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Web and video conferencing is all the rage right now. With families and friends further apart it is a great way for them to stay in touch with each other. I know that I feel extremely lucky to grow up and be in college in a day and age where I am able to talk to my friends over the internet and video conferencing all at once even though they are hundreds and even thousands of miles away. A lot of my good friends from high school are studying abroad all over, from Barcelona to Paris to Australia to London and I am able to keep in touch with them and talk to them online anytime I want.

The connection is great and even though I am not great (and by not great I mean terrible) with technology I was able to figure it all out. I went to best buy to get a camera for my laptop and the man told me about having a secure video and all that entails and also about all of the web conferencing features and how to turn on the microphone and how to hook everything up together.

I got home from best buy so confused and dreading the set up but it really took only minutes and then later that day I was talking to two different friends (one from Barcelona and one from Iowa) and the same time. It is even better than having a phone because we can all talk at once and we can see each other. I can be doing my homework in my room or cleaning or even eating and walk around and talk to them and they can see my room and house (we carried our computers around to give a tour ha).

It is such a great opportunity having this kind of technology. I am even able to talk to my dad face to face (well through the computer) whenever I want and my little sister gets on too. She's ten and she always has so much to tell and show me and now I can see her school projects and still stay involved in her life.

I feel like even though we are miles apart my friends and I have only gotten closer through the distance, which sounds weird, but technology definitely has brought us much closer to each other over the past three years that we have been away from home and each other.

College is such an interesting time in our lives because we are really given everything we need to succeed in one place and then left to decide if we would like to go through with it ourselves. Most of us don't have some kind of an overhanging circumstance or consequence that is there for us to see if we do not finish with our schooling. So essentially all of the incentivizing that we all really do need to do something like this which is the greatest project of our lives needs to come from either our parents or from our own understanding of what the future holds. This of course is slanted more towards our parents because most of us have never had to think about things that far in the future so we wouldn't naturally understand what things will unfold for us and what things obviously from the outset would not. If we are someone though who is internally or externally motivated in a positive way then we have ourselves an advantage over those who simply are pushed to be here by parents. It is in this situation that we can find things about our time here at college that make our future more rich and our time here more useful.

We all know the stereotype of college being the image of Animal House without a care in the world and where all of the students simply party all of the time. This may be the reality for those who wish to live it, but college these days is far too expensive for most and it is a lot harder to make up for even one semester of slacking off in the long run because those grades follow you and stick to you no matter what college you go to. For this and for the simple reason that your future is much more stable if you try to find balance earlier in life between fun and play, it is important to us college not only as a social blossoming but also as a professional tool. It really is so much easier these days to get some type of an education that you don't even need to do all of your schooling within a classroom. E-learning is a form of online training which makes getting your degree more flexible and more independent if you can handle it. You can get any number of certifications or trainings like windows server 2008 training which just makes you look better and makes your future jobs possibilities easier even in a poor economy like this one.