Give yourself the relaxing summer you deserve. (Photo via Flickr)
If you’re like most students, you probably did not finish everything in the spring semester you would have liked. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a great summer, it just means you have some work left to do before you start enjoying yourself. To make sure you can get the boring stuff out of the way, we’ve made a list for you: Continue reading
While it’s great as a whole and literally keeps our lives functioning smoothly at this point, the internet has some dark corners. And in those corners lurk people whose only goal is the separation of you and your money. Roommate scams are a favorite trick of theirs.
But they aren’t going to get you. Not after you check out our guide to spotting and avoiding roommate scams.
How To Spot A Scammer
First, they’re going to get pretty specific with their questions and vague with their answers. They want personal information, but they don’t want you to learn anything about them. You want to get to know your roommate obviously, so make sure you can either meet this person or get a photo of them and jump on FaceTime or Google Hangout.
They’re always unavailable to talk or show their face, never in town and often transferring to your school from overseas or out of state. Excuses are a scammer’s best friend. They’ll live in your email box until they know they will or won’t be able to separate you from your money.
Don’t Fall Prey To A Check Fraud Scam
One popular scam involves the person you’re unfamiliar with asking for an address to send a check. The mystery man on the other end sends you a check written for way more than necessary, either because he or she claims a mistake was made or they had to send you a check they got from an employer that was for more than necessary. The scammer will ask you to cash the check and then send them the difference through something like PayPal or Western Union. Something quick and easy.Â
Days after you cash the check, your bank will notify you that it was fraudulent and you’ll be stuck paying back the entire amount to the bank. These scams can cost students thousands of dollars all the time.
Where Do These Roommate Scams Happen?
They happen all over the internet, from roommate websites to Craigslist. We suggest using resources like Facebook to get a better feel for who you’re dealing with, which is why all of our roommate pages are linked up to Facebook’s API. You’ll be able to see who you’re talking to and typically whether or not they are enrolled at your school.
That’s not enough, though. Make sure you either meet face-to-face or through some sort of video message service. Generally, if your gut tells you something feels wrong about the scenario, your gut is right.
It’s 2 AM and your night is just getting started. The music is blaring, and the bar is a blast. The morning will never come. You’ll be young forever. Or at least, until your alarm hits the next day and you have to make it to that insane Friday morning class. Why would you pick a class on a Friday morning? What a huge mistake. You can’t skip it, though. You’ll have to sit there and suffer. But with the right hangover food, you can limit the lasting effects of the night before. Continue reading
According to the Bureau of Labor Stats, you’re spending more than a third of your day in bed. To us, that sounds like it might even be an underestimation. In this, The Age of Streaming, it doesn’t take much searching on Twitter or Facebook to see thousands of students across the country declaring their intention to spend the weekend in bed bingeing on a new Netflix series.
It stands to reason that more time in bed should mean more time spent washing bed sheets. But we seriously doubt students, of all people, are spending any more time in 2016 washing bed sheets than they did in 2000.
Bed sheets are often left behind on laundry day. If bed sheets were in a military movie, there’d be a tearful eulogy delivered about how they didn’t make it on laundry day. They were the good man that got left behind because hampers are only so big, and we can only stand so many trips to the laundry room.
The rest of your clothes provide a sense of relief on laundry day. When you can empty your hamper, get everything washed, dried, folded or hung and logic and order restored to your clothing rotation, that’s a great feeling. But bed sheets? They’re easy to forget, even though they’re putting in more work than even your most worn outfit.
Bed sheets are there for you every night, absorbing your body’s oils, skin cells, dirt, sweat and anything else you emit. Sure, a layer of clothing usually – usually – separates you from your sheets, but over the course of six to eight hours every night, they still get quite familiar with you.
A good rule of thumb is never to let any of your household chores sit unattended to for more than two weeks. And that includes washing your sheets.Â
As a college student, you may be accustomed to living in a certain amount of filth. We assume your coffee table does not remain pristinely dusted and Windexed at all times. Your floor could probably use a Swiffering, and there may be a few dishes in your sink too. You’re busy with school and work and socializing. Cleaning shouldn’t be at the top of your to-do list every week. And we know you’re not made of money either. Laundry is secretly expensive. According to this article from the Daily Kansan, students spent $9-12 a week on laundry. Doing a load that’s just sheets and comforters, not even clothes that you get to wear, can be frustrating. BUT IT IS WORTHWHILE. YOUR SHEETS ARE DISGUSTING.
But when to wash them is only part of the battle. What do you do when you get them in the washing machine?
Since you’re only going to be able to knock out sheet day every other week or so, make sure you do it right. According to Clean Organized Family Home – which sounds like the kind of place we all aspire to live in – sheets should be washed in hot water, especially if you’re dealing with a cold. All that built up bacteria needs to be hit with the heavy stuff.
Throw some bleach in there – bleach with chlorine if you have white sheets and that fancy oxy-bleach stuff if you have color sheets that can be stained or fade – and make sure to give it the hottest water setting. Hot water, detergent, and bleach are all necessary to kill bacteria effectively according to ABC News.
You may have been relying on your detergent to get rid of all the dirt and germs, but if you’re not using bleach or very hot water, you’re not killing the bacteria — they’re getting on your hands and staying in the washing machine.
So head up or down the stairs to the floor in your building that has laundry on it and restore order to your bed. You’re spending most of your time there, so you may as well make the best of the situation.
If you’ve ever taken the time to check out some apartment reviews on Google or Yelp or any other place where reviews live online, you’ll notice that college students have long had a few beefs with the college housing industry. But online reviews are unfulfilling. Too often they are experiences unique to one person, brought upon by a fractured relationship with the building they are leaving. It’s hard to trust one anonymous user review.
Strength is in numbers.
With that in mind, we surveyed college students across the country over the past couple of weeks to get some more feedback on the current state of college housing. One question we asked every student was, “What advice would you give your landlord?” After over 1,000 responses, we’ve seen a few common responses pop up time and time again. Continue reading
Via Flickr | Stephen Shankland
With all of the distracting, funny, or downright time-wasting things on the internet, it can be hard to remember that you can still use it to be productive and simplify your life. There are so many tools on the internet that trying to find and use all of them might seem counterproductive, so I compiled a list of them to try to help college students make the most of their time online.
Here are some free extensions for Google Chrome that can make college life a little bit easier. Continue reading
After much debate and backroom politicking, Rent College Pads has settled on a list of top ten appliances. Continue reading
Don’t get expelled chasing mac and cheese or these other foods. | Flickr
We’re not here to bad mouth mac and cheese.
Rent College Pads stand firmly behind macaroni and cheese, regardless of how you cook it. The classic Kraft mac and cheese dish obviously has its charms, with its powdered yellow substance that looks nothing like any cheese we’ve ever had. The fast-casual dining establishment Noodles and Company serves a plentiful mac and cheese dish that can serve as adequate nourishment for an entire day. And barbecue and soul food places have made mac and cheese a go-to side dish for many of us.
But as delightful as it is, mac and cheese is not a dish worth risking expulsion from school, as reportedly happened with a UConn student. He had to have his bacon jalapeno mac and cheese, and it was that desire that cost him dearly in the end. Continue reading
Everyone has advice for what you should do with your time in college. Why? Because everyone wishes they would have done more stuff when they were in college. It should be the time of your life. So don’t spend too much time studying and zero time focused on all the things around you that can bring you pleasure.
Honestly, we could have made a list of about 100 things, but we wanted to focus in on a few select things to do in college and give them more attention. Continue reading
Use your phone as something other than a distraction.
College students are easy targets. They’re often caught up in good times and they haven’t yet learned life’s difficult lessons about safety. That’s why parents are always worried. That’s why everyone is always telling you to go out with a buddy. That’s why everyone is always harping on you to be aware. Students are often going through a lot of experiences for the first time in life and without experience to fall back on, it’s easy to be taken advantage of.
Fortunately, there are a lot of apps for college students that can make everything from walking home at night to dealing with earthquakes a safer experience. Continue reading