Your decision to pursue your education to college requires a lot of adaptation to the new environment. This stage of your life is usually the stepping ground of being independent to your parents. Because of that, you may at times feel like you are lost and do not know what to do. Your parents are not there anymore to watch your moves, wash your clothes, and cook your food—you must do these at your own.

Studying in college is a serious task. You must not take this phase for granted because this is the stepping-stone of your future. Because of this nature, you have no time to cook for your own food anymore. Actually, you have no time to eat your meals—not until you feel your stomach crunching. Your last resort then is to eat in your nearest college cafeteria. You must be very aware and careful on what food you eat. You must not eat just for the sake of eating. You must eat for your health.

As a college student, you must bear in your mind that health is very important. No matter how hard you study your lessons, it is still useless if you cannot attend your classes because of your poor health condition. College cafeteria knew this fact for long so all they serve are healthy foods. They make sure that their menus for the whole day will give a balance diet for their customers. When you are a food specialist and try to observe their food lists, you will be amazed that their dishes are not just foods—they are healthy foods.

Another thing that you can observe with college cafeteria menus is that they are budget friendly despite its health awareness. College students’ moms have nothing to worry about their child’s diet for college cafeteria are there to make sure that the food they eat are not just ordinary foods. Your task of serving your child a healthy food everyday is not at stake with the help of college cafeterias.

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It’s the last week of April, college crunch time. You may be both recovering from the disappointment of rejection and worrying about which school that accepted you is best. Here are my five mental health tips for surviving this moment:

1. Those rejections aren’t the problem.

University of South Florida education professor Sherman Dorn says the greatest barriers for college-bound students “will not be the inability to be admitted into every place [they] apply” but instead getting the money for college, dealing with university budget cuts and surviving the daunting academic demands of the first semester. Dorn chides education writers like me who bemoan great students getting rejected by their first choices but who ignore the fact that they almost all get into good schools.

2. If you don’t like the college you chose, it’s easy to get another one.

We have a former college transfer student in the White House. He moved from Occidental College to Columbia University his junior year. About 20 percent of students who start at one four-year college graduate from another four-year college. Many more start at two-year colleges then move to four-year schools. People who say picking a college is as important as picking a spouse are wrong. It’s more like buying a house: If you discover that the neighbors are raising pit bulls or the bad soil ruins your tomatoes, just sell it and buy another one.

3. Your future success doesn’t depend on whether your grandmother has heard of your college.

Database researcher Stacy Berg Dale, now at Mathematica Policy Research, and Princeton economist Alan B. Krueger wrote a paper in 1999 titled “Estimating the Payoff to Attending a More Selective College: An Application of Selection on Observables and Unobservables.” It revealed that students accepted by selective colleges but who decided to attend non-selective ones were making just as much money 20 years later as those who attended the selective, brand-name schools. Those prestigious colleges were good at recruiting students who had the character traits, such as persistence, humor and charm, that produced success in life. But students with those qualities who went to colleges rarely mentioned in the rankings did just as well. It is your character that makes the difference. Work hard, and all will be well.

4. Your college will have many Ivy League-quality students and professors.

Admissions officers at colleges that reject 80 or 90 percent of applicants readily admit that there is no difference between the applicants they accept and large numbers of the applicants they reject. As proof of that, some wait-list more students than they accept. In the case of very selective colleges, the number of rejected high-quality applicants can be two or three times as large as the admitted freshman class. Some of those disappointed but brilliant people, like you, will go to your school and give it the intellectual fizz and take-charge energy you find at the Ivies. Universities such as Rutgers, James Madison and Salisbury, for instance, admit slightly more students than they reject but are great places to learn. They get not only a spillover of Ivy League-quality students, but also Ivy League-quality professors.

5. Whatever your mood now, you will be happy once you ditch your parents.

Maybe you developed a taste for NCAA basketball championships and are heartsick at being rejected by Duke. Maybe you won’t be enjoying the milkshakes at the Peninsula Creamery because Stanford shunned you. No matter. You got in somewhere that has some intriguing features. For the first time, you get to decide what you do every day. In just four months, you will be making friends and sampling new experiences in what are likely to be the most unsettling, strenuous and exciting years of your life. Enjoy.

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Figures released for the first time show 700 senior staff in state schools earn more than £100,000, including 200 who are paid over £110,000.

The true figure is likely to be much higher because hundreds of schools failed to disclose proper salary details.

The details emerged as the NASUWT union called for heads’ salaries to be published – putting them on par with council chief executives and quango bosses – to stop pay being “abused”.

Last year, it was revealed that Mark Elms, head of Tidemill Primary School in south-east London, was given a remuneration package of £276,523 for 2009/10, including employers’ pension, back-dated pay and fees for helping other schools.

Another head, Jacqui Valin, from Southfields Community College in south-west London, was handed a £20,594 pay rise in 2009/10 – up 11 per cent – to take her salary to £198,406.

It also emerged that Michael Wilkins, head of Outwood Grange Academy in Wakefield, received almost £100,000 extra for work at other schools in 2009 – on top of his £130,000 salary.

The NASUWT said many schools were bypassing strict Government rules on pay by rebranding senior staff as “executive heads” or allowing them to take lucrative second jobs as consultants.

It was claimed that flagship academies, which are state funded but independent of local council control, were also being allowed to award huge salaries because they are not bound by national pay deals.

Data published by the DfE for the first time shows 500 senior teachers earn between £100,000 and £109,999 in the current academic year, including some 100 heads and deputies in academies. A further 200 head teachers earn more than £110,000.

The numbers are likely to be much higher as hundreds of schools failed to report senior staff pay properly, figures suggest.

The data represents a snap-shot of teachers’ pay in November 2010. John Howson, head of research firm Education Data Surveys, said top salaries are likely to have soared in the last 12 months, although this is the first time the figures have been published in this form.

The GMB union has claimed as many as 100 state school heads earn more than David Cameron’s salary of £147,000.

Chris Keates, NASUWT general secretary, called for all head teachers’ salaries to be published. The same rules currently exist for MPs, councillors, local authority chief executives and the heads of public sector quangos.

Speaking at the union’s annual conference in Glasgow, she said the Government had created an “anything goes” culture in which schools do not have to stick to national pay deals.

“We’ve heard of a number of head teachers taking schools through to academy conversion, calling themselves executive heads and saying now they’ve got more responsibility they should get more pay,” she said.

“There’s no rationale or debate about it.

“There were examples from the South West by a delegate who raised them about a number of heads calling themselves executive heads, and just because they have changed their title, and they were in small primary schools, they were getting between £100,000 and £160,000.”

According to figures, the average member of the senior leadership team – typically, heads, deputies and assistant heads – earns £55,170, rising to £62,100 in academies.

Pay for heads of large schools in London – which can pay the most because of the high cost of living – is normally capped at around £110,000.

But governors can pay more to recruit and retain the very best heads and independent academies are not constrained by the same deal.

In a study last year, the GMB union said some heads were receiving a generous pay increase despite the recession.

The NASUWT said one academy in the Midlands had almost a third of its staff on the leadership pay grade – giving them a minimum of £45,000.

Miss Keates said inflated salaries were often awarded “on the nod rather than on production of rigorous evidence to identify why this is” and these “abuses” had to be curbed.

“We have called for the publication of head teachers’ pay,” she added.

“Why should they be exempt from chief executives in the public sector that have to have their salaries published?

“We need more rigorous decision making.”

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For generations, the passing of time on the Occidental campus has been marked by the playing of the Westminster chimes, the familiar 200-year-old English melody used in clocks around the world to mark the quarter hours.

Today, thanks to a suggestion from President Jonathan Veitch, the passage of time is now an opportunity to feature the work of three faculty composers, each of whom wrote an original piece of music to be played on the Johnson Student Center carillon bells.

The new compositions “carry an element of surprise, signaling that things are going on here at Occidental, things that are out of the ordinary,” Veitch said at the formal unveiling of the pieces during the College’s Founders Day observance on April 12, the annual celebration of Occidental’s founding in 1887.

“The clock tower is something that unites us, when we hear it on the quarter hour. These new compositions signal a commitment to creative expression, doing something a little bit different with our lives together here on campus,” he said.

Each of the faculty composers from the Music Department – Andre Myers, Bruno Louchouarn, and Jennifer Logan – offered a few words on their work, whose debut coincided with the start of the College’s annual Spring Arts Festival, a week-long series of art exhibits, literary readings, film screenings, and dance, music and theater performances.

Myers’ electronic composition, “The Occidental Quarters,” is a work inspired by the Westminster quarters. “I’ve heard the Westminster quarters all my life, and one of the great things about the them is that the passage of time is the principal means by which the entire musical statement is realized,” he said. “It’s a piece that consists mostly of space–of our life in what composer John Cage might call ‘in its method of daily operation.’”

Louchouarn recorded the voices of members of the Oxy community speaking words such as “time,” “world,” “hour,” as well as the number one through 12, “and used the words to shape the sound of the bells. Much of the essence of the people here can be found in the spoken word” he said of his piece, “Vox Campanorum” (“The Voice of the Bells.”)

“This was a great chance to create music in a space that really does connect us,” Logan said of her piano-based work, “Meditation on Time and Timelessness.” “I created something gentle, something dreamlike, a fairy tale of sorts, in which we can stop and lose ourselves in a moment of wonder and fantasy.”

Veitch has been a major supporter and promoter of arts on campus, commissioning faculty to write original pierces of music to be performed at Commencement and create prominent campus artworks. “Los Angeles is a city of artistic ferment, and Occidental can and should participate in that ferment,” he said in his inaugural speech.

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