- Introduction
- Featured Article: Free Stuff 2005
- Announcement: Student Loan Consolidation
- Scholarship Notes
- A Word from our Sponsors
- Privacy and Subscription Information
- Back Issues
- Sponsor this newsletter!
Welcome to the September 2005 issue of FinancialAidNews.com. This month, we bring back one of my favorite issues - the Free Stuff issue. Our newsletter is devoted this month to pointing out all the free resources online for the college student, from free (and legal) music, to free software, to free scholarships and more. News you can use, so please enjoy it.
Our survey last month was incredibly popular, so we're doing to do it again - this month, we have a student loan consolidation survey. Take our survey and five lucky respondents will win a $15 iTunes Music Store Gift card. Winners will be announced on the Financial Aid Podcast. Speaking of which, you can find the winners of the previous survey in the August 25, 2005 Financial Aid Podcast.
Enter to win in the student loan consolidation survey:
http://www.FinancialAidNews.com/show.php/consolidationsurvey/
Finally, if you haven't subscribed to the Financial Aid Podcast, you should. We're giving away for free our new e-book, Scholarship Searching Secrets, which contains the most powerful tools we've ever published for finding free scholarships, but you can only get it by subscribing to the Financial Aid Podcast. Visit http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com for instructions on how to subscribe.
As always, please share The Student Financial Aid News with your friends, family, and colleagues, by simply forwarding this message, or letting them know to subscribe by visiting www.FinancialAidNews.com today!
Enjoy this month's newsletter!
Christopher S. Penn
Publisher, The Student Financial Aid News
Producer/Director, The Financial Aid Podcast
The Student Financial Aid News
A Publication of the Student Loan Network
1250 Hancock Street, Suite 703N
Quincy, MA 02169
(iPod and iTunes are registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.)
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Featured Article: Free Stuff 2005
Let's talk free. Free stuff, from music to software to resources for your education. First up: free money, in the form of scholarships.
The Scholarships Searching Secrets Guide from the Student Loan Network - free to Financial Aid Podcast subscribers. Subscribe today at:
http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com
Next - free software. If you find your copy of office software just isn't cutting it any more, you won't want to miss OpenOffice, a free office software suite with word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software, and database software, running on most computers that support commercial office software. Why pay hundreds of dollars when OpenOffice is a download away?
Free music. Legally, of course. There are tons of independent artists online, far more than will ever be signed to a major record label, and in some cases, far better than the labels. Artists like solo piano virtuoso Rob Costlow, great rock bands like Waltham, and mashups (remixes) of popular songs. The best part about the new wave of Podsafe Music is that it's not just a one way street - you can make your own Podcast and publish it online for the world to hear.
Free music at:
http://www.Garageband.com
http://www.PodsafeMusicNetwork.com
http://www.PodsafeAudio.com
Learn how to make your own podcast (Internet radio show):
Free tools to make podcasts:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net
http://www.castblaster.com
Free music management. Now that you've got tons of tunes downloaded, you'll need a way to organize them, and there's no way better than iTunes for Mac or PC. Free, plus access to the iTunes Music Store for legal music downloads at 99 cents per song. The newest version of iTunes has a podcast directory as well for you to find over 8,000 free podcasts of new music, news, education, and more. The Financial Aid Podcast is also available there!
http://www.iTunes.com
http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com
Free email. Google Mail is now available to the general public (as opposed to being invitation only) and of the free mail services, it's definitely one of the best, certainly worth a try.
Free firewall. If you're on campus, or on a campus network, you absolutely cannot do without a firewall for your PC. Macs and Linux have them built in, and as of Windows XP Service Pack 2, there's sort of a firewall built in, but it's not very good. Check out Zone Labs' ZoneAlarm Personal Firewall. It screens out hostile attacks and hackers, keeping your computer safe. Absolutely essential if you have high speed Internet access or are on a campus network! The basic edition, which meets the needs of 99% of surfers, is free.
Free spyware detection. Is someone spying on you? Recording what you do on the Internet? Go ahead and check for malicious software using Lavasoft's Ad-Aware 6 spyware detector. The software and updates are free.
Free web browser. The browser wars are not over, and when it comes to surfing safely, free of popups and spyware, there's no better browser than Mozilla Firefox. Stop scams - get Firefox.
Free encyclopedia. Need some information for a research paper? Start with the Wikipedia, the comprehensive online encyclopedia. With over half a million entries on everything from the arcane to pop culture, Wikipedia is an invaluable education resource. Give it a try!
Free maps. Surf the world - the real world - using Google Earth. Google Earth gives you incredible, enhanced satellite photos of the planet, and for major metropolitan areas, street level satellite photos. Awesome stuff.
Free photo management. If you own a Mac, you know the joy of iPhoto's simple digital photo management. If you own a PC, you used to have to shell out $129 for Adobe Photoshop Album. No more. Picasa, also a Google product, offers incredible photo management of all your pictures, totally free.
Free Internet telephone service. Like to talk to friends in far away places but don't want to chew up cell phone minutes? Try the Gizmo Project for Mac or PC. It's the best Internet telephone service out there. And hey, want to be on the Financial Aid Podcast? Call us using the Gizmo Project - just dial financialaidpodcast as the "phone" number.
Free blog. Blogs are a great way to record a diary as long as you don't mind it being public, and Blogger offers lots of good stuff for free.
Free magazines. If you are interested in a particular industry as a career, one of the best ways to learn a lot about it is to subscribe to its trade publications. Subscribe to them and have them mailed to your college address, and you can toss the associated junk mail later.
Announcement: Student Loan Consolidation
Got federal student loans? Now is the best time to consolidate your federal student loans. Lock in your rates before Congress has a chance to change the rules, and before interest rates rise again. Visit:
Plus, find out if you are eligible to receive last year's historic low rates!
Also, take our free survey and win a chance at a $15 iTunes Music Store Gift Card!
http://www.FinancialAidNews.com/show.php/consolidationsurvey/
With interest rates rising across the board, it's more important than ever to have the best tools available for your search for interest-free money, and that means scholarships. That includes free solutions like Google and premium solutions like Financial Aid Officer's Scholarship Search. For a nominal fee, you get access to an ever-increasing database of scholarship awards, more than 2.3 million worth $14 billion.
If you can't find the financial aid you're looking for online, try the FinancialAidOfficer.com Scholarship Search Service at
http://www.GotScholarships.com
How would you like to learn the inner secrets of searching for scholarships? The Scholarships Searching Secrets Guide from the Student Loan Network reveals the power tools and inner secrets of scholarship searching online, and it is free to Financial Aid Podcast subscribers and only available to Financial Aid Podcast subscribers. Subscribe today for free at:
http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com
And now a word from our sponsors...
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