Archives for April 2008
For Students: Frequently Asked Scholarship Questions
By Josh Barsch
Hola, students. As a major private-scholarship provider for more than five years now, we get a lot of questions that come in every day about our programs. There are tons of them, but over five years, we’ve heard just about every concern that you guys have (By the way, you’ve also helped us find and fix the occasional technical bug, the occasional typo, etc., which we appreciate very much.).
To that end, I’d like to post some of our most frequently asked questions about our scholarship programs here. Please bookmark this page — I’ll be updating it frequently in the future, as more questions come in. For now, though, feel free to sift through what I’ve got here. If you have a question that needs to be answered and you don’t see it here, feel free to post it in a comment, and then I’ll edit the blog post later with the answer you need.
Thanks!
Josh
How many words does the essay need to be?
There isn’t a minimum or maximum number of words that your essay needs to be. I had a journalism professor when I was at Southeast Missouri State University who told me that my stories should be “as long as …
Shit, my goddamned toddler is cursing!
By Josh Barsch
I got a text message from our babysitter, Sheena, while I was eating my microwave pizza for lunch at work Thursday. It said:
“Mia said the ’s’ word …ha ha.”
Mia is 3, and she won’t be four for another few months. In most families, this would be a cause for concern. In my family, we call her a “late bloomer.”
This is where I suppose I’m obligated to bring up the story of my own dirty mouth, and how I myself burst into the world of adult language. It was back in North Dakota in 1976, and to hear my dad tell it, I’d quietly snuck up on him while he was hammering a nail into something. Probably something wooden. Anyway, as I drew nearer, he missed the hammer and hit his thumb, and that’s when he yelled out “you BASTARD!” as many of us do when crush our own digits with blunt metal objects. I’m not sure if Dad was talking to himself or the tool, really, but on that day, one of them was a bastard, and the two-year-old version of me thought that was hilarious.
“Bass Turd!” I sung out, triumphant, as if cars ran on bastard fuel and I’d …
A Modest Online-Revenue Proposal For Newspapers
By Josh Barsch
Back in the VHS vs. Beta video-format wars of the 1980’s, my family put all its ill-fated chips on Beta. More recently, I went all in with an HD-DVD player instead of Blu-Ray, and about four seconds after I did, Toshiba threw in the towel and stopped supporting HD-DVDs. I also thought Ryan Leaf would make a better NFL quarterback than Peyton Manning, and argued with my childhood friends that Dominique Wilkins would accomplish more in the NBA than that Michael Jordan guy ever would.
In short, I have a long history of taking the road less traveled — the one that ends up dead-ending off a cliff. But one of the rare times when I came to a crossroads and actually made the right call was when I ditched my first love, newspapering, in favor of an Internet career. It was 1999 when I left the University of Missouri’s graduate program, master’s in hand, with a variety of prospects. Could’ve gone to a newspaper, magazine, TV station, even a radio station — but I chose the Web. For once in my life, it seems, I heard the train coming before it ran over me.
These choices and the evaluation of their …
For Scholarship Applicants - “Page Two” Error
By Josh Barsch
I know there are lots of students on our site who are here to apply for scholarships, so I wanted to take a second to address a problem that some of you are having when you apply online here on the site. We know that some of you are having a problem getting to page 2 of the scholarship application (the one with the essays on it). It’s a very small percentage of you guys who are having this problem, but it’s still happening consistently, so I want to bring you up to speed on what . From what you guys are telling us, the problems takes shape in one of two ways:
1) You fill out the information on page 1, hit “submit,” and the second page just waits and waits and never loads; or
2) You fill out the information on page 1, hit “submit,” and the second page loads — but the rest of the form doesn’t appear.
Here’s the deal: First of all, don’t worry — you can still apply and have your essay considered along with everyone else’s. If you’re having either of the problems, you can email Robert, our scholarship coordinator, and tell him …
Don’t forget to tip your airline pilot!
By Josh Barsch
So I’m out on the deck Sunday afternoon reading the paper while the dogs and kids frolic in the yard, and I notice that this week’s Parade magazine is the “What People Earn” issue. You know the one — the one with about 100 mugshots of regular folks and their jobs and salaries, with the occasional celebrity and her 8-figure salary tossed in every now and then, just to keep us awake. (Gisele the supermodel made $33 million this year. I wonder if she and Tom Brady split the electric bill right down the middle, or if she pays a heftier share because she makes more.)
This is the only time of year I read Parade, because I don’t really care what Hilary Swank’s favorite cheat-food is. I don’t want to know why Aretha Franklin chose “maple scone” for her bedroom paint color, and I already know that Marilyn vos Savant is so smart that she could stick an 8-ball under her armpit and squeeze out a unicorn’s paw (You know what? Screw you, Marilyn.).
But the “How Schlubs Like You Are Scraping Together Your Meager Existence” issue is one of my guilty pleasures, and if you’re reading this, it’s probably one …
When I battle Satan, we will play Ms. Pac-Man
By Josh Barsch
I was in a Phoenix bar one time, and after several gallons of beer, I started wondering about what I would do if I ever had to battle the devil to win back my soul (That’s the thing about alcohol…if nothing else, it really gets you thinking outside the box). I’m a business owner, a husband, a father of two, a friend to many — simply put, I take care of a lot of people. So I try not to let anything catch me by surprise, and I admit, I cast a pretty wide net.
Anyway, I’m not sure how the real battles with the devil proceed, because all the ones I’ve ever seen have been on TV, and they’ve usually involved a rotund blues guitar virtuoso, string ties, top hats and at least one dusty crossroads in Mississippi. But I’m not very good at music, and Mississippi terrifies me.
On that particular night, I decided that (and I concur today), to preserve the high drama involved in these sorts of showdowns, the devil would probably let you choose the actitivity in which you’d like to compete with him to salvage your soul. I mean, he’s probably really good at everything, …
Products I Like: ClicknKids (Click-N-Read Phonics)
By Josh Barsch
Throughout her childhood, I’ve been a little conflicted about when to begin teaching Mia to read. When I was a kid, I read very early — I was reading at 3 years old. My daughter is a very sharp kid, and I’ve always just assumed that she would read as early as I did. This is a pretty tall assumption, though; 3 years old is damned early for a kid to be reading, and I didn’t want to be overbearing and force her to read before she was ready, or to place expectations on her that were based on nothing more than what I did as a 3-year-old. Then again, if the kid was ready to roll, then I definitely didn’t want to hold her back. Decisions, decisions.
A couple months after turning 3, she started twice-a-week preschool, and after a few months of that, she knows all of the letters of the alphabet and what sounds they make. If you know all those, you’re pretty much ready to start learning to read, so I asked her if she was ready. She said yes, so we now have our hats in the ring.
Something occurred to me shortly thereafter: I didn’t really …
Products to Avoid: Zonbu
By Josh Barsch
Unless you’re particularly interested in green computing (i.e., computers that don’t use much energy) or the Linux operating system, you probably haven’t heard of Zonbu, a small computer company in California that sells ultracheap laptops. I came across them in one of the tech/business magazines I read (can’t remember which one) and was intrigued by their unique proposition. At the time, they sold one product — a tiny CPU that was about the size of the Bible that the Gideons leave in every hotel room. It didn’t run Windows (great for security!), but its system emulated Windows for the user (great for usability!). It came preloaded with about 20 open-source alternative programs, so you could pretty much do any sort of basic computer use that you wanted to do (email, Web browsing, word processing, etc.). Its operating system supposedly updated itself, there was some online storage that came with the package, and it was only $99. You had to pay $14.95 or something like that per month for their online updates/no-hassle service, etc. Oh yeah, and it’s also apparently very earth-friendly, uses a tiny fraction of the power that a normal machine uses, is a “zero-emissions” computer, and …
Josh Barsch founded StraightForward Media in 2001 after a brief career in print journalism. He now lives in the sticks of western South Dakota with his wife Christina, daughter Mia, son Ezra, two dogs Velvet & Holly, and cat Chanceux, all of whom he loves dearly. And four nameless hermit crabs, for whom he feels nothing.