Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

Halloween Fun Facts: The ancient Celts thought that spirits and ghosts roamed the countryside on Halloween night. They began wearing masks and costumes to avoid being recognized as human. Learn more here.

New Additions to the Pittsburgh Opera Season

The Pittsburgh Opera wants everyone to be able to enjoy the shows they produce every year. This is why they are including some new prices and shows for everyone in the tri-state area. This is perhaps one of the best deals in the city for the performing arts. You can learn more at Living Pittsburgh.



The Pittsburgh Opera is proving to our city that high caliber culture doesn’t always have to come with high ticket prices.

“As part of our ongoing mission to enrich Pittsburgh and the tri-state area, Pittsburgh Opera strives to make opera intellectually and financially accessible to a diverse audience, offering both high quality opera productions and several free community events throughout the season.”

In September of 2008, they moved their home to Pittsburgh’s historic Strip District into the building that was built as George Westinghouse’s original air brake factory in 1869. We caught a Brown Bag Concert Series performance last season and were lucky enough to get a personal tour of the massive facility thanks to Allison Ruppert, Marketing and Community Relations Manager at the Pittsburgh Opera. At 45,000 square feet, the building still manages to create an inviting sense of warmth and coziness, which is likely due to the pronounced “green” atmosphere. They are currently seeking LEED certification, and that should give us all yet one more reason to think that The Pittsburgh Opera rocks!

This is perhaps one of the best culture deals in the city, so do yourself a favor and check out some of these performances. You just can’t ask for a better ticket price!


Brown Bag Concert Series – FREE

In the George R. White Opera Studio at Pittsburgh Opera’s headquarters in the Strip District, friends, families and Pittsburghers of all ages are invited to enjoy intimate concerts of some of opera’s most popular arias as well as a mix of Broadway, musical theater and other surprises. These concerts are a wonderful opportunity for an informal introduction to opera. Guests can even meet the performers after the show!


Opera Up Close – $5

An in-depth look at the upcoming production, with the artists that make them happen at Pittsburgh Opera’s headquarters in the Strip District, at 2:00 PM on Sundays before the opening of each production.


Art Song Recital Series – $5

In the George R. White Opera Studio at Pittsburgh Opera, Art Song Recitals are high-level, one-hour performances of art song literature by the Resident Artists of Pittsburgh Opera. These recitals are free and open to the public. The Pittsburgh Opera Guilds from Sewickley, Fox Chapel, South Hills and the City serve as reception hosts at these events.

Here is their full listing of FREE performances for the 2014-15 season.

Take A Trip To Soergels

Make sure to head to Soergels before October 26th. You can participate in their fall festival. This annual event includes games, food, and pumpkins! You can learn more at Living Pittsburgh.




Event: Soergel Orchards Fall Festival

Location: Soergel Orchards, 2573 Brandt School Road, Wexford, PA 15090

Date: Saturdays & Sundays September 20 through October 26, 2014

Time: 11am – 5pm

Cost: FREE (items and additional activities available for purchase)

Description: Starting this weekend and throughout October, Soergel Orchards is holding Fall Festivals each weekend. Pick out a pumpkin (additional cost), enjoy kid’s activities, games, hayrides, great food (additional cost) and more! Each ticket is $1, with activities ranging from 1 ticket to 5 tickets. The pirate ship and tiny town play areas, the straw sack, and visiting the farm animals are free. Many activities are only 1 ticket!


More info online at : http://soergels.com/events/fall-festival/


Soergel Orchards2573 Brandt School Road

Wexford, PA 15090

724-935-1743

Start a Business in College

Are you almost done with your studies? It is time to start thinking about the future. For many people, this incldues sending our resumes and networking. However, have you ever thought about starting a business in college. Here are some great tips on how to make this happen.  You can learn more here.




1. Follow your passions (and ignore the haters).

If you do what you love and immerse yourself in industries you're passionate about, you'll be the best person to see where holes exist that you can fill. The three of us met as undergrads at Harvard while working on a student lifestyle-and-fashion magazine that we transitioned online. While some of our fellow students thought our site was "fluffy," we realized we had hit on something that had huge potential, and we got the idea to launchHer Campus. We knew we could bring it to that full potential, because we were passionate about serving college women — and nobody else was engaging that demographic in that way at the time.

2. Create a killer team.


It's very difficult to start a successful company all by yourself, from a skills perspective (no one person possesses all the skills needed to run a company), a time perspective (there are only so many hours in the day!), and a morale perspective. Starting a company is tough and comes with lows only a co-founder can dig you out of. It's important to find co-founders whose skills complement your own and whom you absolutely love to be around!

3. Pump out a business plan.

When Harvard's business-plan competition came around, we decided to use the competition to turn our ideas into a reality. Entering a business-plan competition is a fantastic way to force yourself to flesh out your idea and to give yourself a hard deadline. It doesn't matter if you win the competition (although it's certainly nice!), because the exercise of writing a business plan is so valuable in itself. We won the Harvard business-plan competition and got free office space as part of the prize, which became the very first Her Campus office.

4. Find good mentors.

We knew pretty much nothing about any aspect of business, so we set out to find mentors who did. Whether it was going to hear relevant speakers at Harvard or connecting with anyone and everyone we had met through past internships, we made a point of networking like crazy. While being young can absolutely be an advantage, being young also means you're way behind the competition as far as knowledge and skills go, simply because you don't have the experience that more seasoned people do. Seek out people you admire, and be ballsy about meeting them, introducing yourself, and following up, because it will pay off. Find mentors in a variety of areas you know you'll need help with (for example, web, marketing, and fund-raising), and make a point of asking for advice from them when you run into something you haven't seen before.

5. Put the pressure on yourself.

We spent the summer after winning the business-plan competition living together in a tiny, horrible apartment in New York City, each holding internships while working on Her Campus on the side in order to launch that fall. We had a completely crazy few weeks and nights leading up to the launch, including a last-minute all-nighter, but we did it and HerCampus.com went live on Sept. 16, 2009. Give yourself a deadline, and find a way to hold yourself to it, like we did with preprinted flyers! Otherwise, you can spend forever planning and researching and literally never launch — or a competitor will beat you to it.

6. Associate yourself with big names.

Our first client, Juicy Couture, signed on to advertise with us before the site had launched, thanks to Windsor's repeated cold calls to their marketing department! The money we gained from that sale was more than enough to cover our initial start-up expenses, so we were profitable before the site had even launched. Even more valuable than the advertising dollars we got (which were still pretty minimal) from Juicy Couture? The name recognition that came along with it. Once you have one big name onboard, that brand's competitors will take notice and want to work with you too. Our first advertisers, although not high-paying, allowed us to create powerful case studies that showcased our unique marketing capabilities and made Her Campus look legitimate by association with these big names.

7. Use whatever resources are available.

During our senior year at Harvard, we tapped into every possible resource we could to get our business off the ground. We had free office space through the business-plan competition and free legal help through a program at Harvard Law, and we had friends of ours writing for us for free. The business was going well enough that by halfway through that school year, we had decided to pursue Her Campus full-time after graduation. It didn't matter that we didn't have investors, capital, or many resources. We took advantage of what we did have access to in that year to allow our business to grow. Most colleges have resources that can help you; you just need to be resourceful and dedicated about seeking them out!

8. Fake it 'til you make it.

Over that first year out of college, Her Campus continued to grow, and we were lucky to be named to Inc.magazine's 30 Under 30 Coolest Young Entrepreneurs, among some other key press mentions. Regardless of the internal state of things, we promoted the heck out of every piece of press we got, every new advertiser we signed on, and every new partnership we secured in order to portray the image that our business was on fire. There can be lots of ups and downs and uncertainties when you're running a startup. However, it's critical to make everyone on the outside think you're doing amazing, even though you know that on the inside, things can feel like they're on the verge of falling apart at any moment.

9. Frugality is key.

Even after we graduated and the company started making a little more money, we stayed practical financially. Keeping your money in the business allows you to hire more people and invest in resources that will lead to much larger dividends for you long-term. This mind-set is one that we still adopt today even now that the business is doing much better financially, because once you start to just spend, spend, spend, you're no longer running a lean business and you're poised to drive your business into the ground.

10. Exercise self-discipline.

As time went on, the business started to run more and more smoothly. Our traffic and campus-chapter numbers kept climbing, our editorial system ran like clockwork, and brands were consistently reaching out to us, wanting to advertise. At that point, we needed to give ourselves a schedule and deadlines so we could be sure not to let the business stagnate and coast. As an entrepreneur, you don't have a boss, so it's on you to make yourself work (at least!) a full workday every day and to hold yourself and your cofounders accountable.

11. Show patience and perseverance.

Over the next few years, our traffic, campus chapters, and revenues all continued to grow, we brought on bigger and bigger clients, and we hired our first employees. But there will always be ups and downs, even once your business is well off the ground. There were months when we had to defer our salaries, instances when huge projects and partnerships completely fell through, and times when something we put a lot of effort into totally bombed. And when things are going well, you can't get too comfortable in your success or else things will stagnate. You have to keep challenging yourself, creating more work for yourself, always looking toward what's next, and continuously setting higher and higher goals for yourself and for your company as a whole.

12. Start today!

Five years after we launched, Her Campus now has more than 250 campus chapters, more than 3.5 million monthly readers, and our own beautiful office. Our last tip is to start today. You'll always be busy, and you're only going to get busier and have more "real" things to worry about as time goes on, so just get started on your idea now and let the momentum carry you forward! And don't think that you can't do it just because you're still in school or because you're not a business major or because you don't have enough in savings — because you can! But if you wait around forever just thinking instead of actually doing, you'll never get started. Just start now! We can't wait to see what you accomplish.