Going to college with your grandparents?

Forget famous professors, bulging course catalogs, and ivy-cloaked campuses. It’s extras like on-campus child care, evening office hours, and commuter lounges that count most with a growing breed of undergraduates: the independent or ”nontraditional” student.

Public universities and private ones, many of which did little for these students in the past, are scrambling to accommodate them because their numbers have become far too large to ignore. Broadly defined as financially independent, working adults, nontraditional students age 25 and up now make up 38 percent of postsecondary enrollment, compared with 28 percent in 1970, according to US Department of Education estimates. On many campuses, they have become the majority. Only about a quarter of the nation’s 14.9 million undergraduates fit the ”traditional” mold of enrolling right out of high school, attending full time, and relying on their parents’ purse strings.

”We have this island of mature adults in a sea of kids,” said Bradley Keith, 41, who just completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, which gives nontraditional students preferential placement in classes to accommodate work schedules. ”It’s the little things like that that really make a big difference.”

Keith, who starts working on an MBA this fall, just stepped down as secretary of UNH’s nontraditional student organization. One of the group’s main purposes is to combat the isolation older students often feel.

READ: Colleges offer extras to lure older students

Guess who didn’t make the list?

Forbes wrote an article recommending the best career blogs on the net. Guess who was not on it. (Boo-hoo!) READ: Career blogs

I’ll get you, you young whipper-snapper!!!

Now this is interesting! I wonder how long it will be before this crosses the pond onto American businesses?

UNITED KINGDOM – Recruiters will be among the groups most vulnerable to age discrimination claims under new legislation coming into effect in October next year.

Sam Mercer, director of the Employers

Just say no (to your boss)!

The employment gods are against you if you say no. If you do not sacrifice, then massive suffering will result.

But you understand the reality. There’s a lot of work to be done. You want to be responsible and dependable, yet you want a life outside of work, too.

“I think this is more of a problem than most people realize,” said Ed Turi, an instructor of leadership and organizational behavior at Indiana Wesleyan University. “You have to come from a mindset that you have a right to say no to your boss.”

But how do you even begin to do this?

READ: How to Say No to Your Boss and Not Ruin Your Career

How is this possible?

India faces huge shortage of software product developers who can think ‘out-of-the-box’ ideas and concepts but the educational institutes are churning out engineers suited mainly for the IT services market, industry officials say.‘India faces IT R&D shortage’:

Never too young to work for Microsoft

A Pakistani girl has qualified as a Microsoft Certified Professional at the age of 9.

Arfa Karim of Multan has officially become the youngest MCP in Pakistan, and one of the youngest in the world. Karim, now 10, met with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates last week–an experience she later described as second only to visiting Disneyland.

To attain the credential–at any age–a person has to display technical proficiency in areas such as .Net, Visual Studio 6.0 and Windows Server 2003.

Karim got excited about technology, when her father bought her a computer–primarily to use for e-mail, according to S. “Soma” Somasegar, a corporate vice president in Microsoft’s tools division.

“What she wants to do as she grows up–she would love to study at Harvard, work in a company like Microsoft and go back to Pakistan to do technology innovations in the field of satellite engineering,” Somasegar wrote in his blog last week.

Somasegar describes her as the youngest MCP in the world, but according to a Channel News Asia report, the youngest ever to attain that qualification is India’s Mridul Seth, who is said to have gained it at age 8 in November 2004.

According to Microsoft, Karim is part of a select group, as one of only a few certified professionals in the world to qualify below the age of 10.

READ: 9-year-old earns accolade as Microsoft pro

Also hear Arfa in her own words by clicking here!

Job-Seeking Strategy for Differently-abled Candidates

The single biggest barrier to full employment for the differently abled is the “fear of the unknown” of hiring/working with someone different. Employers know and generally comply with the law, but little is being done to educate co-workers in effective strategies for coping with their apprehension. I believe that hiring committees composed of co-workers/superiors/subordinates may often be the derailing factor in a differently-abled person’s job search process. Peer committees may simply not know how working with a differently-abled individual will work. I’ve often heard comments from potential co-workers that range from “well, how can she talk to us if she’s deaf?” to “well, there’s not enough room in here for a wheelchair.

I Want You! (Before you graduate highschool…)

EL MONTE, Calif. – Flora Ortiz slides into a seat in the darkened auditorium. It’s the last day of school, and the choir is practicing solos. Onstage, a girl with long dark hair hurries through Scarlatti’s Le Violette.

Flora sits chin in hand, pink flip-flops twitching silently in time to the music. She sang in the choir all four years, wore the prescribed evening gown in the group photo, trilled the same high notes . But most days this spring, her school ID hung from a U.S. Navy lanyard around her neck, a quiet declaration of her independence.

Or was it a sign of indecision?

One day short of graduation, Flora is a walking conflict zone: a girl with pink plastic butterflies in her hair who’s contemplating boot camp, who cries at antiwar protests yet dreams of wearing a uniform.

“I just want to do something different,” she says. “Something exciting.”

At El Monte High School in a working class, mainly Hispanic suburb of Los Angeles, the debate over military recruitment in schools hijacked Flora’s senior year. Recruiters wooed her and antiwar activists dissuaded her. She chose the military, changed her mind, changed it back.

READ: The tug of war on campus

Is Your Resume Recruiter Friendly?

If you are in the middle of a job search, recruiters can be either your friend

Maybe being unemployed is not so bad?

Maybe being unemployed is not so bad?

A job worse than yours – Professional Target Mover