Students today frequently choose majors based on what they’re interested in rather than what benefits them; however, your choice in education attainment, major, and occupation could affect your bank account by millions of dollars over the span of your working life.
Degrees & Dollars
Work-Life Earnings by Educational Level ($ millions)
– None to 8th grade – –936,000 – 9th to 12th grade – –1,099,000 – High school graduate – –1,371,000 – Some college – –1,632,000 – Associate’s degree – –1,813,000 – Bachelor’s degree – –2,422,000 – Master’s degree – –2,834,000 – Professional degree – –4,159,000 – Doctorate degree – –3,525,000
Majors & Money
Work-Life Earnings by Major – for those with Bachelor’s degrees ($ millions)
– Engineering 3.5 – Computers & Math 3.1 – Science & engineering-related 2.6 – Business 2.6 – Physical Science 2.6 – Social Science 2.5 – Communications 2.3 – Biological Sciences 2.3 – Literature 2.1 – Liberal Arts 2.1 – Psychology 2.0 – Arts 2.0 – Education 1.8
Work & Wages
Work-Life Earnings by Occupation – for those with Bachelor’s degrees ($ millions)
– Architecture and engineering 3.4 – Computer and math 3.2 – Management 3.2 – Business and financial 2.7 – Healthcare practitioners & technicians 2.6 – Sales and related 2.5 – Science 2.5 – Arts and media 2.3 – Natural resources, construction, and maintenance 2.0 – Production, transportation, and material moving 1.9 – Education 1.8 – Community service and legal 1.8 – Office support 1.7 – Service 1.7
– 1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology – 2 Stanford University – 3 University of California, Berkeley, – 4 California Institute of Technology – 5 Carnegie Mellon University
Sure, beer pong and pool parties are great, but Greeks have nothing on geeks. Here’s to building up your tolerance 3 ways only geeks can.
CLASSIC VIDEO GAME NIGHT, COLLEGE-STYLE
Essentials
– Bomberman Ultra or a comparable multiplayer Ultraman – Any supported game console – Mario Party – N64
How to Play
Bomberman
– SETTINGS: – Power ups set to advanced – Power downs set to off – RULES: – If you die, take a drink of beer – If you kill yourself, take a shot of sake – If you get killed by the dangerous bomb, Sake Bomb! – AND if you get killed by a landmine, take a sake shot, loser – LOSER PUNISHMENT: – Last place at the end of a full game has to take a Sake Bomb!
Mario Party
– Any player that earns a “star” on a randomly placed “star space” on the game board has to make the other players chug a beer
Glassware
– 4 Beer Glasses – 4 Shot Glasses
Drinks
– 1 bottle of sake – Beer – Japanese beer for Bomberman… because sake with Keystone is questionable, but Keystone + Mario Party = greatness – Sake Bomber – Glass half full of beer – Drop shot glass of sake into beer – For the Princesses: – Fresh Peach Donkeys; call it “The Princess Peach” – Attire *Optional* Dress as your favorite 8-bit character
SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD PARTY
Essentials
– Scott Pilgrim Blu-ray – 65 inch or greater flat screen with touch pad remote, High Speed HDMI Cable, and surround sound – What do you mean, “why?” Why NOT?
– Spiced rum – Top with Bacardi 151 – CAUTION: This shot is flammable and is extremely hard to extinguish. DO NOT IGNITE UNLESS YOU ARE 100% SURE of what you are doing.
Lucas Lee – The Grind
– Shot of Jagermeister – Cup of Red Bull – When Lucas Lee gets on the rail, drop the shot glass into the Red Bull, and chug. If you don’t finish it by the time he’s KO’d, start over.
Todd Ingram – Fair Trade Blend with Soy Milk
– 1 shot of Vodka – 1 shot of Bailey’s – 1 shot of Kahlua – Mix in Silk Soy Milk. (Chocolate if you want it to look like Coffee)
Roxy Richter – The Sexy Phase
– 1/2 shot of Buttershots – 1/2 shot of Bailey’s
Ken and Kyle Katayanagi – The Twin Dragons
– 1 shot Momokawa Diamond – 1 shot Momokawa Pearl – Layer the 2 in a double shot glass.
Gideon Gordon Graves – GGG Bomb
– 1/2 shot Grey Goose Vodka
Coke Zero
– For a non-alcoholic Scott Pilgrim-themed beverage and/or post-ex dominating hydration
Food
– Garlic bread
Post-Movie Game
– Follow up with some all night Rock Band – Any version for Xbox, PS3, or Wii – Rock Band 2 “No Fail” is probably your best bet for fun after your college level beverages – Attire Video game-themed T-shirts encouraged
THE CLASSIC: STAR TREK PARTY
Essentials
– TV show/movies muted in background – Soundtracks playing – Klingon Conversation – Star Trek Trivial Pursuit
Drinks
– Samarian Sunset – Fruity beverage of your choice – Aldebaran Whiskey – Whiskey – Green Liquid – Romulan Ale – Equal parts vodka, triple sec, blue curacao, and lemonade – Klingon Blood Wine – 1 oz gold tequila – 1 oz spiced rum – 1 dash grenadine syrup – 2 dashes Tabasco sauce – Cranberry juice – Luckily, Vulcans are impervious to alcohol – Attire Trekkie costumes a must
Now go on and geek out your college glory days like a pro. And remember if at first you don’t succeed; call it version 1.0.
In today’s economy, employers pay more attention to the degree you get than ever before. At Best Degree Programs, we decided to take a look at 10 common degrees that aren’t likely to get you an interview.
Hey, high school seniors hoping to major in Latin – think again! While you probably shouldn’t choose a college major based on what’s likely to make you the most money, you should think long and hard about getting a degree that’ll be sure to get your resume tossed into the nearest wastebasket.
The fact is that 31% of recent grads haven’t found a job six months after graduation. That’s the economy we live in. Now more than ever it’s important to choose a degree that improves your chances of getting noticed and getting hired.
The worst degree to get at the current time is, somewhat surprisingly, architecture. 13.9% of recent architecture graduates unemployed. This makes sense given the massive slow down in construction.
The next set of bad majors is anything that falls under the Humanities or Liberal Arts banner. Latin, Theology, English Literature.
After the humanities, you have the social sciences. Majors like American Studies, Political Science, Sociology and even Economics.
The last type of bad degree for getting a job on our list is the arts. Things like Poetry, Art History, Music Therapy and even something as bizarre as Puppetry (yes, this is a real major).
Ok. So what are some good degrees? Right now you can’t go wrong with either Education or Health. Graduates with degrees in those two disciplines are clearly the best positioned for employment. However, there are plenty of other relatively safe majors: engineering, sciences, computers and IT, business, psychology, social work and media and communications are a few examples.
Much like running a corporation, running for president is an expensive and time-consuming undertaking. Just like a corporation, a campaign involves employees, money management, public relations, advertising and the selling of a product or service. Which in this case is the person running for office. In this graphic, we take a look at just what all it takes to run for president, and how big of a business doing so has become.
Like all businesses, you have better success in some states than others. Below is a look at how effective each candidate has been state by state in fundraising.
One can get a pretty good idea of whose backing a candidate, and who the candidate is courting by how much the average contribution is to their campaign. In this section we break down the average size of campaign contributions to each candidate.
On top of the candidates’ campaigns, money is also raised and spent by the national committees and super PACs. Combined, they have enough financial influence to drastically alter the political landscape without any involvement or say from the candidate themselves.
– National committees – DNC–$223.3m RNC–$323.1m – Super PACs with over $1 million
Republican
– Restore Our Future- $99,148,476 – American Crossroads – $56,122,197 – Americans for Prosperity – $30,800,720 – Winning Our Future – $17,003,038 – Crossroads GPS – $11,181,996 – Americans for Job Security – $8,228,539 – Red White and Blue Fund – $7,529,620 – American Future Fund – $7,137,617 – NRA Political Victory Fund – $5,635,140 – Republican Jewish Coalition – $4,569,320 – Ending Spending Action Fund – $4,463,307 – Make Us Great Again – $3,959,824 – Endorse Liberty – $3,417,567 – Our Destiny – $2,804,234 – Conservative Majority Fund – $2,646,716 – The Next Generation – $1,601,338 – Susan B Anthony List – $1,575,251 – Total – $273,645,942
Democrats
– Priorities USA Action – $53,995,734 – SEIU – $3,836,001 – Planned Parenthood Votes – $3,808,435 – Florida Freedom PAC – $2,814,654 – AFSCME – $2,569,317 – Workers’ Voice – $1,682,583 – League of Conservation Voters – $1,135,369 – Moveon.Org Political Action – $1,042,776 – Total – $70,884,869
How they spend their funds
With budgets bordering a mega-corporation, it’s no surprise that presidential campaigns spend their haul in as many places with the most impact as possible. Below is a look at just where all that “hard earned” money ends up.
*Includes funds from candidates, national parties and super PACs
If looking at these huge sums of cash being spent to become president got you wondering if something is out of whack, you would be correct. President Lincoln spent a total of $2.8 million adjusted for today to become president. Below is a look at just how out of hand election spending has become.
– 1860: Lincoln’s campaign spends $2.8 million in today’s dollars – 1896: McKinley vs. Bryan set a record for most expensive race that stood for over 60 years. – 1908: Taft vs. Bryan – 1932: FDR vs. Hoover – 1956: Eisenhower vs. Stephenson – 1960: Kennedy vs. Nixon – 1964: LBJ vs. Goldwater – 1968: Nixon vs. Humphrey vs. Wallace – 1972: Nixon vs. McGovern – 1976: Carter vs. Ford – 1980: Reagan vs. Carter – 1984: Reagan vs. Mondale – 1988: Bush vs. Dukakis – 1992: Clinton vs. Bush vs. Perot – 1996: Clinton vs. Dole – 2000: Bush vs. Gore – 2004: Bush vs. Kerry – 2008: McCain vs. Obama
SOURCES
Federal Election Commission, Washington Post, New York Times, Mother Jones
Being a paralegal in today’s fast-paced world can be quite the challenge. For that matter, being a legal professional of any capacity today can be quite the calling. For those seeking to be and those already there, here are some amazingly useful iPhone apps, especially for legal professionals.
Fastcase is an intuitive, utilitarian app that provides users complete access to the Fastcase law research system and law library. Access is free and unlimited. Those needing to find and single-out cases, precedents, statutes, and other judicial events can find great use in Fastcase.
For all of the document and file-sharing that must take place within a typical law office, there is Dropbox. Dropbox is a complete file-sharing service, with members starting with 2GB of free, cloud, file storage. Whether it’s a video, picture, sound file, or document, Dropbox is simple, quick, and cost-effective.
Evernote is a great, all-around productivity app, perfect for the busy, legal professional. Create a note, write a to-do list, record a message, then share it with others or access it from other devices. Evernote provides a reliable share system and still continues to be a free app.
My Legal Projects, by West, provides a uniquely helpful case-by-case management system. Input your information and stay organized with everything you have going on within each and every case. In addition to personal organization, sharing case files with peers is easy and quick.
Have you ever felt like you could use a little extra help organizing a specific agenda for a conversation, a meeting, or other upcoming event? Agenda Maker is a great, digital assistant that organizes and helps you create and maintain agendas for just about anything. Color-code organization, calendar tools, brainstorm forums, and more await the serious agenda-maker.
Osborn’s Concise Law Dictionary is a complete digital resource for all terms relevant to English and European Law. Over 4,700 legal references as well as the intuitive browse and search system make Osborn’s a year-after-year winner with legal professionals of all kinds.
It is typically essential that the modern legal pro have an adequate document reading program. In addition to being a superb, consistently top-rated document reader, GoodReader provides advanced document annotation tools as well. Not much is left to be desired by this quality reader app for iPhone.
Attending meetings is not always easy for everyone to do. But with Citrix’s GoToMeeting, you can attend a meeting from anywhere via your iPhone. Schedule meetings, make changes, onscreen brainstorm with digital whiteboard, and much more with this complete, high-quality, on-the-go meeting app.
Time-tracking can be really tough to accomplish when there is so much more to get done simultaneously. With Minibooks for Freshbooks, manage clients, time-track individual actions, invoice, and more. Anyone looking for a more organized approach to the finite details of billing and costs, this app is great.
MobiTech 3000 LLC created a real hit with its JotNot Scanner Pro app. Install this app and enjoy the ability to endlessly scan and upload documents in PDF format. Scanning is done via the iPhone camera hardware and is remarkably clear and convenient.
Regardless of the subject you happen be studying, some of your professors are bound to make its instruction an uninspiring and lackluster experience. On the other hand, such mediocre teachings will often be made up for by those brilliant professors who will improve your quality of life for years to come. Great instructors affect us in all kinds of ways: some encourage us to achieve amazing things; others set a good example for their students. Then there are those profs who are just so cool that you can’t help but like them. We list the 10 most impressive college professors in movie history – the ones you always wished you had!
Stranger Than Fiction was a forgettable 2006 comedy whose only distinguishing features were its premise (a man hears a voice inside his head and realizes that his life is actually a novel being written by a famous author), Will Ferrell’s abortive attempt to do some serious acting, and Dustin Hoffman’s performance as university professor Julius Hilbert. Stern but highly passionate about his subject, Hilbert is the teacher that you wish you could have had in high school. But he’s not only knowledgeable about literature; he’s also so devoted to it that he believes Ferrell’s character should sacrifice his life to create the perfect ending to a story. You have to give him credit for taking his subject seriously.
Clint Eastwood’s aptly named Dr Hemlock isn’t just a normal professor; he’s a retired government assassin who is occasionally still called upon to eliminate enemies of the United States. In this intense 1975 thriller, he is sent to the Eiger in Switzerland to eliminate an enemy spy – an especially difficult task because of the high altitude conditions and his lack of knowledge of his enemy’s identity. Eastwood plays Hemlock with his normal mixture of steely ruthlessness and charm. While an unflappable secret agent with a passion for mountaineering might not necessarily make for the best college professor, at least he would lead some fun field trips.
The classic comedy Animal House features some colorful fraternity characters… and Professor Dave Jennings, one of the most memorable cases of institutional boredom ever depicted in the movies. As a left-wing English professor with a strong indifference to his job, his subject, and the university itself, he is the more down-to-earth foil to the other staff members’ megalomania and control freakery. He has a less than flattering view of John Milton: “He’s a little bit long winded, he doesn’t translate very well into our generation and his jokes are terrible.” The professor also smokes copious amounts of marijuana. Hardly surprising that he can relate to his students pretty well, then.
Professor Julius Kelp may be a skinny guy with a voice that could invite a wedgie from any school bully, but appearances aren’t everything. In fact, he’s a bit of a genius, and one whose insecurity about his looks and social ineptitude drives him to create a potion that totally transforms his appearance, personality and abilities. How many college professors can claim such a scientific breakthrough? And if that’s not cool enough, his alter-ego Buddy Love is every Rat Pack member distilled into one: Mr Hyde to his Dr. Jekyll, but with a super natty zoot suit and awesome cocktail-mixing skills.
Laurence Fishburne’s Professor Phipps is the highlight of Higher Learning. A radical Political Science tutor, he alone amongst the characters in the film makes a serious effort to break through his students’ prejudices and teach them to stop viewing the world through a lens of racism. His dedication to teaching his students to face the real world is also a total contrast to some of the more irresponsible entries on this list: “In the real world, no one wants to hear excuses or empty rhetoric. They want to know that you have a plan.” Now, if only more real world politicians would follow that advice…
In a role that echoes his famous performance in The Remains of the Day (released the same year), Anthony Hopkins stars as the lead in the romantic drama Shadowlands. The flick concerns writer and academic C.S. Lewis’ romance with Joy Gresham, a feisty American poet, in the 1950s. Lewis is portrayed as a quiet man, great with kids and easy to imagine as an effective teacher – not surprising, since he wrote some of the most popular children’s books of the 20th century. The culture clash between stuffy British academics and the more adventurous Americans may be a bit stereotypical, but Hopkins’ powerful performance and chemistry with fellow actor Debra Winger really manage to elevate this movie to a whole new level.
This tightly-choreographed movie about rival marching bands at an American university is an unusual take on the normal sporting movie formula. Dr. Lee, played by Orlando Jones, is a college professor and the mentor of a young freshman who joins the school on a band scholarship. The professor is completely devoted to the one thing that makes the university great: its students’ terrific drumming skills. A strict music lover with a steely gaze that could make The Terminator flinch, Lee is essentially the mentor character from every Hollywood sporting movie condensed into one. The fact that he happens to lead a marching band just means that his job takes even more guts.
George Romero’s zombie movies have a definite prejudice against authority figures, so it’s surprising to find his depiction of a university professor in Diary of the Dead so positive. Film Studies faculty adviser Andrew Maxwell may be a traumatized alcoholic, but he’s also a skilled war veteran with many weapons, and definitely someone you can rely on – whether you need help coping with final exams or fighting off hordes of the undead! No matter how crazy the situation, Maxwell takes it in stride, and his philosophical approach, ready supply of drink and occasional well-aimed arrows prove to be a match for anything – even a horde of ravenous zombies.
Possibly the scariest thing for a newly arriving student is a strict teacher, particularly one with a knack for breaking down his pupils and exposing their weaknesses to the world. In The Paper Chase, Charles Kingsfield is an incredibly intimidating Harvard law professor who rules his classes with an iron fist. But he certainly has style; witness his reaction to one of his students giving him cheek in class: “Here’s a dime. Call your mother and tell her that there’s serious doubt about your becoming a lawyer.” John Houseman was so terrifying in the role that he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance. Whatever else you can say about him, he’s definitely a teacher that gets results. After all, would you even dare turn a paper in late to this guy?
Here’s a professor so adored that some of his female students actually write messages on their faces about how much they love him. And who can blame them? If you were to choose your archaeology professor, wouldn’t you want one who spent most of his time actually investigating ancient ruins and artifacts, rather than just burying himself in a pile of books about them? Just think of the lectures Indiana Jones could give about the time he broke into the ancient temple, stole the idol from the altar and dodged the giant boulder on the way out. Not to mention that, being played by Harrison Ford, he obviously gains a massive amount of coolness kudos right off the bat.
