I just love learning about every possible way for kids to get money for college and this is a fun one, that’s for sure! The Gallery Collection is having a design-a-greeting-card contest for $10,000 in scholarship money! The contest is for high school, college, and university students. The kids have to be at least fourteen years old.

The part that I think is really cool is that photos, artwork, and computer graphics are welcome to be a part of your entry card! That is a lot of leeway room to explore and create! I would love it if they would make a book of all of the entries, so we could see what everyone designs!
They could just make it one of their extra ‘catalogs’, except that the cards wouldn’t really be for sale. I don’t know if they would really want to do that. But they do have a lot of cards for sale, with an extensive selection of business christmas cards.

I think it’s really awesome that a greeting card company, a company you don’t normally associate with education, is running a scholarship contest! That is a great way to give back to the community!

The one thing about the contest that I’m not sure about, though, is the age limit thing. They say that you must be at least fourteen years old, but, in the sign up form - the lowest grade level is ninth grade. My son, being born in September, is a fourteen year old eighth grader. I will have to contact them and see if I can get him in the contest or not.

At any rate, it is a wonderful thing they are doing! Way to go, Gallery Collection!

I think that a career in psychology would be very rewarding, and it would be really cool if one of my children decided to go that route. There is a really nice school from which you can get your psychology degree while you are still working - their college was actually designed for working people! It is the Chicago School Online, and yes, you can do distance learning through them. That is a new part of their program that they have implemented this year. The school was started in 1979 by practicing psychologists who wanted to start a not-for-profit training center for those entering the field. The school has a large focus on diversity and multicultural studies, because, they believe that multicultural awareness is so important in psychological therapy. It sounds to me like a really great school and an even better community - and I would just love it if my kids, or one of them, wound up there!

…and Patrick told me this morning that he would like to be one! Ok, well, I suppose he already is one! But what I mean is - he said he’d actually like to be a game designer! He saw a commercial for a college, I’m assuming like Collins College, where you can go and get a degree in game design and he was really excited about it. That would be so awesome!

We were in the car talking and I was telling him (like I have before) about how he really needs to start learning HTML and maybe get a website up and get an online business going. There are just so many kids doing that these days - and they literally amaze me!

What brought this up, again, was that yesterday I was reading an article about Ashley, known affectionately by her legions of fans, as Ashbo. She owns and operates the site, WhateverLife.com. She started out just making layouts for MySpace, and that is still a big bulk of what she does, although, she has very smartly added other tools to her business arsenal. I have been watching this girl for some time now, and I am in complete awe of her.

But the thing is, she is not the only one. There are plenty, and I do mean plenty, of teens and young twenties, making a living online - some of them actually in the millions! What an amazing and exciting time we are living in!

And I would love for all of my kids to get a leg up, and start learning some of this stuff now, before they even go off to college! And it looks like at Collins College, you can even start some of their courses while you are still a senior in high school! That is so cool, I know that my nephew is doing that through one of the local colleges, and I would love for my kids to do it, too!

I was just reading about this amazing culinary arts program at this site, http://www.twincitiesculinary.com and it got me to thinking. One of the (many) things that made it difficult to leave the North Dallas area, was the fact that one of our high schools had some awesome magnet programs that my boys would have loved! There was a robotics program, that really they both would have enjoyed, but, they also had a culinary arts program that Shawn would have really loved!

I mean, really, how cool would it be to be in high school and have a major focus of your study be robotics? I knew some boys when I was in high school that would have so dug that!

And my sweet Shawn has been watching cooking shows since he was two years old. I am not even exaggerating! I remember that he would sit through two thirty minute shows back to back, and I was completely amazed! What two year old sits still that long, let alone for cooking shows? I just thought that was too funny!

So when we were back in Dallas, and I kept passing the high school with these great programs, I kept getting really sad. I wondered if I’d made a big mistake by moving. But then, my husband reminded me of the heavy gang activity in that school! And that really relieved me a lot! And besides, he could always go to a culinary college!

GO READ A BOOK!