The 2012 travel video contest is well under way, and already there has been immense interest from students all around the world, eager to get their videos in production and ready for our deadline. The grand prize this year is $4,000 - so get your cameras rolling!

The format is simple - in 5 minutes or less, tell us about your planned study abroad trip, or if you are already studying abroad, about any trip at all that you would like to take.

You can be as imaginative and creative as you want to be in your video, but make sure you check out all of the rules and guidelines for your video and its submission. You might even want to take a look at previous years' winners and entrants, to see how good you have to be to win.

The deadline is October 31st, and for full information and rules please see our contest website.

Last month we updated the student airfare tool that we use on our travel center, making it much easier to search for flights from all around the world. The new tool, in partnership with Student Universe, allows you to search for specially discounted flights that are just available to students - on many routes, especially internationally, they can save you money when compared to shopping directly with the airlines! Check out the new tool today and for your trip home, or maybe that trip over Christmas vacation, you can book it with us and save money!

http://www.InternationalStudent.com/travel/student-airfare/

Pan-European Student Loans? Too Complicated

We often talk about loans for international students coming to the US, which are readily available if you have a US co-signer. US students going abroad can also access loans. However, in many parts of the world, student loans are not available at all. Even in Europe, efforts to create a pan-European student loan have been thwarted by complex regulations, as this story from the New York Times illustrates:

When Ivailo Vasilev of Bulgaria was accepted at the London School of Economics two years ago, he calculated that he would need tens of thousands of British pounds that he did not have as a recent university graduate to pay tuition and other costs.

So he decided, like countless others, to take out a student loan. It would be more complicated than he expected. He was not eligible for a student loan in Britain because he did not fulfill a three-year residency requirement, but there were few options in his home country.

Read the rest of the story in the New York Times