Bloggers among us take note: The good folk at IvyGate are looking for a handful of summer editors to maintain the site between the months of (late) May and August. Last year's summer editors actually stuck around to edit the site full-time, so it seems it's possible the job could turn into a full-time gig. Plus, you'll be in good company: Past Columbian IvyGaters include Slate wunderkind (and B&W alum!) Chris Beam and Newsweek reporter Nick Summers.

Sometimes, for the broke college student, whoring yourself out to paid psychology experiments just doesn't cut it. To offer some assistance in your job search, we bring you dispatches from five students who tell all about their various engagements in the world of campus employment, work-study and beyond. Compiled by Maryam Parhizkar.

The Library Assistant

Perhaps you've heard about hipster librarians, i.e. the charming types with quiet smiles and no hips who listen to The Hold Steady. These people do not work in Columbia's libraries. Most of them work in Butler's basement—the mothership of the libraries—where they rarely see the light of day and physically and mentally reflect the lack of Vitamin D. My boss, though quite kind, could rarely breathe normal air, wore wrist braces, and spelled words with LittlE oR No ReGarD for CaSe.

Quirks aside—or perhaps, quirks included—it's not a bad job, especially if you prefer books to people. Unless you wo/man one of the circulation desks, you could spend your days shelving books, barcoding books, or doing countless other activities with books. The merits: you can listen to music, though for long stretches, audiobooks and podcasts are key; there is little oversight; you don't have to interact with people (have I emphasized that enough?). Downfalls: old books are about as clean and nice-smelling as old people, and there are lots of them; books will occasionally fall on your head and bruise you; the lights turn off every 15 minutes. This isn't just an inconvenience to those of us who believe murderers wait for the end of those 15 minutes. Words of wisdom: do not work in the math library.

The Note-Taker

About once every year or so, if you're lucky, you'll find in your inbox and email from Columbia's Office of Disability Services advertising the need for a note-taker in one of your classes for an anonymous student whose disability prevents him or her from taking notes. Or maybe your professor will make an announcement to the same effect. The first student who shows up to the ODS with a sample of thorough, organized class notes will get the job, which pays a total of $350 a semester to undergraduates and $400 to graduate students.

This is one of a few ways to make money at Columbia that doesn't require work-study status, or any extra time beyond what it takes to email ODS your notes every week. Typically students pounce on these opportunities like feral cats, so as soon as you receive the email announcement, reply to ODS with message saying you're interested and high-tail it over to the eighth floor of Lerner with a copy of your most responsible class notes (preferably notes you've already taken for the class, if the semester is already underway). ODS may take a few days to consider which applicant's notes best suit the needs of the anonymous student, whose name is never released — not even to the note-taker.

I've taken advantage of this opportunity twice, once in a science lecture and once in a literature lecture. Knowing I was responsible to someone else for what I wrote forced me to take thorough notes for every class meeting, and which made writing papers a lot easier than it would have been had I filled my notebook with the usual illegible scribble. And the best part was getting paid a few hundred dollars for something I should have been doing for free.

In which Bwog staffers reminisce--namelessly, by and large--about how they occupied themselves for the last few months. If you've got something better, send it (bwgossip@columbia.edu) in and we'll share!

So my boss just sent me out on an errand, with nothing more than an address and his credit card. I assumed the location was a store, I assumed wrong. I ended up at a vet's office, picking up his cat's medicine. I returned to the office, pissed off, and told him, "I hope your cat doesn't die."
Ten minutes later, he walks over sheepishly, hands me a bottle of shitty wine and apologizes. Cellar No. 8. California Merlot. 2005, aged to perfection.

Small(ish)-town newspaper writing is inexorably absurd. My summer experiences include: riding a creaky fire-boat around Lake Erie with drunk seamen, driving 2 hours in the rain because the police in Pennsylvania cracked a case about a pizza delivery man who robbed a bank just before his head literally exploded, interviewing historical re-enactors in one of their encampments (including a man named Ghost in the Head who actually lived the life of a 19th-century Native American trapper), having another reporter violently cuss out a cop who didn't want to tell me the name of another cop's baby who drowned in a pool, trying to get a bunch of media-hatin' rednecks at a freakin' tractor pull to talk to me... Not to mention the obituaries!
...Like sand through an hourglass, such were the days of my life.

Need a summer job to support your unpaid internship? Bwog newbie Sara Jane Panfil tells us why stumping for trees/starving children/cute bunnies may not be the way to go.

I remember being excited to spend the summer in New York, but then summer arrived. Two months in I found myself struggling to stay afloat in my now-shallow pool of friends, and after my third Thursday night Law and Order marathon in a row, I decided that it was time to make some changes in my social life.

I decided to pursue this "more friends" thing by getting a new job, a job that would have a lot of young college people around with things potentially in common with me. So I was clicking through the Craigslist nonprofit sector and answered an ad for the Human Rights Campaign. I was wary to begin with, since campaigns and charities are among the worst labor violators in terms of promising to pay their workers and then... not doing it.

But whatever, I decided to check it out. I get there, and there's a whole bunch of other people there, too. The director, Jesse, pops up and talks to all of us and asks each our name and why we're here ("I'm here because I really believe in the rights of humans!") with so much enthusiasm that I actually think that I got a little sick to my stomach. He puts on a video that shows us what we can expect in our new, glamorous lives as campaign canvassers: grabbing the undivided attention of passerbys on the street, alerting them to the problems that the world faces, and then graciously accepting their donation (which, of course, they offer up enthusiastically), smiles on everyones' faces. I felt like I was in some sort of cult re-education program, since the video was clearly removed from any sort of reality.

In which Bwog staffer Hillary B. unearths a trove of desperate preteen pleas.

The other day, one of my fellow interns at the marketing/publicity firm where I work turned to me and asked, "Do you know what happened to all the Good Charlotte fan mail?" That band once had been among our clients, and we've been receiving their mail for over a year.

"I don't know... I think Autumn threw it all out," I said. This was true — a few weeks ago, we had cleaned out the mailroom and the entire bag of fan mail had been unceremoniously dumped in the trash. What I didn't tell my colleague was that I had later smuggled the bag into my backpack and brought it home with me.

As much fun as I had tampering with the mail — hey, it's not like that's a felony or anything, right? Right? — I'd have to say that on the whole, this was a learning experience for me. I now consider myself an expert on Good Charlotte fan mail composition. Read on to find out how you, too, can write a letter that'll bring Benji and Joel Madden to their knees.

Step 1: Be a 15-Year-Old Girl

The vast majority of Good Charlotte fans are young ladies just shy of the tween years. Out of 30some letters, a grand total of one was written by a boy — and nobody admitted to being older than a sophomore in high school. Then again, there are exceptions to this rule, as proven by this amazing letter from Katie in Ohio:

"Dear Good Charlotte, I Love You Joel Madden! You are the only one I think is Hot! Will you marry me? I like SpongeBob. How old are you? I am 9 years old. You are my favorite rock band. Your Girlfriend, Katie. P.S. Write me back BABY!"

Because Bwog doesn't do hot, sandy or constantly-in-existential-danger, Iraq didn't quite make it into our summer plans. Not so for Matt Sanchez, GS, who has been blogging out of the war-torn country for the past couple of weeks. What the hell's gotten into the conservative activist, military man, Spec opinion writer, American studies major and one-time porn icon? We reached the Marine corporal by e-mail in an attempt to find out.

How did you get the opportunity to travel to Iraq? Moreover, why go there in the first place?

I applied for the media embed; the process seems daunting but if you're tenacious and know exactly what you want to do, your chances of getting approved are a lot higher. I had several advantages. I have a security clearance from my time at NYPD Counter-Terrorism, I know people who have been through the process and they explained it in detail, I had a definite plan of doing a syndicated radio show, In Their Own Words and Hometown Heroes, and I was as specific as possible with dates, units, places etc.

The reason why I came here in the first place was because I just wasn't content with the media coverage. Having seen, personally, how the media can twist, mislead or just fabricate stories, I really wanted to see things for myself. You see, I know lots of people who have been to Iraq and back and I had not been given that opportunity, so I was eager to see for myself Let's face it, this is THE issue of 21st century and, frankly, I want to know what's going on as much as possible.

Editor emerita Anna Corke, of Cooking with Bwog fame, gives us a glance into life behind the kitchen doors.

Here is what I do: toss salad greens with olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, diced tomatoes, and crumbled feta; garnish with mixed olives, sliced cucumber, peppercinis, cucumber yogurt; plate with toasted pita, lamb on the bone, and breaded onion rings. Place each item so that one inch inside the rim of the plate is clear of food, garnishes always come in threes, and the food is as tall as possible. Oh, and this one customer wants extra olives, dressing on the side, the lamb well-done, pita untoasted, and a side of maple syrup. Mess it up and I get yelled at by a cute waitress and an uncute chef named Justin, who reminds me to "make it a quickie" while brandishing both a wrinkled sausage and a large serrated knife. Mess it up and they get yelled at by a paying customer whom I will never see, but who is undoubtedly wearing ethnic jewelry and Dior sunglasses - an authentic Bainbridge Islander (population: 20,000 lawyers).

This summer, instead of learning the finer points of envelope-licking or how to take messages for a Congressman, I am learning to sweat over salad presentation at Café Nola.

This is my second summer cooking in restaurants. Like most young pantry cooks, I started as a dishwasher and was slowly trained into the art of cutting rapidly and preparing large quantities of food for the mealtime onslaught. Throwing someone not used to restaurants into a cooking position can result in not only physical injuries — my boss once saw someone slice all of the skin off of one side of her finger — but also a lethal mix of stress and exhaustion. Many have cried. More have quit. The trick to avoiding such trauma is something any ER doctor could tell you about: staying focused and moving as fast as you comfortably can. Accuracy is usually more important than speed.