If you’ve been looking for a student-oriented web site that will lead you to information resources, link you up with students at your school and give you a place to hang out online, try STUDENeT.
According to its home page, STUDENeT was “developed for students of all majors around the world.” Through this site, you can view categorized listings of educational resources, other students’ profiles and listings of various special-interest sites.
Soon you will be able to chat with other users in a virtual cafe, which will display student artwork and information on local bands.
Developed by San Diego students, including a San Diego State University graduate, STUDENeT is located at apple. sdsu.edu/STUDENeT/.
As a new member, you will be asked to fill out a user profile in the new users’ section. You will need to type in your name, state, country, school, date of graduation, class or grade level, major and minor. If available, you will be asked to include your home page and e-mail addresses. You can pick your user name and password here as well.
Optional information you can include is your sex, birthday, clubs and organizations in which you are involved, hobbies and a personal quote.
After submitting this information you can view your profile and make any changes. Other students will now be able to see your profile when they browse the members’ section.
You can view student profiles by major, minor, school or state.
By school, you can browse members at the Academy of Art; California State University, Northridge; SDSU; University of Southern California and the University of Toledo.
SDSU has the most members with 62, while others have only a few. If you find students who sound interesting, their e-mail addresses are almost always available.
Another area of the site is SN Zones. In this section you can search for web pages by subject, title, location or state.
The page now has 12 subject listings, which include humor, music, online magazines, sports and video games.
Examples of the 41 title listings include 4080 Hip Hop Online, Alta Vista, Famous Birthdays, and Sports Illustrated and Wired magazines.
The only two location sites are Stanford University and the University of California San Diego. California, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri and New York are listed in the state section, which also includes Australia and the United Kingdom.
A valuable part of the site for students doing research is Learning Resources, which lists sites in the same way as the zones section.
The subject section has sites listed mostly by major, and titles are listed alphabetically by site name.
Examples of the 170 sites listed by title are Albert Einstein Online, Amateur Astronomy Online, Police Pages and Skull Collection.
Many universities and research centers are listed by location, and other resource and official sites are listed by state.
The site also includes a search function, by which you can search the members, resources and zones sections.
What may soon be a very busy part of the site is the cafe. Scheduled to “open” Feb. 15, the cafe will include a bulletin board, chat rooms, journals, daily specials, an art gallery, poetry and local band information.
STUDENeT is now seeking student artwork and poetry to exhibit.
Already available through the cafe are coffee recipes, including cafe mocha, cafe frappe, coffee cola float and cafe Lagguccininci. (To find out what’s in that one, you’ll have to look at the site.)
The recipe section lists many alcoholic coffee recipes and a few coffee-enhanced desserts like banana sour cream coffee cake and Gevalia apple coffee cake.
Give STUDENeT a try. It could help you out on your next research project, and who knows, you might make a new friend.
