Who wants to win an extra 5,000 bucks to pay off their student debt?
It seems that the good folks over at Skillshare are just giving away free money.
Head over to their website now and trade your email address and zip code for a chance to win $5,000 to help pay off your student loans.
The contest ends March 17th, so hurry over.
My family has a history of debt, bad credit, and being poor. I did not want to end up like them; I wanted to be successful. Everyone told me to follow my dreams…and my dreams led me to an Art Institute in Illinois. (The Art Institutes are owned by EMDC, which Goldman Sach’s owns 41% of. EDMC is currently being sued for fraud.) I knew tuition was going to be expensive, but everyone told me that it would be worth it, and to go for it, no matter the cost. I was told tuition was about $56,000 and that was near the average salary of those in my field. Good deal, right? I received as many grants and scholarships as I could, but my loans gained just as much, if not more in interest while I attended school (about $15,000). I also worked part time the entire time I attended. I very much regret not being more in tune with my finances, in regard to tuition. I was under the impression that the first loans I took out were Federal, as Sallie Mae was AI’s “preferred federal lender.” They ended up being hefty private loans (just figured this out last year). In total, I ended up borrowing just over $70,000 for tuition, housing, transportation, and supplies. During my final quarter, AI presented information to upcoming graduates which reported the average salary for my field being $29,000. That’s no where near $56,000! Portfolio show is a graduation requirement where professionals in your field come to view your work. It gets to be pretty expensive to print out your portfolio, purchase business cards, resumes, a website, professional attire, etc. They urge you to stand out. Out of the 20+ employers they invited, only two in my field showed up. One never even made it around to my side of the room. I was unemployed for over a year after graduating. I applied everywhere. It seemed I was not qualified to work in my field, and having a BFA made me look overqualified for regular, Average Joe, jobs. When I removed my degree from my resume, I was finally able to find a part-time, minimum wage job.
I consider attending AI to be the biggest financial mistake of my life. It was definitely not worth the lifetime of debt I will face. Not many of the people I graduated with are working in their field either. AI boasts high success rates upwards of 80%(there are articles out there about how they cook their books to keep federal funding). Their actual success rate is probably way less than 25%. If I had known then, what I know now, I would never have gone to college. With hard work, and a lot less money, I could have learned what I did at AI on my own.
When I began repayment on my private loans, I asked Sallie Mae how I could lower my payments. They offered to extend my loan to 25 years, the first two years being interest-only. I also asked how to get my co-signer released and they told me after two years of on-time payments, I could apply to have them released. Those two years ended at the end of 2011 and I applied to have my co-signer released. I was denied, because interest-only payments do not count towards the two years of on-time payments. Had the person I spoke to at Sallie Mae told me the truth, I never would have signed up for that plan! My co-signer is my father’s ex-girlfriend. My father’s expected contribution was high, so I did not receive much in financial aid. He did not actually contribute a dime towards tuition. He just supplied me with beater vehicles that would break down in rush hour and cost me hundreds of dollars in towing/repairs. He insisted he would help with payments after I graduated, so between him and my co-signer, who cares about her credit, they help me pay over $360 each month. I am very grateful. My Federal loans are currently under the Income Based Repayment plan. I currently pay $0 a month because I am unemployed after moving to the east coast recently. In 2036 when my loans are forgiven, I worry about what I will owe as that amount becomes taxable income.
Had I not gotten married last year, I would be living in a run-down, over-crowded trailer with my father, brother, sister and her fiance and two children. Most importantly, I’d be without health insurance (that’s important for a cancer survivor to have). My hero of a husband is in the Navy, so I am covered by his insurance. We will file taxes as married-filing-separately until my loans are paid off because I do not want his income to factor in to what I pay on my federal loans. I took out these loans before we married, I do not want him to pay. Combined, we pay more towards our debts monthly than we do for rent and utilities. We live frugally, paycheck to paycheck. Aside from a bed, cheap plastic drawers for dressers, and folding card tables for desks, we have no furniture. Our only car is 17 years old and I do not know we will do when it dies. I do not save for retirement. I don’t know if I will ever make enough money to be able to because it will all go towards these horrible loans. We would love to purchase or build a home, but I doubt we will ever have the money. We would like to have children, but as things currently stand financially, we just can’t. I’m 26, so we have a few years. I figure, I have several options. 1.) Keeping paying for years and years and end up paying over $150,000 (more than double what I originally borrowed). 2.) Win the lottery. 3.) Hope the government forgives student loan debt to stimulate the economy! 4.) Hope for a zombie apocalypse (12/21/12)!
For those currently struggling, if you have not already, get your federal loans under the IBR plan. It should help to lower your payments! Hopefully we will get relief from this predatory system soon! Contact your local congresspeople and keep pressuring them to help make changes to restore consumer protections on these predatory loans. There are plenty of petitions out there, sign them, share them, keep fighting for change! Try to stay positive. This debt does not define you!
-Kasey O.
In our “Voices From the Field” section, feel free to share your experiences with student debt, your prospects on the future, and any advice you might have.
If you want to have your story appear on this blog, just send an email to editors@pluckmagazine.com and to help guide your thoughts, feel free to tackle any of the questions below in 300 words or so:
Yours in the ranks,
The Pluck Editors
Thanks to everyone who submitted your ideas to the Pluck Fall To Do List contest. Keep an eye out as we’ll be announcing the winners and updating our homepage soon.
Yours in the ranks,
The Pluck Editors
Just as we have accepted that February, April, June, September, and November don’t have 31 days in the month, we all dutifully turn back our clocks an hour in the fall and an hour forward in the spring, but why?
The result is definite, but the origin less so. It is said that Benjamin Franklin was the first to suggest that something be done to address the change in the number of hours of sunlight as winter and summer approached. Franklin made this judgment from the practical standpoint that changing the time to reflect the daylight would save precious resources such as oil used in lamps and garments needed for the early morning cool weather. Of course, communication methods were limited so a national “change” in time was literally impossible.
Fast-forward to World War I, Germany, in its infamous militancy, implemented a nationwide daylight saving time policy to reduce the need for artificial lighting. This policy spread to other countries that saw this as a practical way of reducing the consumption of war materials. In 1918, the U.S. adopted official days and times when daylight savings would be observed, but left it up to states to decide whether they would observe the policy.
It was not until World War II that the U.S. made daylight saving time mandatory for all states as a way of saving materials needed for the war. When the war ended, daylight saving time once again became optional and the dates and times for it either changed or went observed. In essence, daylight saving time became a tool that was used when needed to save resources, like in the 1973 Arab oil embargo occurred and the U.S. extended daylight saving time through the winter.
Yet, whether daylight saving time actually reduces the use of energy is controversial. In states that did not have daylight saving time and then adopted it (providing a credible before and after), the net gains in energy consumption were minimal if any at all. People would not use artificial lights as much in the morning, but would turn on their air conditioner at night, having had the entire day to warm their homes, and thus eliminate any savings that they had had before. That said, states such as California, which generally has mild weather, benefits from daylight saving time because it encourages people to stay outdoors for more of the day, thus reducing their energy consumption.
The conclusion is that energy savings are dependent on where you live and how the timing of daylight savings intersects with that location’s climate.
Another related claim is that daylight saving time promotes healthy lifestyles by giving people more time in the day to be outside and, by extension, to be active. This too has been contentious as some scientists criticize the manipulation of humans’ delicate circadian rhythms that respond, whatever the change, poorly to time changes.
Whatever your thoughts are on the manipulation of time, enjoy the extra hour you’ll get early Sunday morning, and just see if you have more spring in your step next week on your chilly early morning commute.
- Anna
We’ve got an exciting announcement today!
Today we are officially launching our contest to see who has the best ideas for Pluck Magazine’s To Do List, our list of real or imagined things that we’d like to do.
If you have a Plucky item that you think belongs on our To Do List, post it on Pluck’s Facebook page before June 27 and see if yours makes the cut for our Summer To Do List.
We’re going to compile our Summer To Do List from the five best suggestions from readers, so to enter, head over to our Facebook page, hit the “like” button, and leave a comment with your idea, a link, and an explanation for why it needs to be on the front page of Pluck Magazine.
To help guide your thinking, our To Do List is loosely broken down into five categories:
If you want to see an example, go to Pluck’s homepage and look at the left side bar. The contest ends on Monday, June 27th, so be sure to get your ideas in before then.
Winners will also have the opportunity to explain their idea in a featured article on our blog.
We look forward to seeing what you all come up with, and don’t forget to spread the word.
Yours in the ranks,
The Pluck Editors
Wreckless Eric became famous all over again thanks to Will Ferrell. The comedian covered the singer’s “Whole Wide World” for his 2006 movie ‘Stranger Than Fiction’, and suddenly Wreckless Eric’s nasal wail was hot.
For years before that, though, Eric – once a wilder man among the wild men of the fledgling British punk scene- carved out a respectable career touring throughout Europe and cranking out albums of sometimes quite adventurous classic punk rumble (his group Le Beat Electrique recorded an entire album with a cardboard box as a drum). Though over time his era would be remembered for performers like Elvis Costello, it’s ultimately Wreckless Eric that continues to best capture the sheer fun of making unpretentious music.
So with a steady career and a penchant for good times, Eric and his wife, singer Amy Rigby, have decided to vacate their home in the south of France and begin a new chapter in America. Thus, for young musicians with a penchant for history and an appreciation for classically complicated audio equipment, Eric is offering an opportunity to purchase parts of his recording studio, and, for the ambitious, his entire house.
Young up-and-comers who would benefit from miscellaneous recording machines on which songs like “Fuck by Fuck” and “True Happiness” were mixed would do well to take a look at Eric’s blog, where he is painstakingly dismantling his studio and offering up select bits to interested parties. Those who might be in the market for a well-used recording space themselves- one with a serious pedigree behind it- ought to take a look at the house.
-Matt
Nebraska Fuck Yea!
This has been a pretty big week for us here at Pluck. One of our articles was picked up by Dan Savage and Jezebel and according to our fancy Google Analytics statistics we’ve hit all 50 states in the United States as well as Iran, Kenya, and Singapore.
Pluck is in 50 states and we’ve gone international?! Woohoo!
Hope you all have a great weekend!
-Eugene
Photo Credit: Ted Croner, Times Square
We are barely more than two weeks into Pluck and I have already grown reflective. What are we trying to say? Whose voice are we trying to capture? What idea or opinion unifies us?
In a world lined with data, we are offered a picture of what this twenty-something generation is doing with their time. Surveys and studies are constantly telling us what we are buying, how many of us voted, how much time we spend on the computer, and how much we spend on social networking sites.
Those numbers are collected and analyzed by companies that want to figure out not just the how twenty-somethings make choices, but why they choose the ones they do. In other words, what are we thinking about?
Using a laptop to write a blog post that will be published on an online magazine, I feel comfortable saying that many young people are spending a lot of time on the computer. The internet is like New York City on a Saturday night – everything is at your fingertips, but distractions make it hard to focus.
I believe that the length of time people spend on websites that present opinions, news, culture, and commentary is confined by impatience. The constraints of time, interest, and thirst for new information, on the part of both the reader and the author, make many articles sound shrill or boring (perhaps you think that about this one?) – a forum that can ultimately be alienating and oversimplified.
Reflections on this idea came from an unlikely source: New York Times columnist, Frank Rich, who after decades working as drama-turned-political writer, is leaving his post. While I have not been an avid reader of his, I read his final column and much of his farewell was devoted to many of my own thoughts concerning idea-exchange in 2011. He writes:
“For me, the point of opinion writing is less to try to shape events, a presumptuous and foolhardy ambition at best, than to help stimulate debate and, from my particular perspective, try to explain why things got the way they are and what they might mean and where they might lead… I do have strong political views, but opinions are cheap.”
Opinions are cheap. Opinions left untethered from the context of a person, place, or thing end up seeming two-dimensional. At a time when a second identity online is a reality that most of have adjusted to, the flatness of that identity oftentimes mirrors the very flatness of the screen from which it comes.
Yet, just because the computer screen that emits identities out there is flat, the people it portrays need not be. A little reflection goes a long way. Pluck, to me, is a vehicle for reflection. Such reflection often produces a complexity of thought and purpose that I feel is underrepresented in the virtual – and sometimes real – world. Ultimately, reading people’s stories just makes me feel a little closer to a bunch of people my age who also just don’t really know what people my age are thinking.
-Anna
Making and printing photographs can be like a slow slide from art to science and back again- the art of a graceful shot, the science of a well-developed print. But whether we appreciate photography for what it has to say or how it says it, photographs still wear multiple hats in our visual world- as salesmen, seductresses, and, in a small sale going on in a corner of the Internet, support groups.
Not long after Japan’s March tsunami, young photographer Ryan Nabulsi was motivated to use his photographs as a sort of fundraising tool for disaster relief. Since 2009, Nabulsi has been in the business of fine art photography, focusing on the distorted forms and protosplasm shapes that come together when film meets chemicals, time, and a digital scanner. Nabulsi and Japan go way back, before he graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with an MFA, back when he had just finished Bates College with an undergraduate degree in philosophy and training on a camera. In an interview with his gallery-mates at Snapdragon Photography, Nabulsi explained, “I thought I was going to become a lawyer, but a chance trip to Japan at the end of my undergraduate career in 2006 changed my mind. I was able to travel and photograph all over Japan and came back dedicated to making my love for photography into my career.”
So, in the days after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami at Sendei, Nabulsi has been putting together a charity auction of photographs collected from photographers around the country to benefit charities working in the flooded Japanese northeast. If you are in the Atlanta area, stop by the Jennifer Schwartz Gallery on Saturday, March 19 to purchase a piece and help people piece their lives back together. For more information, see here.
If you are outside of Atlanta and would like to purchase a print to benefit Japan, check out the online photo sale hosted by Wall Space Gallery in Seattle. Limited-edition prints are being sold at $50 each, all proceeds going towards tsunami relief. The sale runs through April 30, but prints are limited and charities could always use funds sooner than later.
-Matt
