nation’s economic success.

Most students are returning to school to advance their career, for financial stability, to complete a degree that they started years ago or to pursue a new field of interest. For some, it may that they’ve realized the value of an education or are not giving up on that childhood dream, even if they encountered hardships that interrupted their academic path.

Lelani Monalall is one of those students who isn’t giving up on her dream. She agreed that finding a better job and having upward social mobility are good reasons to go back to school, but there’s also another more important reason why she is returning to school.

“Along the years I’ve learned, it’s not just about making more money anymore. It’s more than an income. It’s about that question I was asked as a child. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Lelani wants to make that dream a reality now and realizes that it isn’t too late. She wants to wake up and enjoy what she does for a living. Making her childhood dream of becoming a teacher requires the right credentials and she has committed herself to achieving just that.

Ten years ago she dropped out of college due to financial difficulties; she was on her own and had to work full time. Now at the age of thirty, she is back in school and is studying to become a teacher.

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By Rona Ramjas

A few words from the Campus Clipper –

The Campus Clipper not only help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create these amazing E-Books, but we give them a platform to teach others. Follow each new blog post to read a chapter of our various books and to learn how the Campus Clipper can help you follow your dreams!

Craving student savings while you catch up on your reading? Click on the link to download the Official Campus Clipper Coupon Booklet! And check out our newest YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during this year’s Welcome Week.

Before I start, I’d like to give a quick shout out to the Campus Clipper. The Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC, from the East Side to Greenwich Village. The company helps support students in so many ways, from their coupon booklet to their Official Student Guide. Now, on to the blog!

There are those people in life who by a very young age know exactly what they would like to do. They have it all mapped out; schools, universities, internships, careers and family. And then there are people like me. I was the college dropout who returned to school after a six year hiatus. I am the non-traditional student.

A non-traditional student is an adult who decides to return to school after the traditional college years of 18-24. For others like me, college life can be more meaningful after gaining some life experiences. Whether you are 25 or 45, and are returning to school to finish a degree or earn a new degree, adapting to the student life after many years could be both challenging and rewarding.

If you are thinking about returning to school and are troubled with obstacles of time management, fear of losing your social life, or worry about the difficulty studying and balancing your life, these are all normal challenges to encounter. There are many resources to help answer your questions and they are others like you out there.

I dropped out of college years ago because I wasn’t sure of what I wanted to study. And I couldn’t afford to continue. I couldn’t afford to keep changing my major, so I had to leave. I gave up my academic course because I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. My decision didn’t arouse much debate at the time. No one knew how long it would really be before I returned. After a series of odd jobs, some I enjoyed, some I didn’t; retail sales, a medical receptionist, administrative secretary and bartending, I began to grow restless.

I grew restless because it wasn’t enough for me anymore. What seemed like an adventurous life was becoming more like a daunting uncertainty that I could no longer keep up with. I needed to stabilize myself; have a career, become financially independent and I needed to find a place in the world for me.

So I decided it was time to return to school. I was ready to be in a classroom again. (Learning is a lifelong experience.  It doesn’t have to stop because you’re an adult.)

More importantly, I decided on what I wanted to do and committed to taking the course. I always enjoyed writing. So I decided to study creative writing. I realized that it wasn’t enough to have a talent; I needed to return to school, to study and be in constant practice with the craft and art of writing.

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By Rona Ramjas

A few words from the Campus Clipper –

The Campus Clipper not only help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create these amazing E-Books, but we give them a platform to teach others. Follow each new blog post to read a chapter of our various books and to learn how the Campus Clipper can help you follow your dreams!

Craving student savings while you catch up on your reading? Click on the link to download the Official Campus Clipper Coupon Booklet! And check out our newest YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during this year’s Welcome Week.

Before I start, I’d like to give a quick shout out to the Campus Clipper. The Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC, from the East Side to Greenwich Village. The company helps support students in so many ways, from their coupon booklet to their Official Student Guide. Now, on to the blog!

If you’re always on the go, you’ll find that carrying an mp3 player or ipod makes travel a bit less tedious. Your music player holds the soundtrack to your life. The songs you choose should fit every mood you experience and everything you encounter during your day. It is beneficial to open your ears to different kinds of music when filling up your music player so you can have a variety of music styles to reflect your mood throughout the day. You might one upbeat music in the morning to wake you up and relaxing music in the evening. An interesting aspect of any music player, especially the iPod, is the shuffle button. If you’re a person who doesn’t stick to one genre, this can be fun to try, especially if you’re doing some activity that would involve you using your iPod for a long period of time. Personally, I like to do this when I’m on the train. It’s funny to feel your own mood change with every song that comes on when your iPod is on shuffle. I like when my ipod goes from something slow like Death Cab for Cutie to something really fast and loud like ‘Walk this Way’ by Aerosmith. When this happens, my mood instantly changes from calm to energetic. Your soundtrack should move with your moods and complement  your tastes. Adding music to your day is like when Dorothy went from black and white Kansas, to a world of technicolor.

No matter what your taste in music, it’s important to remember that music is there for you. It comforts you after a bad day, provides a soundtrack for the things that go on in your head and carries with it a flood of memories from your past. Listening to different genres of music can open your mind to not just different music genres but to all forms of creativity. So open your ears and listen to the music.

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By Janet Reyes

A few words from the Campus Clipper –

The Campus Clipper not only help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create these amazing E-Books, but we give them a platform to teach others. Follow each new blog post to read a chapter of our various books and to learn how the Campus Clipper can help you follow your dreams!

Craving student savings while you catch up on your reading? Click on the link to download the Official Campus Clipper Coupon Booklet! And check out our newest YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during this year’s Welcome Week.

Before I start, I’d like to give a quick shout out to the Campus Clipper. The Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC, from the East Side to Greenwich Village. The company helps support students in so many ways, from their coupon booklet to their Official Student Guide. Now, on to the blog!

MUSIC , THE NAVIGATOR OF NOSTALGIA

Music has the amazing ability to seal and trigger memories. Whether they’re good or bad memories, when a song was playing during the making of a memory, that song will forever remind you of that memory. When I was a kid, I would spend most of my days hanging out with my grandma in her tiny apartment. Like me, she is a tiny woman with a huge love for music. I remember sitting with her in the living room and sifting through her old vinyl records, watching her smile with delight when she found the record she was in the mood to listen to. Those of you of with Latino descent have probably heard of “Hector Lavoe and the Fania All Stars”. For those of you who haven’t, these guys were the Aerosmith and David Bowie of salsa music during the 1970s and 1908s- and my grandma loved them. When the film El Cantante (starring Jennifer Lopez and her already ex-husband Marc Anthony) came out a few years ago, of course I checked it out. Being that it is a film about the life of Lavoe, it was filled with scenes in which his music was performed. As soon as I heard the songs, memories of those afternoons with my grandma instantly came back. Many other moments in  my life have been accompanied by music but I especially love these memories with my grandma because it possibly explains where I get my love for music.

My grandfather suffers from dementia that is rapidly progressing to the later stages at an alarming rate. He’s already forgetting faces and names but one thing that I have noticed is that although he might be forgetting who we are sometimes, he doesn’t forget his favorite songs. When he hears them, which are usually old salsa songs, he instantly comes back and is his old self again, even if it’s just for a couple of minutes.

Music and memory is a popular research topic amongst those who study and work with Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. An organization called Music and Memory works to provide those with special needs, in particular Alzheimer’s and dementia patients, get access to music players. The organization accepts monetary donations in order to purchase iPods for these patients. Their mission is as follows: “…to improve the quality of life for the elderly and infirm through the use of personalized music and digital technology.” This organization was created based on the studies done on these patients proving that music helped to improve their cognitive skills and trigger memory, just in the way I noticed it helped my grandfather.

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By Janet Reyes

A few words from the Campus Clipper –

The Campus Clipper not only help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create these amazing E-Books, but we give them a platform to teach others. Follow each new blog post to read a chapter of our various books and to learn how the Campus Clipper can help you follow your dreams!

Craving student savings while you catch up on your reading? Click on the link to download the Official Campus Clipper Coupon Booklet! And check out our newest YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during this year’s Welcome Week!

Before I start, I’d like to give a quick shout out to the Campus Clipper. The Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC, from the East Side to Greenwich Village. The company helps support students in so many ways, from their coupon booklet to their Official Student Guide. Now, on to the blog!

SOCIAL MEDIA AND MUSIC ARTISTS

Social media sites are another great way to discover new music.  It’s also a great platform for artists to get recognized and develop their fan base. One of the best examples of social media serving this two fold purpose is Justin Bieber. All that kid had to do was post videos of himself on Youtube and he got picked up by a record label. Now, whether you like it or not, you can’t walk into a store without seeing his face on some kind of merchandise.

Another example of fans connecting to and creating a fan base for a new artist is Swedish musician Lykke Li. Some of you might have never heard of her but may know her as “the girl who did that one song with Drake” or “the girl who did that one song with Kanye West.” And for those of you who don’t know her, listen to any soundtrack from any action movie with a woman as the star from the last year or so and she’ll be there. Back to my point, she got her start on Myspace back when social media was still steaming up. She gained such a large fan base that she couldn’t be ignored anymore. She is still relatively unknown but obviously rappers Drake and Kanye West knew her fans were on to something and put her on their tracks.

Social media sites have the capacity for an artist to post their music, photos, videos and other content for you, the fans. If you ‘like’ their Facebook pages or follow them on Twitter, you can find out about concert dates or new albums before people who aren’t as social media savvy.

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By Janet Reyes

A few words from the Campus Clipper –

The Campus Clipper not only help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create these amazing E-Books, but we give them a platform to teach others. Follow each new blog post to read a chapter of our various books and to learn how the Campus Clipper can help you follow your dreams!

Craving student savings while you catch up on your reading? Click on the link to download the Official Campus Clipper Coupon Booklet! And check out our newest YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during this year’s Welcome Week!

The Marriage of the Playlist and Social Media Sharing: Meet Spotify

Before I start, I’d like to give a quick shout out to the Campus Clipper. The Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC, from the East Side to Greenwich Village. The company helps support students in so many ways, from their coupon booklet to their Official Student Guide. Now, on to the blog!

Another way to discover new music is a recent development called Spotify. Spotify, like Pandora, allows you to listen to the music you love while giving you the chance to discover new music by being able to listen to playlists that other listeners share with Spotify. The ‘Share’ aspect works with Facebook, Twitter and other sites where your friends and other Spotify users can see your playlists and give them a listen. And unlike Pandora, Spotify allows you to give any given song as many listens as you like and you have an unlimited amount of skips if you don’t like a song that comes on. Another cool aspect about Spotify is that you can ‘queue’ whatever songs you want to hear next- in other words, you can choose the order that the songs in a playlist play because you can see the list of songs on the screen. There isn’t the ‘surprise’ like Pandora because you have the entire playlist in front of you and can automatically spot out what you like.

With Spotify, you have the ability to share the songs, albums, artists and playlists you listen to with your Facebook buddies, Twitter followers and friends on Spotify. While on Facebook, you might see in your news feed certain songs that your friends might be listening to on Spotify and if you love music as much as I think you do (you made the conscious decision to read this book about music, right?) then you might get curious and click the link to the song. Spotify is also great because once downloaded, it automatically contains your entire iTunes library and/or Windows Media Player library. It’s just one of the latest developments specifically designed for music lovers.

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By Janet Reyes

A few words from the Campus Clipper –

The Campus Clipper not only help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create these amazing E-Books, but we give them a platform to teach others. Follow each new blog post to read a chapter of our various books and to learn how the Campus Clipper can help you follow your dreams!

Craving student savings while you catch up on your reading? Click on the link to download the Official Campus Clipper Coupon Booklet! And check out our newest YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during this year’s Welcome Week!

EXPANDING THE TASTE PALLET AND FINDING NEW MUSIC

Before I start, I’d like to give a quick shout out to the Campus Clipper. The Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC, from the East Side to Greenwich Village. The company helps support students in so many ways, from their coupon booklet to their Official Student Guide. Now, on to the blog!

Now that you understand that it’s perfectly acceptable to have totally contrasting music tastes, it’s time to discuss how to find new music. When I say new I mean new to you and your music taste buds, not necessarily a brand new artist. One great, and easy, way to find new music is Pandora. For those who haven’t heard of Pandora, it’s a site built for music junkies like myself and you too. You can create an account for free and create your own stations based on a song, artist or genre that you type into the search bar. Here’s the part where expanding your palette comes in: from that initial song, artist or genre you typed in to create the station, several other artists similar to whatever you typed in, will play in that station. From this one station, numerous different artists, who you’ve probably never listened to or heard of, will come on. Next thing you know, you have a new artist you love.

If you use the free version of Pandora, as most people do, you get to listen to all of your stations with very few ads in between and you are allotted a certain number of hours that you can listen per month. Trust me, with the way I listen to Pandora, the number of hours they allow is more than enough. If you choose to upgrade and pay a yearly fee of $36 for your subscription to Pandora, everything is unlimited. When I first discovered Pandora a few years ago, it was like when man first discovered how to make fire. It was that serious. The first station I created was a Green Day station and they took all the elements that Green Day has in their music and gave me some other artists to listen to that I now consider to be some of my favorites, like Foo Fighters and Rancid. Pandora and other similar sites, are a great way to discover what artists and genres you like and or don’t like. Remember, you don’t have to like everything that comes up in your Pandora stations. If you don’t like a song, simply click the nifty “thumbs down” button and that song will never play again. Similarly, you can click the “thumbs up” button if you like a song and it will keep that song for future play in your station.

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By Janet Reyes

A few words from the Campus Clipper –

The Campus Clipper not only help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create these amazing E-Books, but we give them a platform to teach others. Follow each new blog post to read a chapter of our various books and to learn how the Campus Clipper can help you follow your dreams!

Craving student savings while you catch up on your reading? Click on the link to download the Official Campus Clipper Coupon Booklet! And check out our newest YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during this year’s Welcome Week!

Before I start, I’d like to give a quick shout out to the Campus Clipper. The Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC, from the East Side to Greenwich Village. The company helps support students in so many ways, from their coupon booklet to their Official Student Guide. Now, on to the blog!

LEARN TO EMBRACE ALL GENRES TO FIND WHAT DEFINES YOU

The beauty of music, is that as an individual with your own opinions and tastes, you don’t have to stick to one genre. The myriad artists on  my iPod range from soulful Amy Winehouse and Adele, to fun and trippy Red Hot Chili Peppers and Lady Gaga, to arrogant– I meant awesome– Kanye West. I also have lesser known but equally talented artists like The Boxer Rebellion, Kate Nash, Phantogram, The Shins and tons of others. I will never admit this to anyone other than you lucky readers, but  there is even some Kesha on my ipod for those days that I “wake up feeling like P.Diddy,” as she sing-says so well. Clearly I embrace all genres, even those of the cheesy sing-talk variety like Kesha. Listening to different genres of music is like trying new food. With each new genre you try, you’re expanding your music pallet the same way you expand your taste pallet when you try new food.

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By Janet Reyes

A few words from the Campus Clipper –

The Campus Clipper not only help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create these amazing E-Books, but we give them a platform to teach others. Follow each new blog post to read a chapter of our various books and to learn how the Campus Clipper can help you follow your dreams!

Craving student savings while you catch up on your reading? Click on the link to download the Official Campus Clipper Coupon Booklet! And check out our newest YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during this year’s Welcome Week!

Before I start, I’d like to give a quick shout out to the Campus Clipper. The Campus Clipper has been offering awesome student discounts in NYC, from the East Side to Greenwich Village. The company helps support students in so many ways, from their coupon booklet to their Official Student Guide. Now, on to the blog!

LET HER HAVE HER MUSIC

Music heals and I have witnessed the strength that it can give. My cousin Ricky passed away from brain cancer and there are no words to express the immense sense of loss that our family felt, especially his mother, my aunt Carmen. Aunt Carmen is a tiny woman whose emotional strength would challenge a lumberjack’s physical strength. During Ricky’s last few months, I began to wonder how she did it. Where did all that strength come from? My wonderment was answered during my last visit with Ricky before he passed. When I walked into the hospital room, I realized where Aunt Carmen’s strength came from- her music. When I walked in, my Aunt Carmen was sitting on a window sill with her sterilized hospital gown on and a small radio sitting next to her. It provided background music in the quiet hospital room that drowned out the sounds of our crying for which I was grateful. The music that was playing came from a CD that she made– her own playlist. There was some classic salsa, some gospel and other songs that provided the words for how she felt in that moment. It provided the words and the feelings that we couldn’t say. No one said anything more than just their “hi’s” and “bye’s” and “sorry’s”. I started thinking of songs that would give me my own comfort. When I approached his bedside, he was unconscious and machines were providing him with each breath he took. I instantly thought of the song “Follow You into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie, a song about memories and loss. I’m not sure if the music playing in the hospital room disturbed the other patients, but no one complained. Some of our family members wondered why Aunt Carmen would play music in a hospital room. To them, it seemed a bit crazy, but the music gave her a sense of peace and normalcy as she dealt with losing her child, one of the most difficult things a parent can go through. They let her have her music.

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By Janet Reyes

A few words from the Campus Clipper –

The Campus Clipper not only help our interns learn new skills, make money, and create these amazing E-Books, but we give them a platform to teach others. Follow each new blog post to read a chapter of our various books and to learn how the Campus Clipper can help you follow your dreams!

Craving student savings while you catch up on your reading? Click on the link to download the Official Campus Clipper Coupon Booklet! And check out our newest YouTube video showing off some of New York City’s finest students during this year’s Welcome Week!