In colleges around the country, most students are also workers. The reality of college can be pretty different from the images presented in movies and television. Instead of the students who wake up late, party all the time, and study only before exams, many colleges are full of students with pressing schedules of not just classes and activities, but real jobs, too.

    This isn't a temporary phenomenon. The share of working students has been on the rise since the 1970s, and one-fifth of students work year round. About one-quarter of those who work while attending school have both a full-course load and a full-time job. The arrangement can help pay for tuition (学费) and living costs, obviously. And there's value in it beyond the direct cause: such jobs can also be critical for developing important professional and social skills that make it easier to land a job after graduation. With many employers looking for students with already-developed skill sets, on-the-job training while in college can be the best way to ensure a job later on.

    But it's not all upside. Even full-time work may not completely cover the cost of tuition and living expenses. The study notes that if a student worked a full-time job at the federal minimum wage, they would earn just over $15,000 each year, certainly not enough to pay for tuition, room, and board at many colleges without some serious financial aid. That means that though they're sacrificing time away from the classroom, many working students will still graduate with at least some debt. And working full time can reduce the chance that students will graduate at all, by cutting into the time available for studying and attending classes.

    There is little reward for attending but not finishing college. Students who end up leaving school because of difficulty in managing work and class are likely to find themselves stuck in some of the same jobs they might have gotten if they hadn't gone at all. The difficulty of working too much while in school can create a cycle that pushes students further into debt without receiving any of the financial or career benefits.

    Tourism is often about seeking deeper emotional and personal connections with the world around us. Not all travel experiences, however, need to take place in the real world. With the evolution of virtual reality (VR) technology, tourism will increasingly become a combination of physical and virtual worlds. VR may even remove the need to travel entirely.

    But can a VR experience really equal a real world one? Many experts believe it can. Studies have shown that our brains have an inbuilt VR-like mechanism that enables us to live imagined experiences. Much of our waking life is spent thinking about either the past or the future. This is known as" mind wandering". During these events we're not paying attention to the current world around us. Instead, we're recalling memories, or creating and processing imagined futures.

    When engaged in mind wandering, our brains process these mental images using the same pathways used to receive inputs from the real world. So, the imagined past or future can create emotions and feelings similar to how we react to everyday life. VR can create these same feelings.

    While critics might argue that a virtual experience will never match reality, there are several ways VR tourism could make a positive contribution. Firstly it could help protect sensitive locations from over-tourism. In recent years famous sites such as Maya Bay in Thailand, and Cambodia's Angkor Wat Temples have had to limit the number of visitors because of their negative impact. These places are now producing their own VR experiences that will allow tourists to pass through virtual models of the sites.

    Virtual reality may also allow people back in time, to experience historical events, visit ancient cities, and even to walk among dinosaurs.

    Finally, in a world where many people suffer from stress and depression due to overwork, virtual tourism may provide a cheap and convenient way for people to take brief holidays to otherwise unreachable destinations and recharge their batteries, without ever leaving their homes.

    It sounds like science fiction but it's already happening. As virtual technology improves and as people continue to demand new and interesting experiences, expect more virtual tourism, both in combination with the real world and instead of it.

My wife and I were at a crowded grocery store not long ago. It was a weekday evening, cold and wet—and tense. People were carelessly blocking aisles, cutting one another off with their carts.

    Things got worse at the checkout line. The cashier scanned a man's discount card, but he misread the savings on her screen as an additional charge. He decided she was acting deliberately and began to argue.

    "She is being spiteful (恶意的)!" he yelled. "This is unbelievable."

    Other customers looked away as the cashier tried to reason with him. She called a manager, who accompanied him to customer service. Shaken, she moved to the next customer in line.

We've all witnessed uncomfortable scenes like this in public places. The grocery scene was another example of how our trust in others has eroded. But it was also a teachable moment on how we can rebuild our faith—starting with just one person.

    Back at the grocery store, my wife and I reached our uneasy cashier. I grabbed a bottle of water from a nearby cooler and handed it to her. "We felt bad about how that man treated you and wanted to buy this for you." I said. Her face lit up, and we talked as she scanned our items. She told us she had been working that evening through severe foot pain and would be having surgery later that week. We wished her well in her recovery, and she thanked us as we left.

    Those are the balancing acts, the moments of responding social and emotional pain with healing, which will add up to restore trust among people. You can start that pattern in someone else's life, even in a place as ordinary as the neighborhood grocery store.

    Carrie Gracie is knowledgeable about China and its affairs. She also has a reputation as a generous colleague. She has resigned from her job as China editor because her employers will not pay her at the same rate as they pay the handful of men who do a similarly challenging and important job.

    She has resigned because she refused to go on colluding (共谋) with the BBC's dishonesty about its failure to give women and men equal pay for equal work.

    Gracie was recruited to the job, because she had all the talent and skills the BBC needed to cover the difficult international and domestic story of the rise of China. One of the conditions she set for taking it was equal pay with the BBC's other international editors, familiar names including Jon Sopel in Washington and Jeremy Bowen in the Middle East.

    Last summer, the government forced the BBC to publish which of the familiar names on radio and TV earned over ￡150, 000. The results exposed an astonishing pay gap. They also showed Gracie that her employers had misled her.

    Gracie sets out all her efforts to get her bosses to do what they had originally promised her, but they fail to respond adequately. Instead, they prevaricate (搪塞) and offer her a pay rise that still would not have delivered equality. They thought they could buy her off; they thought that the reputational hazard she was running would scare her away from the fight.

    The BBC is wrong this time! Gracie has chosen to resign rather than give in because she thinks that it is her responsibility to stop the BBC doing something stupid. She is fighting for women's legal rights.

    Gracie said she hoped she wouldn't be remembered as the woman who complained about money, but as a great journalist. She is proving that they are two sides of the same invaluable coin.

    Carrie Gracie's dispute with the BBC isn't about money—it's about dignity!

When I decided to quit my job as a wedding photographer, I was in my late twenties, fresh from my divorce from Bob who had left me empty and confused. I decided to leave the US and travel. I had no savings, plus more than $5,000 in debt. What I did have were two sponsored tasks as a travel photographer—and with that along, I thought, it would be easy.

My first experience was a road trip from Toronto to Las Vegas, paid for by a car delivery service. Other trips followed and then I started a travel blog (博客). It was intended to be my calling card for assignment travel photography. Yet even with my blog and past experience, email after email I sent to publications, trying to get work, went unanswered. When they did get in touch, editors told me that I had no chance of making a career with travel photography. While I struggled to get on the path that I wanted, and as I expanded my blog to help get me there, I found myself wearing the hat of a full­time blogger.

Luckily, I got in at the right time. It was 2010, and the travel industry was just starting to turn its attention to bloggers. As I never could have predicted, my blogging—not my photography—did take me around the world successfully. At first, I thought it was for personal reasons, but I realized later that it was for free marketing for my blogging.

Within two years, I was being asked to speak at travel blogging conferences, which helped me to raise a network of friends around the world. Even more meaningful, however, was when I saw that my travels were also helping other people. My blog and social media followers saw that I chased my dreams and told me over and over again how they needed that kind of example, which was absent in their lives elsewhere.