Part time jobs during college: Good or Bad?

Part time jobs have always been one of the key factors attracting students abroad from all over the world. Even now during my diploma, I was advised by my close friends to apply for part time jobs. The main factor that attracted me towards the concept was the idea of earning extra income which I could use on whatever I wished to buy such as clothes, gadgets or even on food. However, it has been found that a large number of students who apply for courses abroad carry with them the heavy burden of loans and thus, take up part time jobs. Newman and Newman (2008) suggest that the monetary benefits gained by working during college often attract students even though they may not be as high as a graduate job.


A report by The Times claims that part time jobs are the main elements in a student's life. It is also asserted that nearly 50% of students who study abroad work during term while some work only during vacations. The report also states that nearly 70% of students have said that the main reason for working during their studies was to cover living expenses.

It is indeed tough to say whether working during college is good or bad. It is good for the fact that extra income helps to boost the morale and aids in making an individual feel more self- reliant and independent. However, the other side of the coin is that students tend to slowly increase the number of working hours as that means more income. As more income pours into pockets, students lose their focus on studies. They feel that they are able to earn enough even without acquiring a degree. However, the main aspect that they often fail to realize is that while they are working on part time jobs, they would have to be supervised by someone far less educated than them. A decent graduate job differs in this aspect. The quality of work is much different and hence, the attitude of co- workers would be far better than those working on part time jobs. The common part time jobs taken up by students these days have been found to be in fast food restaurants, post offices and in sales or marketing.

Eating Chocolate to Stay Slim?

When it comes to chocolate, you might just be able to have your sweet and eat it, too.

That’s what researchers report in the first study to balance all of the known health benefits and harms of chocolate. Publishing in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. Beatrice Golomb and her colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, say that the sweet’s extra calories may be more than offset by its positive effect on other conditions, such as heart disease, blood pressure and glucose control.

Most notably, the team found that people who reported eating chocolate more frequently were thinner than those who ate less, as measured by their body mass index (BMI). Golomb says that based on previous studies documenting the health benefits of chocolate, she expected that these metabolic benefits might, at best, compensate for the extra calories. “I wasn’t expecting that BMI would be favorable,” says Golomb. “That was a nice surprise.”

Golomb’s team asked 1,000 men and women how much chocolate they consumed in a week, and recorded how much exercise they did over the same time period. Eating chocolate five times a week was linked to a 1-point drop in BMI, though the amount of chocolate the participants ate did not seem to have a significant effect on weight. The chocolate-lovers’ lower BMI also could not be accounted for by exercise or eating less overall. It “clearly wasn’t explained by the fact that people who ate chocolate ate less food, because they ate more. And they didn’t exercise more than those who didn’t eat as much chocolate,” says Golomb. “So there is no evidence that this effect can be explained by any confounder we looked at.”

The results certainly don’t prove that eating chocolate every day will make you lose weight, but they do raise interesting questions about how better to interpret the benefits of chocolate. Previous studies have focused specifically on its individual benefits, such as the ability of its antioxidants to lower LDL, or bad cholesterol, levels, or the role that chocolate’s flavenols can play in lowering blood pressure and improving blood flow by inhibiting clotting processes. Even the primary fat in chocolate, cocoa butter, isn’t such a health problem because it is made up of stearic acid, which does not raise cholesterol levels, says Golomb. She says it’s important to consider all of these metabolic effects together to get a sense of the net effect that chocolate has on the body. Overall, that effect seems to be a positive one.

The Unsinkable Diana Nyad

At 61, Diana Nyad attempted to swim 103 miles against three-foot waves, the threat of sharks, and her own demons. A Reader's Digest Exclusive.

Because of the currents in the Florida Straits, Nyad would have to last 60 hours — if everything went perfectly. So far, hardly anything had gone right.

“We got a forecast of nice, calm, light wind, but that didn’t happen,” Nyad recalled later. “We had rough seas all over the place.”

The waves swelled. Her chest was corseted by asthma; her shoulder was injured. She had swum into a field of jellyfish that made a meal of her and covered her skin in a rash of painful welts. She was cold and nauseated. Even her goggles kept fogging. There were 50 more miles to go to reach land and 5,500 feet of ocean beneath her, and she was digging even deeper than that into her own soul just to keep surging forward. All these numbers and measurements to process. And one more: In two weeks, she was going to turn 62 years old.

As any long-distance athlete will say, you never know what race day holds until you show up at the starting line. In a way, the results of the event itself are left to fate. The training is all you can control.

“I don’t think any ocean swimmer has ever been this prepared physically or mentally,” Nyad had said.

For two years, this dream of swimming from Cuba to Florida had been part of her every waking hour. Suddenly — or so it seemed — she was about to turn 60, and she felt the tug of her own mortality. Having a goal, a really big goal that required a kind of religious devotion, made her feel alive.

“I wanted to be filled with commitment to the best of myself so that I wasn’t looking back later saying, What have I done with my life?” says Nyad.

So she started training for her second attempt at the record-breaking swim; the first, in 1978, ended after 42 hours, when rough seas knocked her miles off course. She logged hundreds of miles during swimming sessions lasting 12, 14, even 24 hours — warm-ups longer than the longest swims of some of the world’s best marathoners.

“There are people in this sport who train their whole [lives] for one 12-hour swim,” says Nyad. “I’ve done dozens of them. My pride comes from the discipline, from the knowledge that this mind has been strong enough to train this body this hard for two years.”

Not that extreme physical feats — or struggle — are new to her. In 1974, a 25-year-old Nyad became the first person to swim 32 miles across Lake Ontario against the current. A year later, Nyad’s 28-mile swim around the island of Manhattan made the front page of the New York Times. Jackie Kennedy called Nyad her hero.

Back then, Nyad was fighting the demons of eight years of sexual abuse by a swim coach that had started at age ten (the coach denies her claim) and nearly a lifetime of dealing with a mercurial stepfather, who “made his living as a liar and a thief,” says Nyad.

“When I swam in my 20s, I was filled with anger, and it came out in my swimming,” says Nyad. “[The water] was my safe place.”

After the failed 1978 Cuba-to-Florida attempt, Nyad called her next swim — a world-record-breaking 102.5-mile swim from Bimini, The Bahamas, to Jupiter, Florida — her “last competitive swim.” True to her word, when she touched the shore on the tip of Florida on August 20, 1979 — two days before her 30th birthday — Nyad toweled herself off, got dressed, and didn’t swim again for 30 years.

She may have been out of the water for the next three decades, but Nyad didn’t stray far from adventure. During the 1980s and 1990s, Nyad was an announcer for ABC’s Wide World of Sports, covering three Olympic Games. She wrote a memoir, a fitness training guide for women, and a biography of an NFL player; she delivered dozens of motivational speeches and wrote for theNew York Times and Newsweek. In 2001, Nyad became a contributor to The Savvy Travelerprogram on Minnesota Public Radio, making trips to Borneo, Bali, and dozens of other countries.

Four years later, Nyad and longtime friend Bonnie Stoll, a former professional racquetball player, founded bravabody.com, a website devoted to providing exercise advice to women over 40.

“Too many women we know are ashamed of their bodies,” the pair wrote on the site. “We intend to lead our generation into the empowerment of feeling strong, free, and confident in every aspect of our lives.”

For Nyad, the company’s mission statement took on new meaning in 2010 when she announced she’d be attempting the Cuba swim again.

“The Straits of Florida has always loomed in my imagination,” Nyad said in June. “Growing up in Florida, I felt that Cuba has always had a mystique.”

And though she had lost some of her sleekness and speed, she believed when she announced her rematch with the Cuba swim that her age offered advantages for pushing through the rigors of a 60-hour swim.

“Physically, I’m stronger. I weigh a lot more,” Nyad said after a training swim in Key West in June. “I was a fine Thoroughbred back then. Now I’m a Clydesdale. I power through, and nothing can get in my way.”

There are also mental advantages to being older, says Steven Munatones, an expert in open-water swimming. “What you lose in strength and speed, you gain in focus and emotional resilience, which is something you need when you’re swimming facedown in darkness for hours on end,” says Munatones.

The second time around, the Cuba swim was about more than just setting another record — it was also about resilience with age.

“I hope older people will say, ‘I want to live life like that at this age,’” Nyad said. “Our parents’ generation considered 60 old age. I’m in the middle of middle age.”

The 30-year delay helped Nyad move past the anger that fueled her as a younger woman. “I don’t look back on my youth and say ‘What a tragedy,’ ” says Nyad. “You don’t ever get over that life sentence [of dealing with abuse], but I’ve reinvented myself to be happy, to take the tiger by the tail.”

In August 2011, the day had finally arrived, and there was Nyad, looking north from the shores of Havana.
It had taken two years this time just to get to the beginning — there had been money to raise ($500,000 altogether), a team to recruit and manage, a morass of visas and permits from two governments to secure. In 2010, weather postponed the swim, and in 2011, she had waited all summer for the right conditions.

“I’m almost 62 years old, and I’m standing here at the prime of my life,” Nyad told reporters the evening of August 7. “When you reach this age, you still have a body that’s strong, but now you have a better mind.”

Then she leaped feetfirst and plunged into the water wearing only a black swimsuit, a bright blue cap, and light blue goggles; she spurned a wet suit because neoprene adds buoyancy and refused a shark cage because the boats pulling the cages pull the swimmers too. (In 1997, an Australian swimmer, Susie Maroney, made the Cuba swim in a shark cage in 24 hours. Maroney’s more than four mph pace — about double Nyad’s speed — is judged by many in the swimming community to be artificial as a result.)

To deal with the shark risk, two kayaks trailing Nyad were equipped with a Shark Shield, which emitted electrical pulses that created a kind of protective fence around her. The support boat, which led a flotilla of four other boats, had shark divers who would jump in when Nyad would tread water to eat or drink (two universal rules of marathon swimmers: You can’t rest by putting your hand on the boat or be touched by anyone on the boat). She also had to contend with Portuguese man-of-wars, creatures that look like giant jellyfish and haunt the sea’s surface, killing their prey with lethal venom. But she didn’t think about these things. A swim like this required all kinds of organization, including a particular kind that took place between her ears. Her mind would span topics. She had memorized a long list of songs, including the complete works of Bob Dylan and of Neil Young.

“I looked forward to going through all the mental tricks that I had developed over the past two years, counting [strokes] and singing,” Nyad said in August. “But I never got there, because I was so engrossed in my physical distress.”

About three hours into the swim, Nyad felt a sharp stab of pain in her right shoulder. She changed the angle of her stroke, talking herself through each one and telling herself to go gently until her hand caught the water, and then she’d pull and feel the pain shoot through the joint. The suffering went on all night and into the next day.

In the 17th hour, she swam over to the boat, requesting Tylenol. The crew located a pain reliever with a foreign label. Nyad took it, and a short time later, asthma — which she’d never been prey to in the water — made her airway lock up. She lay on her back in the water, gasping for air. The doctor jumped into the water with an inhaler. Nyad rolled onto her belly and continued swimming, and then she’d turn on her back again, gasping, unable to fill her lungs. She swam into a half-mile-wide field of jellyfish and got stung all over her body. Next came nausea, vomiting, dry heaves. The idea of accepting defeat on these terms enraged her.

“I’m trying to make it,” Nyad told Bonnie Stoll, according to Steven Munatones, who was on the support boat as an independent observer. “I’m barely going forward. I feel so sick.”

“You’re making it,” said Stoll, who was also on the boat as Nyad’s head trainer. “You’re going forward.”
Between the 23rd and 27th hours, Nyad had gone just five miles.

“This has been my dream forever, but I can barely make it another hour. I’m just dead,” Nyad told David Marchant, the boat’s navigator.

“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” Marchant told her.

Cold, exhausted, and sick, she drew closer to the boat. Stoll saw that Nyad was suffering and wanted to comfort her. But it was up to Nyad to make the decision.

“OK, Diana, I’m going to touch you, and it’s going to be over,” Stoll said.

Nyad consented. And with that, 29 hours and 43 minutes after she’d leaped into the water off the rocky Havana coast, the swim came to an end. One boat measured her distance at 56.8 miles, the other at 53 miles.

For two years, Nyad had envisioned herself walking up the beach in Key West. It had been so real in her mind’s eye that she was certain it would happen, and in the aftermath of the attempt, the disappointment was keen.

“This was my time, but it wasn’t my day,” says Nyad. “I have nothing to hang my head about in terms of the effort I gave, but it is heart-wrenching.”

And inspiring, for those who watched her fight. “It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” says Mark Sollinger, who piloted Nyad’s lead boat. “She just wouldn’t quit. It was more amazing to see her not make it the way she fought than if everything had gone exactly right and she’d made it the whole way.”

At a press conference in Key West less than 12 hours after being pulled — half-dead and devastated — onto the support boat, Nyad choked back tears and said, “Sometimes the will is so strong. That’s the whole point of this sport — that the mind is stronger than the body. But I was shaking and freezing, and I thought, ‘There’s no mind over matter anymore.’ I think I’m going to have to go to my grave without swimming from Cuba to Florida.”

But when Nyad returned home to Los Angeles, the pain began to fade. In its place, a familiar ambition crept in; the mystique of that fickle 103 miles of water sandwiched between Cuba’s rocky coast and Florida’s sands still beckoned, even as she celebrated her 62nd birthday.

“Something says to me the goal is still there,” says Nyad. “The big fairy tale is [still] there.”

Also: Watch an exclusive video of Diana Nyad before her attempted swim.

inspiring stories

The Twins Teaching a Coastal Town to Clean Up Its Act

Between ballet lessons and tae kwon do, these twin sisters rally to protect the earth.

The images were shocking: Allison Samowitz and her twin sister, Jillian, watched the 2010 BP oil spill on TV with their hearts sinking. “We live right on the beach, and we heard about tarballs and how the spill affected the ocean’s ecosystem,” says Allison. “It was just devastating, and we were afraid it would happen here.” The coastal towns along the Gulf of Mexico didn’t feel that far away from their little Golden Beach anymore.

The sisters studied the conservation habits of their friends and neighbors. “We’re a small town of 360 homes, and we found out only 20 percent of them recycled!” Allison says incredulously.

Moved to act, they first planned a town fair with demonstrations about how ordinary people could make lasting changes to the environment. They persuaded 12 local companies to join them and attracted a crowd of about 200 people. On the scene were hybrid cars and booths where volunteers and company representatives accepted used electronic equipment, eyeglasses, books, and sneakers — all for recycling. The girls are planning another fair this year.

“It’s an education campaign,” says Allison. “People don’t know, but there are so many simple things they can do every day that can become second nature.”
Adds their dad, Harvey, “They’re basically optimists.”

Allison now reports on the environment for her school’s television station. Both girls lend their time to various recycling projects around town, such as giving old toys to children’s charities and collecting used crayons — which are often dumped in landfills — to melt down for reuse.

And should anyone think that they’re awfully single-minded, the sisters have a healthy set of other interests: ballet, tae kwon do, lacrosse, and deep-sea diving with their dad. “We, I, blink — that’s my sleep,” says Allison.

inspiring stories

Boy on a Bike: How a Rwandan Teen Overcame a Legacy of Genocide

He works with the energy and intensity, if not the skill, of a mechanic twice his age. He keeps his head down, focusing on his task, talking to himself—threading greased pedals onto one of 120 sturdy black bikes we’re here to build and donate to a Rwandan charity so people can ride to work, to school, to a well with clean water. He looks to be the same age as my third-grade twins. We’ve been working together for an hour in a small auditorium in a walled compound outside Kigali. A choir practices somewhere outside, the ethereal music blending with the clouds that descend down the green ravines of the hills that define Rwanda. Although he speaks no English and I no Kinyarwanda, we use the universal signs of thumbs-ups, head nods, and “no problem.” We work as a team.

And we smile. A lot. The kid has a smile like no other I’ve seen in more than six years of working with African relief agencies to build and donate bikes to charitable groups. I’ve seen lots of hard workers. Lots of incredible people. But there’s something about this one that has a hold, quite unexpectedly, of my heart, more so than the other kids working with volunteers around the compound.

Maybe because he’s about the same age as my own three children, a world away in an American suburb. Maybe it’s his warmth, laid bare by a complete absence of any artifice. His eyes glow and his teeth sparkle, and my jet lag melts away as this kid, whose name I don’t know and can’t seem to find out, beams with pride and happiness at finally getting the pedals onto the bike. I give him a thumbs-up, and he beams anew. Over the course of this humid morning, we’ll assemble 15 or so bikes, half of what I could do working alone. But I have a new friend.

And he likes me. Anytime we stop work so I can explain something to him, he holds my hand. When we stop for tea, he holds my hand again, and I slip him some Skittles. A woman in traditional dress comes over, ignoring me, and speaks to him sharply, then raps his hand. I’m shocked, but parenting methods are different in central Africa than in New Jersey, so I say nothing as he struggles to hold back tears. Then he takes my hand and pulls me back to the bikes. Within two minutes, he’s beaming, and this time, I’m the one trying to hold back tears.

At lunch, I tell Jules Shell, the director of Foundation Rwanda, the charity group we’re working with, what a great hustler we have on our hands. I ask again what his name is. She says, “Well, we call him Jean-Paul. But he doesn’t have a real name.”

I must look confused. She smiles a little. “I don’t think his mom could bring herself to call him anything at the time.”

I don’t get it, but she continues. “How old do you think he is?” she asks.

“Nine, maybe ten,” I say.

She looks at me with the tired eyes of a relief worker exhausted by explaining the unexplainable. “He’s 16,” she says. I say it can’t be; he’s tiny. “Sixteen. All these kids are. The genocide was in 1994. Do the math.”

The boy, like the other children here, was born of rape. His mother, a member of the Tutsi tribe, was raped during the 1994 Hutu genocide that slaughtered some one million Rwandans. Raped by a gang of militia who killed her three brothers, she considered an abortion but bore the child. In tribal Rwanda, however, she wore the birth like a scarlet letter, victimized twice as she suffered the brutal crime, then was rejected by her own deeply conservative family. Is it any wonder she couldn’t bring herself to properly name him? Bad enough she should have the daily reminder of the horror she suffered. “I care for him, but I can’t love him,” she told Jonathan Torgovnik, in 2007, when he and Jules started Foundation Rwanda. “I am not interested in a family. I am not interested in love. I am physically handicapped because of the beatings that I went through—I can’t carry anything. I can’t work. It’s good I didn’t kill that boy, because now he fetches water for me.” Jules says she thinks his diminutive size is most likely the result of malnutrition.

As we eat, a chain gang of convicts in bright jumpsuits walks by the compound, shovels and pickaxes in hand. They are convicted murderers, the perpetrators of the genocide. They walk by their victims twice a day. Some of the convicts jeer.

After lunch, I can’t look at the boy in the same way. I just can’t reconcile the horror of his conception and life, utterly without love, with his sunny countenance and sweet demeanor, his exuberance. This child has every reason to hate yet greets the world with love. I think of my own children, who get everything by simply asking for it. Everything except love, that is. That they don’t have to ask for; they automatically receive it and return it. What would this kid’s life be like if he were loved the way Kit, Chris, and Luke are?

The author with 'Jean-Paul,' whose
appearance belies his age 

He goes at the bikes with the same intensity he did all morning, the quality of his work getting a little better, a little faster, with each passing build. And when I decide to take a break around 3 p.m. and try to wave him over for chai and Skittles, he just smiles and keeps on working, even if the bicycle pump continues to confound him.

Asking a child (or even an adult) to assemble bikes all day without riding one is tantamount to torture. So around 5 p.m., I take him outside with a bike I know to be assembled properly and gesture for him to get on and have a spin. The gestures don’t work, so I ask a translator to tell him to go for a ride. His eyes grow solemn at the news, and although the bike is built for someone half again as tall as he is, he gamely throws a leg over and wobbles down an alley and around the corner.

As I stand there with a three-way wrench in my hand, a wave of fatigue sweeps over me. I think of the warm Sunday September afternoon a few years before when my son, Luke, insisted I take the training wheels off his bike. He then promptly mastered two wheels and spun away from me down our street. In one of the great paradoxes of parenthood, I had just taught him the means to leave my side. It was as if I had said, “I love you so much, I will teach you how to leave me. Because if I’ve done my job right, you’ll always ride back.”

Maybe it is the jet lag, or maybe the tea is wearing off, but my eyes fill with tears. I wipe them away and look down the alley, waiting for him. But there’s no sign. He isn’t there. I imagine him riding away from here to a place where his love will be returned and his warmth valued. Just riding away, for good.

Suddenly a bike slams into my right leg; I drop the wrench. He’s there, having circled the building, the compound. Laughing out loud, feet on the ground, he takes my hand and beams.

Museo Casa Enzo Ferrari museum opens in Modena

A new Ferrari museum in honour of Enzo Ferrari opened at the weekend in Via Paolo Ferrari, Modena, the heart of Italy's supercar valley.

The Museo Casa Enzo Ferrari opened on 10 March 2012, dedicated to Enzo Ferrari - the powerhouse behind the eponymous supercar maker. The new museum includes plenty of other sports car brands with links to the Modena area. It looks like petrolheads' tours of northern Italy will get a bit longer… 

So what's inside the Museo Casa Enzo Ferrari?

The new museum cost €18 million and stands on the ruins of the old house where Enzo was born in 1898. His house and workshop have been preserved, but there's now a new gallery crafted from yellow aluminium, the colour of the city of Modena and the background to the famous prancing horse logo.

The gallery, which was designed by London architects Future Systems, is packed with the key milestones of Enzo's life, charting the story of his car company, but also the Mille Miglia, Scaglietti – and there are plenty of cars on show like works of art. It's not just about Enzo; there are also exhibits explaining how Modena became home to other supercar makers, including Maserati, Pagani and De Tomaso.

Exhibits include the Alfa Romeo 40-60 of 1914, the Alfa Romeo RL Super Sport Mille Miglia of 1927 and the Alfa Romeo Bimotore of 1935. Naturally, there are plenty of multimedia exhibits, documentations, shops and cafes to feed little ones.

'The Museum is dedicated to the life of a character who contributed to making Italian culture famous all over the world, a path that tells the story of sports car racingthrough symbolic individuals, places and races,' said the brains behind the museum, Mauro Tedeschini. 'It is an importantinvestment for the city of Modena and for Emilia too, confirmed once again as the focal point of the life and passion of Italian motoring. With the Museo Casa Enzo Ferrari we try to portray the imaginary bridge existing between past and future. The past as told by the old house where Enzo Ferrari was born in 1898, restored and preserved in its original structure, the future represented by the innovative architecture of the yellow aluminium “bonnet”, the city’s new emblem.'

'This tribute to my father, who loved Modena profoundly, gives me immense pleasure”, Piero Ferrari says. “It provides an opportunity for anyone who wants to find out more about the man, his story and the link between the city and the world of engines. This new structure is perfectly complementary to the Ferrari Museum at Maranello, the other fundamental location in the life of my father.'