Life as a Dare

Making Every Moment Count

I’m Terrible With Gifts | Minted Haul

I am one of the worst gift-givers on the face of the planet.

So now that all my friends are graduating, it’s actually quite a source of stress for me. It’s pathetically hilarious how annoyed I get by gift-shopping, my sister can attest.

I just sit there and make sarcastic comments and then take 45 minutes to just end up buying that scarf that I saw five minutes after walking into the store.

I just don’t have “the gift” when it comes to buying gifts. 

See, I like practical gifts. I like things that say, “Here, I want to make your life more beautiful, and easier at the same time.”

That’s something I really like about Minted’s graduation gifts. They’re really good at making gifts that you can actually use, and gifts that really bring life to a room without just adding to the clutter.  [Read more…]

5 Graduation Gift Ideas Guaranteed to Make Her Smile!

Looking for graduation gift ideas?

Graduation season is upon us! And both my husband and I are graduating this year!

(OK, so technically I graudated in October last year, but my convocation is in June, and Connor won’t be done for a few months because he has 3 more courses to take, but we will both be finished our school this year. Phew. That was long-winded.)

It’s dawning on me what a huge deal graduation is. Whether you’re graduating from your undergrad, your college program, or a master’s, this is a huge feat!

You went into school unqualified for the majority of the jobs on the market. You went into school a child–you graduate an adult.  [Read more…]

How to Organize Your Notes To Stay Productive

In college, my life was a hot mess. But I knew how to organize your notes.

Seriously. I couldn’t be trusted to eat real food, so I had to have weeks’ worth of dinner servings in the freezer at any point. My room was always a mess because I lived off campus and I spent almost all my time either in the library or at Connor’s house. At any given moment I had over 100 unanswered emails in my inbox.

But my notes… oh, my notes.

My notes were perfect.

My notes were organized.

Because with everything else, I could fake it ’till I make it. Sure, my room was messy, but I didn’t let it spill into the common areas. And I just spent one day a month making food so I had a solid stock of dinner and lunches frozen for later. And every now and then I would power through that inbox. With my notes, though, there wasn’t really room for a slip-up. If my notes were disorganized or messy, my productivity was shot.

When you keep your notes organized, your time can be put towards studying, not reformatting your notes so they actually make sense.

[Read more…]

5 Things I Wish I Knew in Senior Year

Senior year. This is it. You’ve made it this far. 

Senior year and I had a very complicated relationship. I loved parts of it, like how in depth into the material we got, but other parts were, well… not so great. Most of the things that were difficult, though, weren’t so much about senior year as much as they were about me.

In senior year, I learned so much more about myself than I did in any of my courses. I think it’s that way for most people, but it was a definite learning curve for me. And many of these lessons I learned after they could have helped make my year that much better! So I wanted to make sure that you didn’t make the same mistakes I did, and had the best senior year you possibly could. Because it really is a blast.

[Read more…]

13 Reasons You Aren’t Reaching Your College Goals

How to get better grades–the question we’ve all asked a million times.

College can be really hard. And it can be very demoralizing when you don’t seem to reach a single one of your college goals. I’ve definitely been there before!

But every now and then, it’s important to take a step back and troubleshoot. Is there a reason you’re not getting the grades you need? And if we can find what that reason is, what’s the solution? Just worrying about your grades won’t accomplish anything, so let’s take some action steps to try and fix the problem!

[Read more…]