If you’ve locked up “A”s, congratulations.  But the type of “A” you earn is certainly still up for grabs, and so you need to crush your finals.  No matter where you are on the grade spectrum, your final will move you up or down.  And so you need to start planning, and studying–now.

Here are a few tips:

1.  Make a Time Line

You don’t have the same amount of time to study for all of your finals, and you need to get really good at time management really quickly.  If you have a Money and Banking final on Saturday the 12th, that needs to occupy your most immediate attention.  If your last two finals are on, say, the 14th and the 17th, you shouldn’t study for the Dec 17th final much, if at all, until Dec 15th.  So make a time line of due dates, assess which subjects require the most attention and how much time you’ll be able to devote to each.

2.  Plan On Office Hours

For sake of argument, let’s say you need 15 hours of “quality time” with each subject to feel confident for the final.  If studying alone for one hour prepares you 1/15 of the way, that’s great.  But generally speaking, going to office hours will give you more bang for your buck – one hour spent at office hours may be able to prepare you 2 or 3 times as much as one hour studying on your own, especially if you come knowing what you don’t understand.  Even if you get most of the material, it doesn’t hurt to clarify more complex topics, talk about where you stand in the class, and even what you might need on the final to land a certain grade for the course.

You may be mathematically eliminated from an “A” (or need something like a 98 on the final), but may be in a position where you’d need to tank to get a “B+.”  If so, don’t spend so much time studying for that course – any marginal benefit from studying is negligible compared to classes where you may be able to move up or down.  Budget your time accordingly.

Also, many teachers are willing to place less weight on a poor mark received early in the semester and more weight on later grades.  Talk to them and see what you can weasel out.

3.  Make a to-do List

You now know when things are coming up, what classes require what proportion of your attention, and when you need to get into office hours.  Now budget your time.  Schedule flexibility is usually an asset, but you want to be a hard-ass with yourself.  Make a plan for the next few weeks saying when you will study for what, when you will go to office hours, when you will meet with a study group, when you will reach certain benchmarks, etc.  Remember, soon is not a time and some is not a number – be specific with your game plan and you’ll be more successful.

Fortunately, the Gmail client CMC uses has “Google Tasks” functionality.  Look on the left side of your email and click the “Tasks” link.  An editable box will appear on your screen where you can list what you need to do and, with great satisfaction, cross off your accomplishments.

4.  Learn from the Past

Right before Thanksgiving “break,” many students had a run of exams simulating what finals will look like.  Look back and ask yourself a few questions:  How well do you do on less than ideal sleep?  How much did you over-study for one exam and under-study for another?  Could you have allocated your time more efficiently?  How have your academic experiences during the semester taught you not only the course content, but about how to do well on graded material for a certain class?  How similar are practice exams to the real thing?  Think, figure it out and adjust what needs to be adjusted.

5.  Crush it

Get down to business.  Work your ass off.  Study hard.  Do well.

So for everyone at CMC, good luck with finals!  Set a solid game plan and I’m sure you’ll have a much easier go of it.

The first box shows the poor performance of the Google Voice transcription service (click on the image to see a larger version). The second box plays the actual voice mail he left me. As you can see, we checked the “X” in the lower right corner to indicate that the transcript was NOT useful.

Right now, Google Voice’s main functions are call-forwarding and voice mail. But how many phone lines do each of us have? One, our cell phones, and we can access voice mail with at most two buttons. Our primary use of phones is for texting and calling, so Google Voice for college students? Not terribly useful.

Possible flaws with college-age users aside, Google Voice may soon become infinitely cooler for all audiences as a result of Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5. As reported in TechCrunch by TechCrunch founder and 1992 CMC alum Michael Arrington,  the acquisition could mean that Google Voice would look something more like Skype or Google Talk, adding the all-important calling function.

A few days ago, Google announced on its blog that it was introducing a new search feature that will help save you time as you search for free music online:

Now, when you enter a music-related query — like the name of a song, artist or album — your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners MySpace (which just acquired iLike) or Lala. When you click the result you’ll be able to listen to an audio preview of the song directly from one of those partners

Pretty cool, right? Even more impressively, you can now just type in song lyrics, and Google will tell you which song they are from. For example, in this walkthru video, typing in some Lady Gaga lyrics provides you a direct link with which to listen to the particular song–in this case, Just Dance.

Here is the Christopher Walken (told you it would make sense). Last Friday, Christopher Walken appeared on the Jonathan Ross’ BBC show, on which he performed an excerpt of Lady Gaga’s  hit: Poker Face. Check it out below:

Let’s take an example. A friend and I were looking for someone to drive us to the airport (from Palo Alto to SFO) and tried to think of all the people we knew in the area.  Rather than relying upon our multi-tasking and maxed-out memories, however, I wanted to turn to Facebook, the virtual Rolodex of my social existence. Using Facebook Search, it should be pretty easy to come up with a list of people I know who are in the Palo Alto (/Silicon Valley/San Jose/South Bay) area.  Whether that person is a Fan of the Palo Alto Jewish Community Center, attended Palo Alto High School, or simply lists Palo Alto as “Current City,” that information should be available to me.  All I have to do is type “Palo Alto” into the seach box at the top, right-hand corner of any page on Facebook, and I will be greeted with every mention of the phrase “Palo Alto” on my friends’ pages or otherwise, right? Wrong.

Even with the filters on the left, finding people I know with connections to Palo Alto was not happening.  If I wanted to know which friends of mine like the Rolling Stones, the results weren’t much better.  Status updates that mention the Stones were the closest I could get.  Rather than thinking of the new Facebook Search as Google search for all information on Facebook (i.e. complete, thorough, exactly what  you were looking for), it would be more helpful to think of it as a Twitter search — you can find topics your friends are talking about in their status updates. Facebook needs to be able to better organize the information that people share on Facebook. One of Facebook’s greatest assets, if not the greatest asset, is the information that people voluntarily share: interests, favorites, experiences, etc. Help us get to that information, Facebook.  In other words, be more like Google.

Before the emphasis on Search, I would have used networks to accomplish this task.   I used to be able to find a list of networks and the number of friends I had in each network. But Facebook has begun to phase out regional networks because they were pretty useless in general — were you really going to start up a friendship with someone who you didn’t know, but was in your same “network”?  No, probably not. Facebook is built upon the strength of social connections, and sharing a regional network was not a strong enough bond to truly connect you with another person. These networks were marginally useful, however, for grouping your friends by their location(/school/organization).  Palo Alto anyone?

In the end, we found a ride to the airport.  Ironically, it was someone who worked at Facebook.

So maybe I won’t be meeting any big business hot shots this summer. I’ll concede that. But what I will be doing is playing golf and going to museums for two figs on the hour. Can you say that? This summer I scored a job working as a nanny, or as I prefer, the correctly gendered term, Manny. Ok, so it’s not as prestigious as some other jobs, but hey, at least now I’m getting paid for pwning twelve year olds at Halo.

But the nature of my job isn’t the point of this article. The point of this article stems from an important fact that was made very clear to me during an interview with my future employer: I am on the internet.

During one of our conversations my interviewer started asking me about my work as a satire writer (a fact I hadn’t told her) and then later about my interested in ultimate frisbee (another fact I hadn’t told her). I was starting to get a little weirded out. Then I realized how she knew:

Woah. Ok, that’s not that bad, I guess…

Oh. my. god. WTF?!?! I don’t even want to think what might show up if safe search were off.

The reality is, I’m on the internet and you probably are too. As we all get older, search engines and future employers are only going to get better at creeping on us. Think about fifty years from now, when you are being vetted for a position on the Supreme Court of the United Googley States, or whatever important post you’ll be after in the inevitable search engine ruled dystopic future, and remember now, you’re on the internet.

Of course, we’ve all heard warnings about incriminating Facebook pictures but there is more to your online image then a bunch of traps, those drunken portraits or the time you called Charles Johnson a d-bag. Google can be your friend, too. When I applied to CMC, the first hit for “Carl Peaslee” was a political editorial I’d written in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. That looks good to a school who loves politics. You can do the same. You can make your google search an asset during the interview process — or at the least, not a detriment.

An easy way to do this is by starting a blog. Interested in going in to finance? Write a blog about finance attached to your name. Don’t know what you want to do? Just write intelligent, uncontroversial things on the internet under your name. Like to bicycle? Make a blog about bicycling under your name and write on it once a month. After a year of this and a few well placed hyperlinks, maybe the first ten hits of “You” will be your thoughts on the newest Trek frame rather than the time you made it on to the front page of www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com. (Yes, that is a real site. And yes, I have seen my friends on it.)

For people who ask stupid questions.
We’ll admit it. We ask stupid questions sometimes. It’s so much easier to turn to your super intelligent friend and ask that really ridiculous question that you clearly spent no time trying to figure out for yourself. Actually, in our case, it’s usually worse, because we’re gchatting the super intelligent friend…and already being on the computer, there’s even less of an excuse not to just google something. Hurray for laziness!

For those of you who wish to punish the lazy, lmgtfy.com is your new best friend.

If you didn’t immediately grasp what the website is all about (you’re probably the same idiot asking the stupid questions), lmgtfy.com lets you put in a search question and then makes an animation that you can link to, showing other people how easily they could have found their answers all by themselves.

Information Technology Services will be updating a site with pictures of the new Ryal Lab in Phillips Hall all summer.

Kravis Center: sketches, drawings, and models online at Rafael Vinoly Architects

Assorted pictures here.

Every year since 2005, a group of about a dozen Claremont McKenna students spend a week in San Jose where they have the opportunity to visit and network with various Silicon Valley executives at leading companies in the area. This year, students brushed shoulders with CEOs, partners, and other top management at nine companies in the Silicon Valley area. The trip, which costs ITAB over $1,800 per student, is provided free to participants.

ITAB, the Information Technology Advisory Board, is an organization of CMC-affiliated executives in the technology industry working to advance the role of technology at CMC. Since 2005, the organization has sponsored a week-long trip to Silicon Valley. The trip was started in 2005 by ITAB Chair Bart Evans ‘70.

Mr. Evans started the ITAB trip to help establish Silicon Valley as one of CMC’s “centers of gravity.” “The current centers of gravity for CMC alumni are LA, New York, DC, San Francisco,” Mr. Evans explained to the group of 15 students who attended this year’s trip. That is, CMC alumni are concentrated in a few industries and geographic areas. “The world is getting smaller—much of our country’s business is being exported, but Silicon Valley is one of the few places [in the US] where people are still creating and innovating.” Mr. Evans wants to add the technology industry, specifically Silicon Valley, to CMC’s radar.

During the trip, ITAB pays for all student expenses—a week-long stay at the Fairmont Hotel San Jose, transportation, food, and miscellaneous costs. ITAB also provides each student with calling cards (business cards), a leather-bound portfolio, and tote bags to carry the “shwag” we pick up throughout the week—an “I’m Feeling Lucky” t-shirt from Google, a chunk of Silicon rock from Applied Materials, a bottle-opener that plays the “Yahoo!” jingle, etc.

Throughout the week, students are shuttled to various companies in Silicon Valley from Apple Headquarters in Cupertino to Google Headquarters in Mountain View (plug for Google: free Naked Juices and food everywhere!). CMC Chief Technology Officer, Professor Cynthia Humes accompanies the students on the trip, as her office is responsible for planning the trip.

“It’s a lot of work to plan the trip, but we get better at it each year the program is in operation,” said Dr. Humes. “For example, we hope to visit a gaming company like Electronic Arts next year in addition to this year’s lineup of companies.”

ITAB is also actively recruiting new members to help defray the costs of the trip. “The current cost is about $1,800-$2,000 per student, with students paying for their own transportation to San Jose. We want to expand our resources to be able to pay for each student’s transportation as well,” said Humes.

The ITAB trip (and the similar Financial Economics Institute-sponsored Networking Trip) is an underutilized gem at CMC. Within days after the trip was over, students had landed interviews and even jobs at the companies visited. What one learns in an economics or computer science class makes for useful technical skills, but only opportunities like these prepare students for the real world.

My highlights from the 2008 ITAB trip:

-Presentation by Scott Mauvais ’90 at Microsoft. Mr. Mauvais gave us the down low on why Microsoft isn’t threatened by Apple and a few other “do not repeat this outside of this room” remarks. I will not repeat them. We also got to raid the company store.

-Julie Cox ’07 gave an informative presentation about what consultants, especially IT consultants, do on a day to day basis.

-Listening to John Volk ’70, Partner in the Venture Capital Group at PricewaterhouseCoopers recount his decision to go to law school (“This was nearly 40 years ago… we didn’t know what was what… Duke was the best [law school] I got into, so I jumped in a car and drove across the country.”)

-Ashwin Navin ’99, President and Co-Founder of BitTorrent delivering the keynote address at the Alumni Association-hosted ITAB Reception at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. In a chat with students after his speech, Ashwin recalled how cool he felt living in Auen Hall when it was the only dorm with high speed internet hookups in every room.

-Weston Presidio, a venture capital firm located on a pier in San Francisco. Jim McElwee ’74, a partner at Weston Presidio, talked about the hardships and benefits of venture capital firms.

-Todd Teresi ’94, Senior VP at Yahoo!, brought in legal and marketing experts from the company to talk to us about censorship in China, redefining Yahoo!’s brand, and other topics. I was pretty unconvinced that Yahoo! would grow or survive much longer after our visit until recently.

-Discussion with Bill MacGowan ’79, Executive Vice President, and Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystem. Mr. Schwartz is a legend in Silicon Valley and his blog is one of the most widely read in the industry.

-Apple presentation by Scott Gilfoil, head of campus recruiting. Mr. Gilfoil gave us an entertaining pitch to work for Apple (and buy Apple products).

-Joe Pon ’89 and George Davis ’80 at Applied Materials. Joe Pon gave us a tour of Applied’s labs, including chip manufacturing and research clean rooms where we had to take off our shoes and wear booties. Mr. Pon also discussed our country’s energy crisis and gave me a clearer view of solar panel technology and alternative energy sources.

-A visit to Infosys in Fremont, CA convinced me to apply for an internship in Bangalore, India this summer. I guess I’ll see how that one turns out…

-Jonathan Rosenberg ’83, Senior Vice President at Google, first fanned out 15 business cards, smiled, and said “E-mail me. I WILL help you.” Mr. Rosenberg also recounted some of his favorite CMC stories and advice for success in business.