FREE. Think about it, everyone loves free stuff right? And who would love it more than someone who is young, broke, and easily excitable? In college, you will encounter many opportunities to receive free stuff. Coming in, you will have free stuff offered to you at every turn. Come to the volleyball game and get a free shirt! Volunteer and get free food! Visit our information booth and get free sunglasses! This goes on for the first two weeks, and soon you will find your room stocked with five pairs of sunglasses, ten extra sleep shirts, a set of pom poms, three waterbottles, two gym backpacks, and a bouncy ball (I forgot how fun those are!). However, after a couple of weeks this excitement dies down, and the wealth of free stuff seems to dry up. Panic settles in, you only have 28 free gym shirts, you need an even 30!!! But wait, don’t panic just yet! This is college after all, there is always free stuff, you just need to know where to look for it. The key is to look for booths around campus. Booths are usually set up to promote some kind of charity or club or organization, but we all know that they are really there to give us free stuff. Learn to master the casual walk by, this way you can glance for free stuff without having to actually talk to someone about curing AIDS or joining the longboarding club. Another key is to attend the less popular sporting events. You attend the football games because they are fun but you attend the soccer/waterpolo/volleyball games in hopes of scoring sunglasses, or a shirt, or a BJ’s gift card (true story). Soon you will be an expert in scoring free stuff and you will never have to buy clothes/sunglasses/bouncy balls again.

Happy Finals week, hope you stocked up on free t-shirts to study in! :)

However, we played a lot better than we did against USC last week. We looked like a better team, and we actually put points on the board. I think it is safe for UCLA football fans to come out of hiding and proudly wear our colors again.

So here’s to a mixed season for the Bruins and to focusing our school-spirit on basketball. After all, I can’t let my eight clap and fight song cheer get rusty. And I still have my pom-poms, gold bandeau, and two tubes of face paint that need to be put to good use. Gooo Bruins!

Here are 15 tips I have picked up in my first quarter at UCLA:

1. Get sleep. I know, the last thing you want to do in college is sleep. There is so much going on all around! Why sleep when you can go to that frat party/explore campus/stay up talking until 4am with your new best friends??? Get this out of your system early on because eventually you will crash, and crash hard. But at least then you will learn your lesson and your grades and immune system will thank you. Which brings me to number two…

2. Protect yourself from germs. Hand sanitizer is your friend, and so is vitamin C. I love the dorms, but when one person is sick, everyone is sick. Disease spreads like a good piece of gossip so do whatever it takes to avoid it. However, no matter how extreme your prevention measure are, you probably will get sick at some point, especially during the first couple weeks. The best medicine for this is to just relax and sleep as much as possible, find a hot girl/guy to help nurse you back to health, subsequently fall in love, wait for the fever to break and realize that it is just your roommate and you still live on planet earth.

3. Call your parents. I know this one sounds cliché and it is probably the last thing on your mind. You had 18 years with them right? They can stand a little separation. But once the newness of everything fades away, you will get homesick, and it will be nice to hear their voices. Plus, it will keep them from being in a bad mood because they haven’t heard from you in three weeks and the only reason they are talking to you now is because you answered without checking caller ID first. Happy parents=money.

4. Get involved. This one is also cliché, but it’s true. Especially at a school as big as UCLA, it’s nice to find a niche of people that you get along with. Plus you can meet upperclassmen who have invaluable wisdom (and apartments, hellooo home-cooked meals, television, and parties).

5. Go to the football games. Dress in school colors. Paint your face. Sing the fight song. Nothing brings a school together like trying to rally behind a failing team!

6. Go to class, even if it is at 8am. You will be tempted to skip class, because in most classes the professors honestly don’t care. You will feel a sense of freedom and euphoria at this idea. But this quickly fades when its 10^th week and you know absolutely nothing for the final. Oh and don’t even pull the old, “But the lecture is podcast, I can listen to it later.” Let’s get real here, you are not going to listen to it later. If you didn’t want to go in the first place, what makes you think you are going to want to listen to it on your own time?

7. Take some time to be alone. And I mean truly alone, no laptop (gasp!), no cell phone (double gasp!), just you and a book, or you and your thoughts. It will give you a break from all of the craziness in your life and help you focus on what you want out of college.

8. Keep your room clean. It’s easier to focus and your roommates will stop glaring at you and subtly handing you the vacuum every time you are in the room.

9. People will still know your business. Aren’t you so glad high school is over? Everyone loved to gossip there, but here you can be anonymous. In a group of 30,000 undergrads, you are free! Now if you make a mistake, you don’t have to worry about everyone finding out about it right? Right? Wrong! (well, semi-wrong). Because you live with the same people that you go to class with and hang out with, they will know your business. If you have certain boy (or girl) who always comes over around a certain time of day, people will know; if you come back drunk and throw up all over the hall, people will know; if you go out every night dressed like a total slut, people will know. Although you can be anonymous to a point, you will be surprised by the amount of random people that still know that you are hooking up with what’s-his-name and you are the roommate who comes home drunk and throws up all over your shoes.

10. Find a good guy friend. This one is extremely important, and perhaps the most important part of this is to make sure that you are not attracted to him, and more importantly that he is not attracted to you. The quickest way to ruin a guy-girl friendship is for attraction to enter into the mix. A good guy friend is great. He will make you laugh, give you a different perspective, listen to you complain about the latest douchebag in your life, take care of you when you are drunk, and pretend to be your boyfriend when you need to escape a creeper. Just make sure you show the guy friend appreciation in some way (they love baked goods and pretty much all other food) and they will be a valuable addition to your life.

11. Don’t study in your room. It always begins with the best intentions, but no studying ever gets done in the room. You may clear an area, set out your study materials, and sit down with a serious intent to focus, but…oh look, the laundry needs to be done, and the floor vacuumed, and I am just gonna leave my door open for some fresh air and if I happen to see friends walk by, well it would be rude not to talk to them. Happens every time. Don’t even study in the lounge. You aren’t fooling anyone. There are so many libraries and study rooms available, so take advantage of them!

12. Watch your money carefully. Make sure that you keep careful track of all the money that you spend because it can be so easy to spend more than you mean to. Remember, you are a poor college student now and it’s time to start spending (or not spending) like it.

13. Use a planner. This isn’t high school, and while some professors will remind you of due dates and exam dates, not all of them will. It is extremely important that you know exactly when everything is due. It will also help you keep track of dates of events and other things.

14. Take study breaks. Yes, college is a lot of work. Yes, you need to work hard. But everyone needs the occasional—skipping across the hill, twirling with a friend, going to play bingo, or watching a funny movie—break. It won’t kill you to take a 30-minute break to catch your breath.

15. Have fun!! You are young, attractive, and in college for goodness sake! Don’t take it for granted and don’t think that anything is the end of the world. You will only have this experience once so enjoy every second of it!

I hope this is helpful :) If anything, it helped me put off studying for an hour, so it’s all worth it. Good luck with finals everyone!

Oh, and here’s an extra tip (at no extra charge). Keep track of your room key, otherwise you will find yourself standing outside your room in a towel with no key, a roommate who is out-of-town, and having to walk downstairs to the front desk in said towel. (not that I speak from experience…)

Not study, that would be absurd! So while all my friends are freaking out, scheduling every second, and yelling at me because I want them to come to the gym with me (are you kidding me?? do you know how much time that would waste??), I did what any self-respecting college freshman about to face their first ever college finals would do, I started a blog. 

So if you are a UCLA student, I hope you can relate. And even if you aren’t, I’m hope you can find something to relate to as well (unless you are a student at that $chool across town!). 

Feel free to drop a line in my ask, it’s not like I have anything better to do (threepapersandafinaltostudyfor). What? What was that? Nope, nothing better to do at all….