Earning Money

I know, I know, you look at a soda can and go, “yeah right, there is no way in hell that I can make money from this. Sure, five cents, but what is five cents going to do for me?” That’s true, what can five cents do for you? Nothing at all. But what if you controlled all the cans on campus? What if you went around campus once a day after all your classes were over, collected a bunch of bags of cans, put them in your car and then drove to the store? You cashed them in and voila, you have made some money. But, how can you make money on getting cans around campus?

Here is an idea that you should play around with. If you get permission from your school and say that this is an effort to ‘clean the school up and give back to the environment,’ you can easily get permission to put boxes or bags around campus for cans. Schools are always looking for things like that. They will see that you are doing a ‘good deed’ and they’ll eat it right up. So, you go around and place one or two boxes in each dorm building or on each floor of each dorm building. Now, the next step is actually letting people know what you are going to do with the cans. A lot of people just throw the cans in their garbage and that’s lost profit.

Here is where you get permission to put fliers up around campus asking for people to, rather than throwing their soda cans, their beer cans, their beer bottles and their soda bottles in the garbage, they take just half a second longer and throw it into your box or bag. By doing this, people may find it intriguing and some may just do it because they want to say they are helping the environment. And in a sense, they are helping the environment. Now, you may still be asking yourself how in the world this can make you any money. A can only gives you five cents and that right there is nothing. And, you will need twenty cans to make a dollar.

Consider if your school is one thousand people strong. That is extremely small for a college, but let’s just say for argument’s sake, your school is one people strong. Thursday night, five hundred people decide to get drunk. So, two thousand cans of beer are bought for those five hundred people (assuming each person only drinks four beers). And they do their drinking. Now, let’s just say five hundred cans find their way to your bags. Voila, you have just made $25.00 on someone else’s money spending. Now, what about schools that are 25,000 people strong? Can you imagine the possibilities?

Now, the only downfall would be the counting of said cans. So, what you could do in a sense is devise a method so that you know EXACTLY how many cans can fit in each box. Perhaps set up each box with slots so that each can fits. By doing this, you are ensuring that when you go to a beer deposit store, you can get what you deserve and it saves a lot of time of counting. But, as you can see, if you have a lot of people on campus and a lot of people drinking beer, you are going to make a lot of money. But, do keep in mind that you are going to have to do some work and you are going to want to try and invent some way to ensure that you are getting the cans counted. Good luck doing this, though.

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College is a place of learning. You know that. Moreover, you should try to learn not only from your professors but from your classmates. Glean from the wisdom of others rather than brutal personal experience. I go on this tangent because I want to share with you some information I have gained over the years.

In college you must electronically submit papers to be scanned for plagiarism. These documents most likely must be in .doc format. The most popular program to write in this format is Microsoft Word. However, most laptops and student computers sold today do not come with a full program of Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office for students costs over $100. I am here to tell you that you do have options.

On the Internet you can download a program called OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a freeware program that allows you to create text documents, presentations, and databases in the most popular formats. It also allows you to open all .docs created with Microsoft Word. There are only small instances where the formatting does not completely transfer. If you only use Microsoft Word for writing term papers, why pay over $100 when you can get the same program for free?

I encourage you to try out OpenOffice and see if it fits your needs. There is no harm done in merely trying the program as it is a freeware program with no catches. (Note: If you run a Mac and do not want to install X11 on your OS, try NeoOffice. It is a Mac version of OpenOffice and available through the Apple website. It too is free and what I am running on this laptop.)

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