Mel Sundquist’s portfolio

Originally published in the UVU Review on June 30, 2008.

At RateMyProfessors.com, college students can leave comments on and judge all of their professors. They can say how much they learned and if the teacher was unintelligible, funny, or even attractive.

As of this paper’s printing, the site has 1,145 professors listed for UVU, and there are still eleven listed under UVSC. This makes RateMyProfessors.com a valuable resource for students here when the time comes to register for classes.

When using UVU’s self-registration service online, it becomes too easy to choose a class based on the time it’s given, or how many seats are left. However, when you actually start taking the class, those are not the factors that will influence your time in that class the most. Your professor can make or break not only your GPA, but your college experience as a whole.

Feedback can be left anonymously, so there is no threat to your grade if you leave a negative comment. Also, professors can now publish a rebuttal to negative comments if they would like, which has the potential to tell more about the professors than the original comments by students.

To leave a comment on a professor, no proof that the rater actually took the class is required. There is an optional place to enter your grade and which specific class you took, but in general, the angrier students don’t provide that information. So take each comment with a grain of salt, because they’re certainly not all true.

Published in The College Times on June 2, 2008.

Everybody and their dog has a blog (or two) these days. This creates limitless sources of information and inspiration. But all of that data can be hard to organize.

You can try using a simple rss feed to marshal your favorite blogs, but it can be messy and frustrating. Or you could flag all of your favorite blogs in your bookmarks, but then you still have to visit each individual website, which can be a pain if your internet connection isn’t capable of warp speed.

The answer to the problem? Bloglines.com. Here, you can set up your own account, complete with a totally customizable set of feeds. That’s right, you can read every post you want, all while staying on one website.

Bloglines also makes it easy to find new blogs to read — a bit too easy. You can see who else is loyal to any one of your favorite feeds, and then see what other blogs they read. You can find other users with similar tastes, and poach their feeds. Pretty soon, you’ll find yourself addicted to hundreds of blogs.
Bloglines is still in beta, which means that there are sure to be some kinks to smooth out. The most annoying item on this website’s list of cons is that with some blogs, you can’t read entire posts via Bloglines. They’ll give you a summary or the first paragraph, and from there you can follow the link to the actual post. This is generally set up by the blog owner, so that their website will generate more traffic.