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Jan 9, 2015    |       8 comments

What Year Is It?

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What day is it? What week is it?

Is anyone else having this issue? It’s like I have NO IDEA what is going on around me right now! Things are moving at warp speed and I’m just trying to keep up. Probably the time off from the holiday. College session doesn’t officially start back until Monday, but instructors are back full-force this week. Yes, even online we report back. I’ve been doing training sessions and answering student emails and tweaking minor things on syllabi and lesson plans and just trying to keep all the balls in the air. Things tend to settle back down a bit once we get a couple weeks into the semester and things start smoothing out.

In the meantime….what’s the best debt-payoff calculator (online, free) that you use?  The one I used to swear by has recently disappeared. It was one through CNN, but its now gone and the calculator in its place doesn’t have the same versatility I’m used to.

What I’m looking for:

  • Can enter multiple, different kinds of debts (with different interest rates)
  • Can see payoff schedule based on different factors (paying a set amount per month, paying minimums, using the snowball method, using the avalanche method)
  • Offers visuals, like charts or figures

I guess that’s really it. Why is it so hard for me to find something like this? I either find calculators that will only let you enter a single APR (doesn’t work for me since I have various debts with hugely different APRs), or its based only on minimum payments, or it doesn’t let you play around to see estimated pay-off dates based on which payment method you’re using (e.g., snowball versus avalanche)

Give me your recommendations! I’d love to hear them!

Many thanks!

Jan 8, 2015    |       11 comments

On-Campus Interview

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I just got the email I was hoping for….I’ve been asked to do a campus interview!!! This is for the job I recently had a phone interview with (I talked about the phone interview here) and, to be honest, I wasn’t sure if I’d receive the campus visit request. I felt the phone interview had gone well but its been a full month since then and, even with the holidays, I thought I would’ve heard back before now. So I was thrilled and pumped to see the email!

I’ve been asked to prepare two separate talks. The first (and longer) talk is about a specific content area (which happens to NOT be my area of expertise. A little odd and will require some prep, but no biggie). The second, shorter, talk is supposed to be about my vision of higher education in reference to technology, different modalities of teaching, etc.  Academic friends – thoughts on this topic? I assume the best bet is to research the University’s and Department’s strategic planning to make sure my thoughts are in-line with theirs, but this is certainly an interesting thing to talk about. Not what I’d expected, but interesting to be part of the interview.

And in reference to my birthday money I’d talked about, it now has a purpose! I’ve decided to put some of it toward getting an appropriate interview outfit (no, I haven’t done that yet) and some of it toward getting my hair professionally cut/colored for the interview. This will be my first professional hair cut/color since BEFORE I started blogging here (my last time was back in early March 2014). Although I think I’ve done a decent job doing my own hair (I do my own cuts & have just done all-over boxed color), I think its important to look one’s best on a job interview and the confidence boost I’ll get from having professionally done cut/color can’t hurt, either. Even after my last botched experience, I decided to purchase a Groupon for the hair cut/color. This time, though, the Groupon is for a really fancy salon, and I paid $65 (retail value of $185). I’m hopeful that my experience this time around will be lightyears better than last time. I have no idea how much the interview suit will cost. I know there’s a huge range and I’d like to stay on the lower-mid-cost side of things, while still scoring a really nice outfit. If birthday money is leftover after that, it’ll be going toward debt.

Fingers crossed for finding a decent interview outfit! My interview is scheduled for January 26th, so I’ve got a couple weeks to find something.

 

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