U.S.News & World Report Tumblelog

If you’re still looking for the perfect summer getaway, here are eight strategies to consider.

If you’re not certain what you want to study in college, use this time to research those that sound the most interesting to you. This may save you time and money once you get to college by avoiding the numerous major switches that can plague undergrads.

2. Learn another job. It’s an unfortunate fact that many corporations in the throes of restructuring won’t think twice about piling additional work on the employees who survive the layoff rounds. So knowing how to fill more than one position in your office can be a surefire way of getting a survivors’ edge.

But avoiding dairy also comes with a warning. “There are compounds in plants that bind to calcium and prevent you from absorbing it,” Anding says. “Although they’re good sources of calcium on paper, physiologically, the amount of calcium is not so great. Dairy calcium is biologically available, meaning you absorb what’s in the product.” The way around this, she adds, is to “make sure you’re varying your sources.” While nothing can undo the effects of these compounds, in general, vitamin D helps your body absorb calcium—so make sure you get enough of this, too. (The government recommends 15 micrograms of vitamin D per day.)

A blizzard of articles give advice about the best places to retire. They generally recommend fleeing the North and heading for the Sunbelt, to places in the Carolinas, Florida, or Arizona. Occasionally they offer a surprise retirement spot in Iowa or Indiana. Sometimes they even tout retirement locales outside the United States.

These articles rely on statistics such as the cost of living or winter temperatures. But they miss the most important thing—the human element. Here are the real best places to retire.

“There’s no bright-line test on sexual harassment since the courts—including the U.S. Supreme Court—have made it clear that it will depend on the frequency and severity of the conduct, whether the conduct is physically threatening or humiliating and whether the conduct interferes with the employee’s job performance,” says Paul O. Lopez, director and chair of the litigation department at law firm Tripp Scott.

Most English majors don’t go on to become novelists, and history majors don’t always become history teachers. Edwin Koc, who wrote the NACE report cited above, states in it that “the objective of a liberal education…is to prepare you broadly for the professional world so that you are prepared to undertake many jobs rather than to be trained to do a specific task.”

Tips from one man who spent 13 months in Venice telecommuting to his job in the States.

As Ron Czarnecki, a retired mattress salesman and author of the book Shop for Sleep and Survive the Bite, points out, “if you buy something online and have issues, you’re going to have a real problem resolving it because the cost of shipping a mattress back is prohibitive.” It’s much easier to return or exchange a mattress when you’re dealing with a brick-and-mortar store.

• MinutesPlease: On MinutesPlease, you can enter a website that you visit regularly and restrict the length of time you want to spend there before getting back to work.
• Quizlet: An online haven of study games and more than six million sets of flashcards, with subjects that range from German verbs to LSAT questions. The study material appears on virtual flashcards, with an option to have the content presented in the test-form or within a competitive game.
• Citation Machine: “The idea is to make citing sources so easy that students get in the habit of doing it in college and after they graduate.”

The scholarship was founded in 1902 upon the death of Cecil Rhodes—a British diamond magnate so wealthy he had an entire country named after him—as the first large-scale international academic exchange program. Its mission is simple but wide ranging: funding prestigious programs of study at Rhodes’s alma mater, University of Oxford, for qualified students from outside the United Kingdom. Each year, regional selection committees pick 32 Rhodes scholars from the United States from a field of around 1,000 applicants; there are 80 Rhodes scholars worldwide each year. Those selected receive tuition and living expenses for at least two years, with a third potentially available depending on programs of study.