"July 5, 2010 was the best day of my life!"

This was by far the best quote I heard during Welcome Week by an exuberant student walking into Snell Library. She saw the Library’s Welcome Week table that featured an announcement about 24 hour study in the Library, which we began offering on July 5. As staff volunteers, my colleagues and I were able to welcome students and visitors to their Library. It was a lot of fun and students asked so many sensible questions about the Library and getting around campus. Even President Aoun stopped by a couple of times. I would like to say to the student I quoted, “You’ve got it sister, and we have your back.” The Library is YOUR library and we are here to provide research assistance and to stimulate learning and exploration. 24 hours started because the student body spoke up. We want you to succeed in your academic pursuit and we have an abundance of resources, tools and experts to help you along! In addition to being open to students, faculty and staff all hours around the clock, we have text-a-librarian, consult with a librarian, and faculty can request an instruction session led by a librarian for your class.  We also have many new resources such as American Periodicals Series and mobile apps for research databases. Wishing you the best at the start of the fall term!

Time to Resume Writing Resumes

So it’s Fall 2010; some of us are back from Co-op, some of us fresh off a great summer… The unfortunate ones like me are in class again after having summer classes. The one thing that joins us all together: WE NEED MONEY! I remember hearing before summer started that unemployment figures for the 16-20 age group reached worse-than-Great Depression levels. What that meant was less summer jobs, less party money, and just less fun for all of us students. One of the easiest ways to combat the recession, stay employed, and keep money coming in is to update your resume. Before college, I thought you just have one simple resume that you use for everything and update as you go through life. If those of you reading this are like, well I still think that… you are WRONG. The reality is that your resume should be specifically tailored toward the job you’re applying for, with certain previous experiences and skills highlighted or left out accordingly. It can take a lot of effort and a lot of guesswork to really shine through to employers, but it is the most crucial step to getting an interview or a job. Luckily, Northeastern knows that jobs during and after college are just as important as the education you receive. Hence the co-op program, and hence Career Services walk-in hours! Check out the Walk In Hours from 2pm-4pm Monday through Thursday in 202 Stearns Hall. Someone will be there to give you a 10-15 minute session reviewing your resume. Check out other great resume resources at the Career Services page. And of course, don’t forget the resume help you can get from books in Snell Library!

This Week: Meet Authors John J. Siegfried, John Hollway

The Meet the Author Series will kick off this Tuesday, September 14th, with John J. Siegfried. He will be speaking on Better Living through Economics, which he edited. The book is a study of how economic reforms over the past fifty years have helped to raise the standard of living in America and to make the country prosperous. The event will be co-sponsored by the Department of Economics and the NU Bookstore. The following day, Wednesday, September 15, will feature our second event, with another John, the journalist John Hollway. He will be discussing his book Killing Time, which he co-authored with Ronald M. Gauthier. The book describes the Death Row sentence of John Thompson, a black man convicted of killing a rich white man in New Orleans. Thompson insists he is innocent, and eventually two Philadelphia lawyers step in to the case, ultimately proving his innocence. This event is co-sponsored by the NU School of Law, the NU Bookstore, and NU Phi Alpha Delta. Both Better Living through Economics and Killing Time will take place in 90 Snell Library at noon. The third John featured this week will be John Coltrane, whose annual memorial concert takes place this Saturday. Before the concert, on Thursday the 16th from 6:00-8:00 pm in the Amilcar Cabral Center of the NU African American Institute, the Library is co-sponsoring a symposium and book-signing for the recent release of John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music. Unfortunately, John Coltrane himself, who has been dead for some forty-three years, will not be making it to these events. Yet this is a great opportunity to hear a panel of Coltrane experts moderated by NU music professor and jazz composer Leonard Brown, who organized the concert and edited the book. The talks are free and open to the public and refreshments will be served. For further questions about any of these events, please contact Maria Carpenter at m.carpenter@neu.edu. For campus directions, click here.

Friday five on the brain

Today’s Friday Five starts with the mind. Specifically, the hottest article in this week’s Times, judging by the number of times emailed, debunked common myths about studying. Based on a review article in Psychological Science, it says there are no “left-brain” and “right-brain” learning styles, we all basically learn the same way!    Furthermore, you should study a mix of different things and not immerse yourself in one thing according to a study of college students and retired people in the Journal of Psychology and Aging.  Other studies say you should study in different rooms not just sit in one place because changes of scene and environment help you to remember.  Finally, spacing your studying, and testing, help you remember better over the long term. Ready to blame the teacher?  Turns out that’s hard, we don’t really know scientifically what makes a teacher successful at getting kids to learn, according to Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book “Why Don’t Students Like School?” (available on the 3rd floor of Snell Library!) Finally, an MRI scan can map brain development in children, according to research in the journal Science.  It could allow doctors to place children on a “maturation curve” just like we do with height and weight and perhaps even be alerted to signs of disorders.

Affordable Textbooks? You Have Options!

According to this New York Times article, college students spend between $700 and $1000 per year on textbooks. Yikes! I was an English major in college, so I was lucky to be able to find at the library many of the works we studied. But for those gen ed courses, it killed me to have to spend as much as $50 for a textbook at the bookstore (I know, it seems like nothing now…), especially since I knew I wouldn’t want to keep the book and would be lucky if I could get a third of its value back by selling it back to the bookstore afterward. At the beginning of each semester, students swarm to the Research Assistance desk for help finding copies of their textbooks in the library. Sometimes they luck out, often with a slightly older edition, but we don’t generally purchase textbooks for our collection because a new edition comes out each year, and, well, they’re expensive. Given the choice between spending $200 on a textbook that might be used by one class, for one semester, and putting that money towards, say, an online resource that would be used by the entire campus, you can see why we usually don’t choose the textbook. (We do always ask faculty to consider putting copies of their textbooks on reserve, though! Here’s our full policy on textbooks.) The textbook publishing industry thrives on producing a new edition every year, and encouraging professors to adopt that new edition for classroom use instead of the older edition that’s often nearly identical. Until very recently, publishers reaped huge profits by bundling what are called “ancillary materials” with textbooks — you know, the CDs, the study guides, the stuff you often don’t use. They packaged that stuff with the textbooks in order to justify charging a much higher price than the book alone would cost. However, in July 2010, a bill introduced to the Senate in 2007, Senator Dick Durbin’s College Textbook Affordability Act, finally went into effect. Among other things, it requires publishers to offer for sale just the textbook, as well as the “bundled” version with all the other stuff included. If you don’t see a non-bundled version of a textbook for sale at the bookstore, talk to your professor! After all, even though the publishers are now required to offer them for sale, you can bet they’re still marketing the bundled versions to faculty. You can also check out sites that allow you to rent textbooks by the semester or shorter periods of time — they’re kind of like Netflix for textbooks. That NYT article linked above will point you towards some of these sites. I haven’t had any personal experience using them, so I can’t vouch for them, but I hear good things. There are also growing collections of free online textbooks — take a look at this list of provider sites. Our own mathematics professor David Massey has even written a free online calculus textbook! Interested in getting involved in the movement for affordable textbooks? Try starting here.