One thing I’m always looking for is some extra money to supplement what I am making, and Dawn at Frugal for Life highlights a few of the legit online survey sites. I always had good luck with Greenfield Online, but am not familiar with the other ones she listed. But who can turn an extra $5-10? Not me! Check out the website here. It could pay for your bluebook!

One of the hardest things for me about my grad school application was rounding up all of those recommendation letters. Tara Kuther at About.com offers a few tips on how to go about getting them:

Learn about letters of recommendation – what they are, who writes them, and how to prepare – early in your college career, well before it is time to apply to graduate school.

Seek experiences that will help you develop relationships with faculty that will get you excellent letters.

Understand that admissions committees seek letters from specific types of professionals

You can read the rest of her article here, on the About.com Grad School Guide.

JD, from Get Rich Slowly, recently wrote about the effect of money on friendships. A grad student is generally on a budget, while sometimes their friends have started their careers and are making enough to go out for fun.

Here are a few of JD’s suggestions:

Suggest low- or no-cost alternatives. Bike or run together. Go hiking. Kick a soccer ball around. Organize a picnic or a mother-daughter tea party. Play hearts or bridge or Settlers of Catan. A one-time investment in a board game or a deck of cards can be a cost-effective source of entertainment. If your friends want to go to a movie, suggest a matinee. If they want to dine out, name a restaurant you know you can afford. (Better yet, suggest a potluck.)

Budget for social spending. If your circle of friends makes a regular habit of a specific activity, consider building the expense into your budget so it won’t catch you by surprise. If your girlfriends go out for happy hour on the first Thursday of every month, for example, set aside $20 for the occasion. This may, of course, require sacrifices to other parts of your budget.

Check out the rest of the article here. He also includes links on the same topic.

My professors often sent out large PDF readings for us to read/study for our courses. Enter BookletCreator. Not only does it help you organize your PDF into a booklet, it also saves paper! Just upload your file, and get it back in a book-like format. See some screenshots at MakeUseOf.

Like I’ve said before, scheduling those group projects can be a pain in the butt. Timebridge takes some of the guess work out of this by letting people suggest times to meet up according to your schedule. I would probably use this app, but not put my entire REAL schedule…just the school related one. My group mates don’t need to know where I am 24/7, but it does make it easy to see who has what class when and such. Visit Timebridge here.

Scribd is a website that allows you to upload and post documents on the internet, and allows them to be viewed in their viewer iPaper.

One of the bonuses of Scribd is that it offers unlimited storage and supports all major document formats (pdfs, docs, excel, etc). The documents can be embedded in any website, and can also be shown to other Scribd users so you can receive feedback.

Check it out here.

If you have ever wondered what the journey through grad school applications was like, just ask Marc Dotson. The former University Journal Editor-in-Chief has been blogging his experiences on the Southern Utah University newspaper’s website since May 2007, and recently received acceptance letters to both the school he thought he wouldn’t make it into, and his safety school To read more about his adventures in applications, click here.

Website Empressr allows you to create a presentation on the web that can be embedded in your blog, webpage, or anywhere else you want it to be really. Right now Empressr is in its beta form, registration and the hosting of your presentation is currently free. This is a good alternative to paying for Powerpoint, and since it is loaded on the web, you’ll never have one of those embarrassing “Why won’t my presentation load on the classroom computer?” moments. Learn a little bit more about Empressr above.

Personal finance blog The Simple Dollar is one of my favorites, and Trent delivered a great article on how to save money in college. The amount of income you get in grad school is very similar in college, so I thought I would share the main points:

1. Take studies seriously–you are paying so much for school, that screwing around will be wasting your education.
2. Take advantage of other opportunities–join in on activities that will help build your resume.
3. Live as poor as you can–the less you spend, the less money you will owe later.
4. Use a credit card only for buying books, and pay the bill immediately–then you get the benefit of using a card, but not the debt.
5. Seek a job related to your major, even if they pay is low–my unpaid internship is what got me a job at a newspaper, which is what got me the job at the publishing company. Never underestimate the experience you will get!
6. Minimize your debt–debt will only hurt your future instead of help it.

Read the full article here.

Downloadable Firefox toolbar 8aweek tracks your wasted hours on the computer and tells you where you spent them. I always have trouble taking a "few minutes" to surf the net while I’m writing, and then a few minutes turn into an hour…you know the drill. Procrastination is not my friend! Once you figure what websites you are wasting your time on, you can block them with the toolbar, and set a timer where you can only spend a set amount of time on that particular site.

Source: MakeUseOf