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Simply having a college degree will not get you hired. We need to break away from this idea. In all reality, most employers could care less about your GPA or where you went to school.

Today, getting hired in entry-level positions requires experience and fine-tuned skills, not a 4.0 GPA. This probably isn’t what most new grads want to hear, but it’s the truth.

Many new college graduates enter their job search with a why-wouldn’t-someone-hire-me mindset. But most employers aren’t going to take on an entry-level hire unless they’re certain they’ll positively impact the company.

So the real question for new graduates to consider is this: What can you bring to the table that makes you worth hiring?

Here’s some food for thought for those entering the workforce:

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Florida teen Kiera Wilmot, 16, deserved some good news after being the target of a racist legal system, arrested and expelled for causing a small explosion during a science experiment. And she received it in the form of an unexpected scholarship to attend the United States Advanced Space Academy (ASA) from former NASA engineer Homer Hickam, reports the Black Youth Project.

As previously reported by NewsOne, on the morning of Monday, April 20,  Kiera mixed some household chemicals inside of an 8 oz. bottle of water. The top flew off the bottle and a cloud of smoke erupted.

There was no damage caused and no one was injured, but Kiera was led away in handcuffs and faced possible charges of “possession/discharge of a weapon on school grounds and discharging a destructive device.

”She made a bad choice. Honestly, I don’t think she meant to ever hurt anyone,” principal Ron Pritchard told WTSP. “She wanted to see what would happen [when the chemicals mixed] and was shocked by what it did. Her mother is shocked, too.”

Kiera was expelled, served a 10-day suspension  and will have to complete her diploma in an expulsion program.

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We are increasingly confronted by more and more content, and that is why many of us appreciate services that help us discover the gems. Google tackles the problem with advanced search algorithms, but we also rely on brands and publishers. Another solution, to the problem, is the role of the curator. Do you want to learn what curating is? Please watch the video.

Many companies and organizations use influencers to help them reach out to people. Curators are an interesting breed of influencers. However their full potential can only be understood and appreciated through the lens of their tribes. Tribes are groups of people gathering around strong passions or emotions like hiking, gardening or ABBA. Curators do not work in isolation, but in relation to the people that share their passions.

I was in a discussion with Olga Kravets, a netnographer, and she proposed that curators serve their tribe like dumpster divers. They dive into containers to rummage through heaps of garbage to find useful stuff that can be re-purposed. When they are done they bring forth their scavenged gifts to their tribe.

Something really interesting happens in the curation process, because stories don’t have intrinsic value. An unshared story is basically like rubbish, lying around without any value. Stories gain their meaning and value by sharing, but it’s not as simple as that. The curator imparts her own value, status and trust, upon the story.

Curators represent a new type of tribal leadership that operates bottom-up and peer to peer. As a member of a tribe, curators will always be more native and relevant than any outsiders will ever be. Within a tribe they are not only appreciated for leveraging their insider skills, but for sustaining and developing their culture.

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Last week Heritage Foundation scholar Jason Richwine, coauthor of a hotly disputed new study on the fiscal costs of comprehensive immigration reform, resigned his position in a hail of controversy over his 2009 Harvard Ph.D. dissertation. In that dissertation Richwine had argued, among other things, that American "Hispanics" are less intelligent than native-born whites as evidenced by their lower average scores on IQ tests. Richwine then attributed Hispanics' alleged intellectual inferiority at least partly to genetic factors.

The Richwine affair is just the latest flap in a long-running dispute over the significance of IQ tests and group differences in IQ scores. It's easy enough to shut down that debate with cries of racism, but stigmatizing a point of view as morally tainted isn't the same thing as demonstrating that it's untrue. Here I want to explain why Richwine's position is intellectually as well as morally unsound.

Let's start with the fact that there is no such thing as a direct test of general mental ability. What IQ tests measure directly is the test-taker's display of particular cognitive skills: size of vocabulary, degree of reading comprehension, facility with analogies, and so on. Any conclusions about general mental ability are inferences drawn from the test-taker's relative mastery of those various skills.

How justified are such inferences? Well, it depends. Without a doubt, the skills assessed on modern IQ tests are widely applicable and highly valued in contemporary American society. Accordingly, considered just as a measure of skills rather than as a proxy for underlying ability, IQ scores clearly tell us something of genuine importance. They are a reasonably good predictor not only of performance in the classroom but of income, health, and other important life outcomes.

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What exactly is a MOOC? Like most interesting things in this world, the term avoids simple definition.

For instance, what constitutes a course? A particular body of knowledge to be delivered? Except maybe in the case of skill-based classes, like a writer's workshop. A start and end date? Except maybe in the case of self-paced, on-demand online courses. Interactions between students and instructors? Except maybe in the case of entirely computer-mediated courses or older correspondence courses. Certification or recognition of completion? Except in courses that don't offer them. A learning experience? That must be too broad, or sitting here reading this post would constitute a course.

If we can't even define exactly what a course is, how can we possibly hope to provide a clear sense of what constitutes a Massive Open Online Course?

One thing that people then do, in the ambiguous space left by our inadequate ability to precisely define, is to use analogies. We define things by comparing them to other things.

In popular discourse of MOOCs, two dominant analogies seem to have emerged in making sense of MOOCs: MOOCs as textbooks and MOOCs as courses. Consider the open letter to Harvard professor Michael Sandel published by the San Jose State University Philosophy Department. The letter explains why the philosophy department refuses to pilot Sandel's JusticeX course.

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We like to view higher education as the "great equalizer" that leads to social mobility. But selective colleges have long been accused of perpetuating class divides, rather than blurring them.

A recent landmark study by Stanford's Caroline Hoxby and Harvard's Christopher Avery lent further empirical evidence to this accusation, finding that high-achieving low-income students do not have access to selective schools. The study showed that the mismatch is due to a lack of knowledge, not quality. Low-income students outside of major urban centers do not even apply to the top-tier colleges for which they are qualified.

Many commentators and the study authors themselves have looked for ways to alleviate this mismatch. A follow-up study found that supplying basic information to applicants could substantially increase the number of low-income students applying to more selective schools. Just giving low-income kids packets of information helped them apply to better schools.

Yet while the information gaps are real and need to be addressed, there is a much deeper structural problem. If most top colleges wanted to be truly equitable, they could not be with their current business model. There is not a golden pot of low-income applicants that schools want but are failing to reach. Instead, many schools don't want more low-income students because they won't be able to pay for them without a major overhaul of school funding practices. Outside of the handful of super-elite universities with fortress endowments, colleges' finances are currently designed around enrolling a disproportionately high number of high-income students. These schools could not afford to support more low-income or middle-income students absent either a huge increase in tuition, a commensurate reduction in spending, or a dramatic change in public funding.

In fact, schools are already moving away from a more equitable system. Colleges actively recruit "full pay" students who can attend and will not need financial aid. A 2011 survey by Inside Higher Ed found that about 35 percent of admissions directors at 4-year institutions, particularly public colleges, had increased their efforts to target "full pay" students. Far from wanting to enroll more low-income students, colleges recruit more affluent ones who will pay full price to attend.

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Many of you want to start a company. I certainly did. But I knew I wasn’t ready when I graduated.

You probably think starting a company is risky. When I started my first business, most of my friends thought I was a crazy risk-taker. I couldn’t disagree more—I had raised money from investors and wouldn’t be financially ruined if I failed. That would be true risk. That said, I did put my reputation at risk, especially with the investors, who were people I desperately didn’t want to disappoint. While I didn’t feel risk, I felt an immense amount of discomfort and stress.

The key skill you must master for life as an entrepreneur is to be comfortable taking calculated, or safe, risks. I call this feeling “being over your skis.” It’s the feeling of losing control when you’ve hit a jump and are flying through the air. Worst case? You’ll land in powder and have a bruised ego. But you’ll emerge a stronger skier.

Prepare yourself now by always being slightly uncomfortable. Make career choices that others view as risky, but that you know have limited downside.

Shortly after graduation, I moved from my small hometown in Virginia to Los Angeles to work in the film industry. I was a quintessential fish out of water. I knew little about filmmaking and only knew a handful of people. It was intimidating and scary, but I did it anyway. Ultimately Hollywood was not for me, but I ended up with the right mindset to get in the door in the Internet industry.

Start small in taking safe risks by interviewing for a job you know nothing about. Or by emailing people you admire and asking for an informational interview. Then move on to volunteering for a highly visible project in your company. Challenge yourself to find discomfort by focusing on your weaknesses. If you’re not good at sales, find a way to start selling a product or service at your company. If you’re intimidated by technology, teach yourself to code and ask your CTO to review your work.

I practiced taking safe risks until the discomfort of starting a company was just bearable enough that I could actually do the work of starting a company.

By the time I asked investors for hundreds of thousands of dollars in seed financing, it was stressful but not paralyzing.

The best part about learning by taking smart risks and staying uncomfortable is that you’ll always emerge stronger. This will help you have a better, fuller life, even if you never actually want to start a business.

Ultimately, the real risk in life is that you’ll depart this world not accomplishing what you want—and what you are capable of doing.

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When David Karp was 14, he was clearly a bright teenager. Quiet, somewhat reclusive, bored with his classes at the Bronx High School of Science. He spent most of his free time in his bedroom, glued to his computer.

But instead of trying to pry him away from his machine or coaxing him outside to get some fresh air, his mother, Barbara Ackerman, had another solution: she suggested that he drop out of high school to be home-schooled.

“I saw him at school all day and absorbed all night into his computer,” said Ms. Ackerman, reached by phone Monday afternoon. “It became very clear that David needed the space to live his passion. Which was computers. All things computers.”

Clearly.

Now 26 years old, Mr. Karp never finished high school or enrolled in college. Instead, he played a significant role in several technology start-ups before founding Tumblr, the popular blogging service that agreed to be sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion this week. With an expected $250 million from the deal, Mr. Karp joins a tiny circle of 20-something entrepreneurs, hoodie-wearing characters like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, who have struck it rich before turning 30.

“When I first met David he was 20 years old and wearing sneakers and jeans,” said Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Spark Capital, who was one of the first people to invest in Tumblr. “But I knew he was one of these rare entrepreneurs that grew up on the Web and who could come up with an idea, build it himself, and then ship it that night.”

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With the economy stuck in neutral, tuition prices and student loan debt skyrocketing, and parents and students increasingly questioning the value of a college degree, our public institutions urgently need a different approach to the challenge or educating an increasingly diverse mix of students at a reasonable cost.

Today, New America's Education Policy Program released The Next Generation University, a policy report about the future of public higher education. The report comes at a time when too many public universities are failing to respond to the nation's higher education crisis. Rather than expanding enrollment and focusing limited dollars on the neediest of students, many institutions are instead restricting enrollments and encouraging the use of student-aid dollars on merit awards. But, according to the report, some schools are breaking the mold by boldly restructuring operating costs and creating clear, accelerated pathways for students.

The report focuses on six public research universities: Arizona State University, University at Buffalo, University of California at Riverside, University of Central Florida, Georgia State University, and the University of Texas at Arlington. These universities are continuing their commitment to world class research while increasing enrollment and graduation rates, even as the investments from their states have declined.

The report includes case studies on each of the six universities, which were selected after an analysis of federal education data, site visits, and interviews. Based on similarities in their approaches to reform, the report's recommendations include:

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Something big is up in higher education thanks to the advent of “massive open online courses” (MOOCs), which can reach millions around the world. What most people—including university leaders—don’t yet realize is that this new way of teaching and learning, together with employers’ growing frustration with the skills of graduates, is poised to usher in a new credentialing system that may compete with college degrees within a decade.

This emerging delivery regime is more than just a distribution mechanism; done right, it promises students faster, more consistent engagement with high-quality content, as well as measurable results. This innovation therefore has the potential to create enormous opportunities for students, employers, and star teachers even as it upends the cost structure and practices of traditional campuses.

Capturing the promise of this new world without losing the best of the old will require fresh ways to square radically expanded access to world-class instruction with incentives to create intellectual property and scholarly communities, plus university leaders savvy enough to shape these evolving business models while they still can.

Consider the first of the two converging trends. As is well known, frustration with the performance of traditional institutions is mounting. Only six in ten students at four-year institutions are graduating within six years today. Most employers say graduates lack the skills they need. Tuition has risen far faster than inflation or household earnings for two decades.

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A pocket of water some 2.6 billion years old — the most ancient pocket of water known by far, older even than the dawn of multicellular life — has now been discovered in a mine 2 miles below the Earth's surface.

The finding, announced in the May 16 issue of the journal Nature, raises the tantalizing possibility that ancient life might be found deep underground not only within Earth, but in similar oases that may exist on Mars, the scientists who studied the water said.

Geoscientist Barbara Sherwood Lollar at the University of Toronto and her colleagues have investigated deep mines across the world since the 1980s. Water can flow into fractures in rocks and become isolated deep in the crust for many years, serving as a time capsule of what their environments were like at the time they were sealed off.

In gold mines in South Africa 1.7 miles (2.8 kilometers) deep, the scientists previously discovered microbes could survive in pockets of water isolated for tens of millions of years. These reservoirs were many times saltier than seawater, "and had chemistry in many ways similar to hydrothermal vents on the bottom of the ocean, full of dissolved hydrogen and other chemicals capable of supporting life," Sherwood Lollar said. [Strangest Places Where Life Is Found on Earth]

To see what other ancient pockets of water might exist, Sherwood Lollar and her colleagues investigated copper and zinc mines near the city of Timmins in Ontario, Canada. "As the prices of copper, zinc and gold have gone up, mines now go deeper, which has helped our search for long-isolated reservoirs of water hidden underground," Sherwood Lollar said.

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“So little time, so much to do.”

In a recent blog post entitled, “5 Reasons Virtual Worlds Died” [1], Simon Newstead, the CEO of mobile games company, Frenzoo, paints a dismal picture of the slow decline in people’s participation in virtual worlds. He mentions the Second Life® environment by name and appears to be referring heavily to it in his list of criticism. And if not, he’s thinking in terms of the more “open, user-created” types of world, rather than the tightly constrained Halo® or Call of Duty® scenarios.

To summarize, he argues that virtual worlds have (a) no purpose or goals,
(b) no quick feedback, (c) no theme, (d) too much of a learning curve for newbies, and (d) the needs of players in these worlds can be met else-
where.

This may be true of Second Life or OpenSim grids but according to figures published in 2012, the online gaming community is still pretty strong and generating a lot of cash. A report generated by the marketing and consult-
ing firm DFC Intelligence revealed that players of the game League of Legends logged over 1.3 billion hours of activity during the year, followed by a more modest – but still impressive – 600,000 hours logged by World
of Warcraft devotees.

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