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If your kid's wrapping up her internship soon, here's something to think about: experts say to end it with a bang, not a whimper. According to newswise.com, an employer is more likely to offer a graduate a full-time job if she's had an internship prior to graduation, by about 20%, up from 12/6% five years ago. And colleges, which know this, are amping up their abilities to get their students these kinds of early job opportunities. I had two internships early in my journalism career and I know that one of them led directly to a job two days after I graduated at my local newspaper, where I'd had one of the internships.   "Soon-to-be-seniors are hoping to land the job offer before crossing the stage in May and performing well in an internship that matches their skills and interests can make that happen," says Patrick Sullivan, an expert in career education who focuses on internships at Wake Forest University. But even if students perform well in an in...

It almost caused me to drop out (just kidding!) but a new study has found that schools that emphasize math and science see more of their populations drop out . According to newswise.com, as U.S. high schools beef up math and science requirements for graduation, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have found that more rigorous academics drive some students to drop out. “There’s been a movement to make education in the United States compare more favorably to education in the rest of the world, and part of that has involved increasing math and science graduation requirements,” explained first author Andrew D. Plunk, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine. “There was an expectation that this was going to be good for students, but the evidence from our analyses suggests that many students ended up dropping out when school was made harder for them,” he added. Hmm...  Wonder where Com...

Turns out teens have so much trouble getting enough sleep because their melatonin levels are lower than in childhood, and when your kid tells you he just can't fall asleep early enough to get up on time, believe him.  It's true, Dr. Max Gomez says on CBS TV New York. It's biology. Of course, I'm watching this while trying to wake up my son from a sleep that resembles hibernation (one morning I just couldn't, no amount of shaking his arm, yelling or threats worked, though I didn't try the one others swear by, cold water). But it turns out that kids who are home-schooled and usually wake 20 minutes AFTER most schools have started, do better.  These kids, on average, Dr. Gomez says, sleep 90 more minutes than kids who go to regular schools, So what?  Home-schooled kids supposedly do better -- graduating at higher rates, getting better grades and ready to jump into lessons shortly after they wake up, while other kids can take up to two hours to start functioni...