by Jim Parsons
Campus Editor
While we wait for all classes to go on-line - the day when we can sleep through a lecture at home, without having to make the commute to campus to do so - here are a few student-friendly sites already available on the Internet.
They don't offer classes, but some of the sites could teach you something, and a few might even help in other ways, from alleviating boredom to finding financial aid.
Crestar Bank's student lending Web site, www.student-loans.com, has some potentially valuable information for students who need some financial help. The site features "Select-A-Loan," which helps determine what loans you're available for by answering a few questions.
In addition, the Financial Aid Planning Calendar is a handy year-round timetable which tells exactly what needs to be done to get financial aid, and when to do it. There's also a FAFSA checklist to help get through the financial aid paperwork, a glossary of financial aid terms, and - yes - a Loan Repayment Calculator. Of course, you can also order a Crestar loan kit.
If you're not so interested in financial matters but would like to try an interesting site, check out The Washington Post's College Post at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/scoop/front.htm (it is also accessible by link from the Post's main page, www.washingtonpost.com).
College Post, while geared toward students in the D.C. area, has some useful information, including an article on internships and tips on how to get them and - useful for University of Houston students at this time of year - an article on dealing with the stress of final exams.
On the journalistic side, try looking into College Post's Wild World of News, which features college sports information, weather, comics, movie reviews, articles about college students and even Post articles divided by state.
Study Break will lead you to the Post's Sunday crossword on-line and a map of the United States that allows you to put an electronic pushpin on your hometown.
Finally, there's Find Everything, a search/reference tool aimed at college students. Bypass the Washington movie and restaurant listings and you'll find a useful dictionary/thesaurus, a link to Deb and Jen's Land O' Useless Facts (and it really is quite useless), Associated Press headlines, and - the link which is sure to become a classic - an on-line version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
In the same vein, but a little more irreverent, is www.student.net. The first thing people will probably notice here is the "Seinfeld-o-matic," a feature which generates random Seinfeld plots.
Yet another feature is the "Reject-o-matic," which allows you to enter some information and whip up unique letters of rejection, which can be e-mailed to anyone.
There are also directories of all kinds of student Web pages, the Archive, which apparently contains articles about random topics, and TV Search and Remind, which allows users to search for television shows and then (like the name implies) sends reminders when they are broadcast.
And lastly, there's The Recent Graduate (www.recentgraduate. com), a service started by a recent graduate of the University of Rhode Island.
The Recent Graduate contains helpful information on finding jobs, finding apartments, the ubiquitous selection of résumé tips, filing a tax return and other facets of life that graduates aren't supposed to be familiar with.
Of course, this is just a sampling of on-line student services. The Web is an almost endless resource, and the best way to find what's useful - if anything - is to go out and look for it yourself. Happy hunting ...