Saving Money on Textbooks: Rent Them!

There's one thing that almost all college students have in common: we're all poor. We've sent all our money paying our tuition for the semester. So of course we're always looking for ways to cut costs and save a few (or more than a few) bucks.

 

Besides tuition, the main sapper of money from a college student's pocket is textbooks. They're expensive! The average science textbook often costs $150 or more! And let's not even talk about those unlucky semesters where you happen to have more than 1 science class. So I've seen a few advertisements for CampusBookRentals.com and decided to look them up today. I must say, I was a little more than pleasantly surprised. I looked up a pretty popular Chemistry book (ISBN 013601976 if you want to look it up) to compare the purchase price to the rental price. The price to buy was $172, pretty steep for a book you're probably only going to use one semester. A looked at the price to rent the same book and was floored. Only $28, an over 80% decrease from the purchase price! I looked up a few more books, including several I'm going to need for classes next semester. Same thing!

Okay, I know, I know. Why should you rent a book when you can buy it, right? Well think about it for a second. You buy a book for almost $200, use it one semester and sell it back for less than 10% of the original price. But if you rent from CampusBookRentals.com, it's a ton cheaper and shipping is even paid both ways! So tell me honestly, what reason do you have not to rent your books? I know how I'm getting my textbooks next semester and I strongly advise you do the same. Then maybe there'll be a few less "poor college students".

My Shameless Plug for the Day

Everybody's gotta give themselves a plug sometimes, and this is my one plug for today (and probably forever on this blog. Don't want a blog of plugs). I also right another blog called Flights of Fantasy. It's a science fiction/fantasy blog where 2 other writers and myself review various sci-fi/fantasy shows, books and movies. It's decently popular, 21,000+ views and on the first page of the search engines if you search "Flights of Fantasy". There's a link below, and also a permanent link in the sidebar. So if you happen to be a fan of any of those, give it a look sometime! Heck, even if you not a fan, just browse around. Maybe you'll find something interesting to read.

Flights of Fantasy

App Idea: Greek Database

It'll eventually be on iPhone and Android

I've been doing some programming practice over the last few weeks in my free time, and have been trying to come up with a few ideas for some apps. Then it hit me. Make an app that is a database of every fraternity/sorority officer at every school around the country. At first I was thinking, "Dang, that'd be impossible." But I think I may have come up with a way it could work.

First off, the app would start out as iPhone only. I only have experience in C-based languages (not that it means anything to most people) so I have no knowledge of how to program on Android...yet. Anyway, the whole database would be user-maintained. I personally don't have the time or resources to call every single chapter at every school and get their officer data. So instead, have the users enter their data. The people at each chapter obviously know who their officers are. So they enter their chapter's data, which then updates a database that I've created online. Then every person who owns the app gets the same data pulled to their phone when they start the app the next time. 

Think of it! If advertised correctly and widely adopted, the potential is staggering. Need to call your chapter and XYZ School. Before, you'd have to search online, hoping they had a site and that it was properly updated. But with this, you'd just pull it up right on your phone, and even make the call right out of the app! 

The only problem is the possibility that no one in a chapter has an iOS device (iPod Touch counts too). So really, once the iPhone version is working, I'd have to learn Java double-quick to get an Android version working because the more people that have it, the better it'll work.

That's my idea. Tell me what you think!

Fraternity Work over the Summer

Fraternity work never ends, even over the summer. Especially for exec member, there's always something you can be doing. At the moment, our chapter is in full recruitment mode, hosting events and contacting PNMs (Potential New Members). In fact, I can bet that every other fraternity around the country is doing the same thing.

It's the other things that you normally don't think about that you could be working on. For instance, our exec is going to be starting an examination of our chapter's bylaws next week. Most people don't even think about that. If you don't update your bylaws regularly, and actually read through them to make sure that everything is still relevant, you can end up with rules that no longer help.

Other things to do: party planning and risk management planning. It's never too early to plan out your parties for the semester. Themes, times, locations, the earlier you have all these things in mind, the earlier you can get money ready and get the word out. Think, if you have people talking about your first 3 parties 3 weeks before you even get back in class, you have a HUGE leg up on the fraternities that wait to plan until they get back to school. Now with risk management, there's always something that we do as fraternity men, that is risky or dangerous. Some could even result in our chapter or general fraternity getting sued. And trust me, getting sued sucks for everyone. Even if the general fraternity settles out of court, all the chapters around the country are stuck paying off the bill for years to come. Hense risk management planning. If you can mitigate the risks as much as possible, there's less that can go wrong and less that you can get sued for.

So, moral of the story, it may be summer, but if you're in a fraternity, be prepared to work. It is the summer, so take it easy, relax and be with family (if that's what you want to do). But if you get a call asking you to do something for your fraternity (or sorority actually), don't complain, just help out. Because trust me, the exec has enough work to do already.

Delta Gamma Anchor Splash

Anyone who's Greek and been at a school with a Delta Gamma chapter knows that every year, they hold a philanthropy event called Anchor Splash. The basic event is a few swimming events, with a synchronized swimming dancing event at most schools. Well at Southern Miss, the girls perform the synchronized swimming dance, but the guys perform in a different event the day before, called King Neptune. Basically, each fraternity puts together a dance from scratch, practices, and performs it on stage in front of all the fraternities and sororities. Massively stressful!

So, the past week and a half, we've been putting the dance together. Two days ago, we had it down pretty well, but we found out that one of the people doing the dance has to work now. But that's not the worst! Another one of the dancers got sick, making him unable to dance. Fortunately, we had two backups. Unfortunately, one of them is me. So, for the past two days, we've had to practice a huge amount to get myself and the other alternate fully caught up. It's been hectic and stressful, to say the least. But we finally got the dance fully down at midnight.

Oh, but of course that's not the end of the problems. We're starting off with I'm On A Boat, the remixing into another song. If you've ever heard I'm On A Boat, you know there's a lot of cursing. Even the clean version isn't fully censored. So I went through and censored it myself, because the Dee Gee Music Director asked us to. But tonight, the night before the dance, they tell us that we need to change it because even censored, it's too offensive. Now, if they had told us this days ago, or even on Sunday, we could've modified the dance to a new song. Instead, we had to jury-rig a replacement to that section. Here's what we did.

We took the instrumental version of I'm On A Boat, and then recorded our own words over the top, with new lyrics and stuff. This way, there's no way they can say it's offensive, because there are no offensive words. But it took until 1 AM to do, hence the timing of this post.
Well, I'm off to bed. Tell how it goes tomorrow after we get up there and embarrass the hell out of ourselves. :-D Peace!

Sporadic Posting

Ah, the fraternity life. That, in addition to school and ROTC, takes up pretty much all of my time. I usually have a little bit of time left over, and that is often devoted to unwinding through video games, TV, or writing on Flights of Fantasy. In fact, I tend to post a lot more on Flights. It's possibly because I'm working with 2 other people on that site, trying to turn it into a pretty decent science fiction/fantasy review site. But it's also probably because I just can't think of fraternity stuff to write about. I mean, do you really want to hear about the practices we're having, and parties we're planning. Maybe, maybe not. From now on, it'll be up to you to decide. I'll post what's going on, and if you read it, you read it. Fair? Okay, I'm gonna write one more quick post, then it's off to bed. I've got to do King Neptune tomorrow (explanation in the next post :-D). Peace!