Since the start of StudySuccessful.com, you have the ability to ask questions in the comments. But the questions I get are mostly questions about the topic I just wrote. Another option is writing an email, or contacting me on Twitter. This can become too personal maybe. These reasons are probably why I don’t get a lot of questions. And these reasons are probably why Chris and Kelly from HackCollege started DiscussCampus.

DiscussCampus is a site where you can post your college related questions. Anything. From coming out in your social circle to how you use Evernote for note-taking. You can give questions and answers +1′s if you like them, so they will rank higher on the ‘questions page’.

With answering questions, you can get points if people like your answer. This is the same with asking questions. You can also earn badges for certain acts (like having the first answer, a questions with 1k views etc).

I really like this service, basicly because I can answer people their questions over there. One of the reasons I started this blog is to help other people succeeding in their mission to survive college life and eventually becoming successful in college life. Having this mission, DiscussCampus is a great tool for me.

The other thing is that I can find topics over there to write about here. DiscussCampus makes a great resource.

So, head over to DiscussCampus, ask a couple of questions, answer a couple of them. When you reach 1000 reputation points, you will get a cool laptop cover, so start participating.

I don’t get paid in any form for this review, I am just honestly excited about this service!

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!

It has been more than 6 months now since I’ve had the HP bundle to review. I’ve done some reviews in the beginning of the giveaway and I am going to do the last one now.

The HP Pavilion dv6
What a machine. It works perfect for me. It’s big, it has muscles and it keeps going all the time. I almost never shut down my laptop, I always put it to sleep only, and it still works great. I haven’t been testing out any great games, basicly because I just don’t have the time and money for those games, but it has the potential to carry some great titles. I love the HDMi port, when I’ve plugged my laptop on the HD tv of my parents it was fantastic.

Furthermore, the dv6 came with 500gb hard drive, which is awesome of course, 4gb RAM, which makes it super fast and with Windows Vista. I think I’m going to upgrade to Windows 7, since all the great stories I’ve heard about it, but this works out fine too!

The HP Mini 110
In the beginning I said it was a sweet little thingy. And it still is. It has everything you expect from a netbook, and it misses everything all the other netbooks miss. It doesn’t have a cd-player and it doesn’t have a big intern memory. Although, it does have a big uptime (around 5-6 hours) and it is sooo lightweighted. I love it.

TimBuk2 backpack
Before I got the TimBuk2 backpack, I’ve never heard about them. Shame on me, obvious. TimBuk2 is great. The backpack I have is great, it is big, it has a seperate place for my laptop and it works out great. I’m travelling 2 times a week by train for around 3 hours, I always take the TimBuk2 bag, it can carry everything, including both the laptops and it takes me everywhere!

For students
Alright, this is great, but you want to know what it means for you of course. Well, I love the complete pack. I think it is a great bundle together. I use the netbook to make notes in class. You can just carry it in your bag (I think the TimBuk2 bag is too big to bring to class) and you can get it out really quick. It has an uptime for around 6 hours, so you won’t have any problems with failing batteries. The dv6 is the wonderful machine which stays home, ready to rock when you are back at your dorm room. It has all the power you need there, while you have the mobility with the mini 110. The backpack is wonderful for travelling to your parents’ and back.

To conclude, a great bundle. A great set of machines to use when you are a student. Thanks again to HP for supplying this great stuff!

If you have something which may be interesting to review, please contact me, maybe we can arrange something, I would love to help you out!

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!

In the last post (the case study about public transport) I mentioned iPod Studying. If you didn’t read the iPod Studying article, I will give you a little summary:

1. Make a summary of what you need to learn.
2. Record your own voice with summaries of what you have to learn.
3. Play the recording whenever you have a spare minute, so you can go over the material you need to learn over and over again.

This will give you a thing to do in the couple of minutes you wait on the bus, when you are early for class or when you are cooking. But what I think is even better to kill those lonely minutes, are audio books. They don’t require the effort you need to put in recording everything and you still get smarter! You can download a lot of self-improvement audiobooks or audiobooks on whatever you are studying! And if you aren’t in college anymore, or you just don’t want to study, you can listen to fiction. My girlfriend loved listening the Twilight series and I think she isn’t the only one.

Why are audiobooks so great?
I just make a claim here, audiobooks rock. There are a couple of reasons for this statement.

1. You don’t need a big backpack. Probably the biggest advantage of audiobooks over hard cover books is that audiobooks don’t require big backpacks. You can just put them on your iPod and you are off to go! Just get your iPod out of your pocket, put those ears in, and listen.
2. Cheaper than books. $7,99 for an audiobook is a price you will never pay for a brand new hard cover book! Knowledge is valuable, that is why books are that expensive, audiobooks don’t need to be produced, they are just a file, that means you are only paying for the content, you are only paying for what you want!
3. It is easy! Audible.com makes downloading audiobooks easy. What Amazon.com was for hard cover books, is Audible.com for audiobooks. You can register easy and start downloading easy.

Not sure what you want to do yet? Download an audiobook for free! You can download any audiobook for 1 credit and you can check out if you like the concept of audiobooks. It’s free, why shouldn’t you try it? Try Audible Now and Get A Free Audiobook Download with a 14 Day Trial. Choose from over 60,000 Titles.

Need to kill a couple of minutes in the train, or in line at the mall? Listen an audiobook. Have fun listening!

Disclaimer: Yes, the links I gave you are affiliate links. And I want to be honest with you guys, if you sign up for a program I get a commission. This doesn’t mean I am in here for the money. I am genuine a fan of audiobooks, love it. So, yes, I am gonna get money when you sign up, hope it will encourage you to sign up instead of scare you!

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!

You have probably noticed the todoodlist ad in the corner before, it has been there for a long time. But I am finally going to tell you what the todoodlist is about! The Todoodlist is a book, written by Nick Cernis. The title page of the book itself says: ‘A simple book about falling in love with paper, simplifying your life, and following your dreams.’ Pretty sweet, gives yourself a good feeling already!

It contains

• Part one. Nick wrote seven short essays which will make you think about the need to abandon complexity. It contains ‘Zen Kitten in a Box’ and ‘Einstein Shaving.’ In this part, you will understand why you need this book!
• Part two you will get to know the five paper systems of productivity. These five replace the electronic stuff you have and they will simplify your life. These five are: the Todoodlist, the Sudoku Calender, the Tagbook, Glyphies (great shorthands) and the Banana Reminder.
• Part three. You get a five-step system to identify and reduce complexity in your life. If you implement these steps, you get more hours in your day and less stress.
• A wonderful book. Even if you are not about productivity, this book is great. It is written in a really easy way, with a lot of (sometime a little bit strange) jokes. Fun to read and maybe even wonderful to read. The lay-out helps here, it is just cute.

My opinion.

To be fair, no I didn’t implement everything Nick described. Or course not. But I did implement a couple of things. The Todoodlist works great, I think better than normal to do lists. I didn’t had that much stuff going on for a sudoku calendar, while I think it is a good system. I also read the book in the holidays, so there wasn’t going on that much anyway. It helps me now though, now school started again.

The techniques Nick described are focussed on business people. Although, I think we, college kids, can use these system also. You don’t need cool devices always to get productive. Actually, you can do a lot with paper only. Read the Todoodlist, buy a moleskine and get going!

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!

Well well, there is a winner! The number of submissions were above all my expectations, thanks you all! I have selected the top5 of submissions, by giving value to your stories. I gave a mark from 0-10 for the story, a mark from 0-5 for the tips and one more point if you had tweeted about it. I ended up with 5 entries, I gave them a number (from 1 till 5) and put it in Random.org. The winner there was number one, which equals: Nick Daniels from New Zealand.

I am going to publish what he wrote here, so you can all see why he was one of the last five. It is a long story, but worth reading it!

“This story of cooperation hails back about 10 years to my days at University. It is part confession, part life-lesson, part advice. I studied Computer Science at university. So did 3 of my closest friends. We had the same classes, the same lectures, the same coursework, the same everything. We studied together at university, hung out together out of school and partied together both inside and outside of school. None of this is bad, but the fact that we were all arrogant smartasses was. We were rude to just about everyone and so tight-knit that anyone that did want to get to know us, couldn’t.

Our Database Design paper had a ‘team project’ component to it. There was a minimum of 6 people required for each team for the work to be accepted. There were only 4 of us and suddenly the joke was on us. No one wanted to be in our group due to the collective personality disorder that the 4 of us seemed to share when we were together.  Once all the other students had picked their teams, the 4 of us were left standing by ourselves, not knowing what to do next. Our lecture, whether out of pity or favour, assigned ‘Jeff’ to our group and told us quietly that 5 people would suffice for our team. In an act of both stupidity and ungratefulness we all complained to each other that ‘its BS, we cant work with him’. We didn’t seem him for the blessing he would turn out to be.

We didn’t have anything against Jeff as such. He was about 15 years older than us, always had a smile on his face, always greeted us with a pleasant ‘hello’, but unfortunately that seemed to be about the limit of his English. Jeff was from China and his grasp of the English language was pretty poor. We all set out one night to meet at my house to begin our team project. The 4 of us met up at my house and we were waiting for Jeff to turn up before beginning. When the door knocked, everyone seemed to let out a collective groan of dismay at the fact of having to try and communicate with Jeff for the next few hours.

Things were going well (or so it seemed) and we were having some good discussion about our project and some concepts for it. Well the 4 of us were… I began to notice that every time Jeff tried to speak up with an idea, one of our colleagues ‘Robbo’ would make a blatant effort to speak over the top of him. I can only surmise that he did this to halt Jeff from trying to speak his ideas in a slooooow drawl of pigeon English in a heavy Chinese accent. Jeff would speak, Robbo would interrupt, Jeff would speak, Robbo would interrupt. It was like a terrible game of verbal tennis. Each time he was interrupted, Jeff’s face would get redder and redder and redder. Finally the inevitable happened and Jeff unleashed a very loud torrent of what I assume were Chinese insults and swearwords at Robbo. All our jaws dropped in amazement and Jeff started to cry.

It was pretty unpleasant having an older guy who we didn’t really know, crying in my house. It was pretty embarrassing for me and I dare say Jeff was pretty hurt. I took him aside for a quiet word and asked him ‘what was wrong’. Pretty stupid question in hindsight, as it was pretty obvious why he was upset. What Jeff told me though, blew my socks off. All the time he was trying to speak, he was trying to tell us that his spoken English was very poor, but his written was excellent. Jeff suggested that whilst we continue to discuss our project, he will write down his responses and input for our perusal. We spoke, he wrote and it all seemed to come together nicely. The night ended with Jeff and Robbo shaking hands and all 5 of us happy that we had completed the bulk of our design work.

Marking time came for the assignment and we got a B for our paper. Not brilliant, but for us 4 ratbags this was a pretty good result. Jeff was a bit disappointed as he was used to getting higher marks but I think he realised that it was a good result considering the circumstances. That night all 5 of us went out to the pub for a beer. Jeff even cracked a couple of jokes in English that he had been practicing.

So, what lessons can be learned from all of this? Don’t judge something solely on its weakness alone. Whilst it seemed Jeff had nothing to say, this was far from true. He just couldn’t say it in the same way we did. There is strength within everyone and once you identify it, you will often find that your weakness compliments their strength and vice versa.

Working as a team also requires patience. Everyone has different opinions and different means of applying themselves. Sometimes these quirks might annoy you and drive a wedge between your team members. Apply patience and realise that people are different. The benefits of working as a team are that each person can contribute in their own ways to form a collective that is better than the individual. Sounds a bit like communism, but I’m saying this from experience.

The 4 of us all seemed to wise-up to the fact that being a smart alec will get you nowhere with other people and we all started to be nicer to everyone. Our grades improved too. We saw Jeff around University a bit following this project. He always smiled when he saw us. Cheers Jeff, I hope you are doing well in life mate.”

So, that is Nick his story. There were more stories, a lot of cool stories I really enjoyed reading. With all the tips you have sent me I can really put some cool posts together. Thanks again. I hope you’ve all liked the contest and I hope you may return to StudySuccessful sometime. If you have any questions, regarding to the contest or not, don’t hesitate to send them to author@studysuccessful.com!

This giveaway is over for StudySuccessful.com, but isn’t over for HP! There are still 21 websites who are running this contest! Good luck over there guys!

• Gear Live (16-20 Aug)
• CampusGrotto (17-21 Aug)
• Poorer Than You (18-22 Aug)
• Notebooks (19-23 Aug)
• ThePrereq. (20-24 Aug)
• Hack College (21-25 Aug)
• College Times (22-26 Aug)
• OSNN.net (23-27 Aug)
• Green Panda Treehouse (24-28 Aug)
• Building Camelot (25-29 Aug)
• Mocha Dad (26-30 Aug)
• College Candy (27-31 Aug)
• Studenomics (28 Aug – 1 Sep)
• The 2.0 Life (29 Aug – 2 Sep)
• Geeks Room (30 Aug – 3 Sep)
• Debt Free Scholar (31 Aug – 4 Sep)
• One Day One Job (1-5 Sep)
• Daddy Forever (2-6 Sep)
• Clinton Fitch (3-7 Sep)
• Zen College Life (4-8 Sep)
• Gear Diary (5-9 Sep)

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!

I am really excited to announce that StudySuccessful is into a program from Ivy Worldwide, HP and Microsoft. I am going to review a notebook, a netbook, synch software and a backpack on this site! And it gets even better, I can give away that package to you, my readers!

What am I going to review?

I haven’t recieved the package yet, but I do already know what I am going to review.

• The HP dv6. A powerfull notebook, with pretty much cool stuff. Like a blu-ray, light sribe and even fingerprint reader. More about all of that later.
• The HP Mini 110. A small netbook. Which I can carry all the time, so small that I can carry it in my backpack. I will come with cool stuff about this later.
• Syncables software. With this software, I can synch the mini to the big one all the time, if I understood it correct, with one push on a button!
• A great TimBuk2 backpack! How can you carry all that stuff without a great backpack, TimBuk2 will deliver what you need with carrying!

So of course, I am super excited to review all this stuff! But there is more. I can give you some good deals in the near future and the best part: I can run a contest to give away this package. I want to make one thing clear, this is NOT the package I have here in the Netherlands, this is another package which I can give away! So brand new, never used and all! This package includes the hp dv6 and the Hp mini 110 and a for StudySuccessful.com customized backpack! Should be pretty awesome!

I am not sure about the contest yet, but it is going to be cool, I am sure about that.

I am not the only one in this project, there are 24 bloggers more who are running this giveaway! Here is a list with all the blogs and when they are running the contests! (Yes, you can enter every contest on this list. No, you can only win one package!)

This is going to be BIG. Keep updated! Subscribe to my feed and make sure you follow me on Twitter, cause I am going to publish the latest news on the contest and the package there. Not only news from the contest, but also I am going to offer you some cool deals, keep up to date! And for more information, visit the Back to School: Better Together website!

Have you download the free ebook on motivation already? Download ‘Nine ways to get motivated for college’ from Stefan Knapen now!