Your brain uses three primary modes for learning. These modes are the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. While everyone uses all three modes, one of them is usually dominant and it is very important to identify which one is your primary method for learning.
Visual people tend to think with pictures. They see things they are learning, and analyze the pictures to gain deeper insights and understanding. Visual people also tend to use words that are visual in context like picture, see or image. They also describe things using visual metaphors like bright or colored. If you identify with this description than you are probably a visual learner.
Auditory people tend to think by listening to their inner voice. They think about things using words and phrases, and analyze what they hear to make their decisions. They often say things like, "are you listening", or "did you hear what I just told you." They also describe things using auditory metaphors like loud and melodic. If you identify with this description than you are probably an auditory learner.
Kinesthetic people tend to think base on their feelings. They need time to connect with ideas at a gut level and tend to use terms like, "how does this feel to you", or "are you comfortable with what I am telling you." They also describe things using kinesthetic metaphors like comfortable or pleasant. If you identify with this description than you are probably a kinesthetic learner.
The Importance of Repetition
Regardless of which mode your brain primarily uses to process information, repetition also plays an important role in learning. Did you know that information must be repeated from 1-20 times before it finally sticks into memory? Too many individuals rely upon a single pass through a text to lock in critical information. It is little wonder their success doesn't reflect the amount of time they've invested in learning. Remember repetition is an important part of learning...repetition is an important part of learning.
It takes time before your brain can validate information as significant enough to retain. Your brain's main purpose is to find or create patterns that will prove useful to your success and survival.
Moving From Facts to Understanding
Facts may prove useful on some tests, but don't truly measure your understanding. Understanding a pattern provides the brain with its true significance. The limbic system or emotional brain also plays a role in moving from facts to understanding. It is important that something feel significant or important so your brain will feel compelled to retain the information for later use.
You can get more learning strategies and powerful programs at www.HowToLearnAnythingFaster.com
Howard Stephen Berg Learning Systems LLC
5100 Eldorado Parkway
Suite 102-720
McKinney, TX
75070
US
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
From HSLDA:
(Home School Legal Defense Association)
Home schooled students ARE eligible for financial aid!
Scott Woodruff answers questions and assists members with legal issues in Idaho. He and his wife homeschooled their children. Read more >>
Last week the Idaho State Board of Education (ISBE) adopted a new
rule that should quell the recent controversy about whether
homeschoolers need a GED for college admission. Effective immediately,
all Idaho public colleges should cease asking homeschoolers for a GED
because of the new rule, Idaho Administrative Code 08.02.03.118.
Several years ago, some colleges refused to believe that homeschoolers were eligible for federal financial aid (and colleges don’t want to admit students who are not eligible). They asserted that a homeschool student could only qualify by obtaining a GED or by the “back door” route of getting an adequate score on a standardized test to prove he had the “ability to benefit” from a college education. These colleges refused to acknowledge that a graduate of a homeschool program was eligible for federal financial aid in his own right.
HSLDA asked Congress to pass a new law to protect homeschoolers. But we were concerned that if the law only referred to “homeschoolers,” it would not protect families in the many states where a homeschool is a private school. For example, in Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Texas and others, state law acknowledges private schools, but nothing called a “homeschool”—even though that’s what they are called in everyday conversation.
So the law Congress passed to cover homeschoolers in all states referred to “a home school setting that is treated as a home school or private school under State law.” (20 U.S.C. §1091(d)) Problems with college admissions virtually disappeared.
But two surprises popped up. First, we learned that a number of colleges—in defiance of federal law—were treating homeschoolers as if they had to prove their ability to benefit. And second, an influential organization erroneously told college admissions officials that if their state’s law did not use the precise phrase “home school,” a homeschooler would not be eligible as a homeschooler.
This was obviously preposterous. Congress used the term “homeschool” because it is quite well understood in common usage, no matter what nuance of language is used in each state’s law.
In Iowa, homeschooling is technically known as “competent private instruction.” In South Dakota, it’s “alternative instruction.” In Virginia, it’s “home instruction.” And so on. But it’s all homeschooling, as Congress understood very well.
But admissions officers—fearful that they might be personally on the hook for any mistake—grabbed the erroneous guidance and treated it like gospel. Regrettably, the herd instinct took over.
Soon many admissions officials were afraid to admit homeschoolers if their state’s law did not use that exact term “home school”! HSLDA immediately went to work to solve the problem at the national level, and collaborated closely with Idaho Coalition of Home Educators (ICHE) on the state level.
Some Idaho colleges had drafted revised favorable new homeschool policies in anticipation of the new state rule. We now expect them to quickly pivot and apply the new rule. However, students whose college admissions have been in limbo should contact the relevant admissions official to make sure they are following the new rule.
The new rule is not yet readily accessible on the internet. If you encounter a still-confused admissions official, promptly contact us with their name and phone number, and we will follow up.
Our thanks go to ICHE for their excellent work on this issue.
(Home School Legal Defense Association)
Home schooled students ARE eligible for financial aid!
New Rule Ends College Admission Controversy
Scott Woodruff answers questions and assists members with legal issues in Idaho. He and his wife homeschooled their children. Read more >>
Refusing Aid
Here’s some background on how the problem arose in the first place.Several years ago, some colleges refused to believe that homeschoolers were eligible for federal financial aid (and colleges don’t want to admit students who are not eligible). They asserted that a homeschool student could only qualify by obtaining a GED or by the “back door” route of getting an adequate score on a standardized test to prove he had the “ability to benefit” from a college education. These colleges refused to acknowledge that a graduate of a homeschool program was eligible for federal financial aid in his own right.
HSLDA asked Congress to pass a new law to protect homeschoolers. But we were concerned that if the law only referred to “homeschoolers,” it would not protect families in the many states where a homeschool is a private school. For example, in Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Texas and others, state law acknowledges private schools, but nothing called a “homeschool”—even though that’s what they are called in everyday conversation.
So the law Congress passed to cover homeschoolers in all states referred to “a home school setting that is treated as a home school or private school under State law.” (20 U.S.C. §1091(d)) Problems with college admissions virtually disappeared.
Problems Arise
Then last year Congress repealed the “back door” option for qualifying for financial aid as part of its effort to quash diploma mills. Homeschoolers should not have been affected, since a homeschool graduate is eligible without proving his ability to benefit from a college education.But two surprises popped up. First, we learned that a number of colleges—in defiance of federal law—were treating homeschoolers as if they had to prove their ability to benefit. And second, an influential organization erroneously told college admissions officials that if their state’s law did not use the precise phrase “home school,” a homeschooler would not be eligible as a homeschooler.
This was obviously preposterous. Congress used the term “homeschool” because it is quite well understood in common usage, no matter what nuance of language is used in each state’s law.
In Iowa, homeschooling is technically known as “competent private instruction.” In South Dakota, it’s “alternative instruction.” In Virginia, it’s “home instruction.” And so on. But it’s all homeschooling, as Congress understood very well.
But admissions officers—fearful that they might be personally on the hook for any mistake—grabbed the erroneous guidance and treated it like gospel. Regrettably, the herd instinct took over.
Soon many admissions officials were afraid to admit homeschoolers if their state’s law did not use that exact term “home school”! HSLDA immediately went to work to solve the problem at the national level, and collaborated closely with Idaho Coalition of Home Educators (ICHE) on the state level.
Clearing up the Language
The ISBE’s new rule solves Idaho’s problem by connecting the phrase “home school” to the Idaho statute under which families educate their children. There can no longer be any doubt—if there ever was a plausible reason to doubt—that what we have called “homeschooling” for decades in Idaho is truly “home schooling!”Some Idaho colleges had drafted revised favorable new homeschool policies in anticipation of the new state rule. We now expect them to quickly pivot and apply the new rule. However, students whose college admissions have been in limbo should contact the relevant admissions official to make sure they are following the new rule.
The new rule is not yet readily accessible on the internet. If you encounter a still-confused admissions official, promptly contact us with their name and phone number, and we will follow up.
Our thanks go to ICHE for their excellent work on this issue.
Friday, April 20, 2012
Acceptable Documentation for Verification - Data Retrieval Tool Failure
In the limited set of cases where an aid applicant, who has filed a tax return and attempted unsuccessfully to use the IRS Data Retrieval Tool or to obtain IRS Tax Return transcripts, needs a timely alternative for meeting the 2012-13 verification requirements, institutions may, until July 15, 2012, use a signed copy of the relevant (i.e., applicant, spouse, or parent) 2011 IRS Tax Return (Form 1040, 1040A, or 1040EZ, as appropriate) as acceptable verification documentation for the 2012-13 award year.From NASFAA
Thursday, April 12, 2012
IRS Newswire
April 11, 2012
Issue Number: IR-2012-46
Inside This Issue
Last-Minute Reminder to Parents and Students; Don’t Overlook College Tax Benefits
IRS YouTube Videos:
Education Tax Credits and Deductions: English
Education Tax Credit - Claim It - Parents: English | Spanish | ASL
Education Tax Credit - Claim It - Students: English | ASL
Podcast: Education Tax Credits and Deductions
WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service today reminded parents and students rushing to meet this year’s April 17 deadline to be sure and check out several college-related tax benefits before filing their 2011 returns.
Two tax credits and a tax deduction are available to taxpayers who paid tuition and other expenses for an eligible student during 2011. Because an eligible student can be the taxpayer, spouse or dependent, these benefits can, for example, help workers taking continuing education courses and people returning to school, as well as parents paying for their children’s college education.
Given the number of different higher education credits and deductions, the IRS reminds taxpayers to carefully review eligibility requirements so they don’t overlook these important college benefits. Tax benefits include the following:
The American Opportunity Tax Credit helps pay for the first four years of post-secondary education. Tuition, required enrollment fees, books and other required course materials generally qualify, and eligible students must be enrolled at least half time. Qualifying expenses of $4,000 or more in 2011 can earn a taxpayer the maximum credit of $2,500 per student per year. Even taxpayers who owe no tax can get a payment of the credit of up to $1,000 for each eligible student. The credit is claimed on Form 8863. But the IRS warns taxpayers to avoid an often-costly tax scam, currently being promoted widely to senior citizens, low-income families and church members falsely claiming that refunds based on the credit are available, even if they’re not currently enrolled in college and even if they went to school decades ago. In addition, some international students, normally considered nonresident aliens for tax purposes, have been improperly advised that they qualify for the credit.
The Lifetime Learning Credit, limited to $2,000 per taxpayer per year, can be claimed based on tuition and required enrollment fees paid for any level of post-secondary education. Because of differences between the two credits and the fact that the American Opportunity Tax Credit usually yields greater tax savings at the undergraduate level, the Lifetime Learning Credit may be particularly helpful to graduate students, students taking only one course and those who are not pursuing a degree. The Lifetime Learning Credit is also claimed on Form 8863.
The tuition and fees deduction is available for both full-time and part-time students at all levels of post-secondary education. The deduction of up to $4,000 is claimed on Form 8917.
Each year, a student normally receives a Form 1098-T from their college showing tuition payments and other information.
Though a taxpayer often qualifies for more than one of these benefits, he or she can only claim one of them for a particular student in 2011. Income limits and other special rules apply to each of these benefits. The general comparison table in Publication 970 can be a useful guide to taxpayers in determining eligibility for each of these benefits.
Often, tax credits are more valuable, because they reduce the amount of tax owed, whereas deductions reduce the income on which tax is figured. Tax software can often help parents and students determine which benefit yields the greatest tax savings.
Besides these tax benefits, parents, students and former students who made student loan payments during 2011 can deduct up to $2,500 of student loan interest. Normally, borrowers receive from their financial institution Form 1098-E showing student loan interest paid for the year. This deduction is claimed on Form 1040 Line 33 or Form 1040A Line 18. Income limits and other special rules apply. For example, the student must have been enrolled at least half time in a degree or certificate program. A worksheet in the tax form instructions can help taxpayers figure the deduction correctly.
The student loan interest deduction, the tuition and fees deduction and both tax credits can be claimed by eligible taxpayers, regardless of whether they itemize deductions on Schedule A. These benefits are available to both Form 1040 and 1040A filers. Details on these and other education-related deductions and credits can be found in the Tax Benefits for Education Information Center on IRS.gov.
Thank you for subscribing to the IRS Newswire, an IRS e-mail service.
Friday, March 30, 2012
Graduate School is a Means to a Job
This article is excellent. In order to ensure its availability to my readers, I am posting it here in full, including the byline.
March 27, 2012
Graduate School Is a Means to a Job
One of the most common questions I hear from graduate
students, whether they are in their first or their final year, is what
they can do now to prepare for the academic job market.
Excellent question. As a graduate student, your fate is in your own hands, and every decision you make—including whether to go to graduate school at all, which program to go to, which adviser to choose, and how to conduct yourself while there—can and should be made with an eye to the job you wish to have at the end.
To do otherwise is pure madness. I have no patience whatsoever with the "love" narrative (we do what we do because we love it and money/jobs play no role) that prevails among some advisers, departments, and profoundly mystified graduate students. But for those graduate students and Ph.D.'s who actually want a paying tenure-track job and the things that go with it—health insurance, benefits, and financial security—here is my list of graduate-school rules, forged after years of working in academe as a former tenured professor and now running my own career-advising business for doctoral students.
Before Graduate School
Ask yourself what job you want and whether an advanced degree is actually necessary for it.
Choose your graduate program based both on its focus on your scholarly interests and its tenure-track placement rate. If it doesn't keep careful records of its placement rate, or does not have an impressive record of placing its Ph.D.'s in tenure-track positions, do not consider attending that program.
Choose your adviser the same way. Before committing to an adviser, find out how many Ph.D.'s that potential mentor has placed in tenure-track positions in recent years.
Go to the highest-ranked graduate department you can get into—so long as it funds you fully. That is not actually because of the "snob factor" of the name itself, but rather because of the ethos of the best departments. They typically are the best financed, which means they have more scholars with national reputations to serve as your mentors and letter writers, and they maintain lively brown-bag and seminar series that bring in major visiting scholars with whom you can network. The placement history of a top program tends to produce its own momentum, so that departments around the country with faculty members from that program will then look kindly on new applications from its latest Ph.D.'s. That, my friends, is how privilege reproduces itself. It may be distasteful, but you deny or ignore it at your peril.
Never assume that the elite, Ivy League departments are the highest-ranked or have the best placement rates. Some of the worst-prepared job candidates with whom I've worked have been from humanities departments at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. Do not be dazzled by abstract institutional reputations. Ask steely-eyed questions about individual advisers and their actual (not illusory) placement rates in recent years.
Meet, or at least correspond, with your potential adviser ahead of time so that you understand whether he or she has a hands-on approach to professionalization training and will be personally invested in your success.
Do not attend graduate school unless you are fully supported by—at minimum—a multiyear teaching assistantship that provides a tuition waiver, a stipend, and health insurance that covers most of the years of your program. The stipend needs to be generous enough to support your actual living expenses for the location. Do not take out new debt to attend graduate school. Because the tenure-track job market is so bleak, graduate school in the humanities and social sciences is, in most cases, not worth going into debt for.
Apply to 6 to 10 graduate programs. If you are admitted with funding to more than one, negotiate to get the best possible package at your top choice.
Be entrepreneurial before even entering graduate school to locate and apply for multiple sources of financial support. Do not forget the law of increasing returns: Success breeds success and large follows small. A $500 book scholarship makes you more competitive for a $1,000 conference grant, which situates you for a $3,000 summer-research fellowship, which puts you in the running for a $10,000 fieldwork grant, which then makes you competitive for a $30,000 dissertation writing grant.
Early in Graduate School
Never forget this primary rule: Graduate school is not your job; graduate school is a means to the job you want. Do not settle in to your graduate department like a little hamster burrowing in the wood shavings. Stay alert with your eye always on a national stage, poised for the next opportunity, whatever it is: to present a paper, attend a conference, meet a scholar in your field, forge a connection, gain a professional skill.
In year one and every year thereafter, read the job ads in your field, and track the predominant and emerging emphases of the listed jobs. Ask yourself how you can incorporate those into your own project, directly or indirectly. You don't have to slavishly follow trends, but you have to be familiar with them and be prepared to relate your own work to them in some way.
Have a beautifully organized and professional CV starting in your first year and in every subsequent year. When I was a young assistant professor, a senior colleague told me that her philosophy was to add one line a month to her CV. Set that same goal for yourself. As a junior graduate student, you may or may not be able to maintain that pace, but keep it in the back of your mind, and keep your eye out for opportunities that add lines to your CV at a brisk pace.
Make strong connections with your adviser and other faculty members in your department, and in affiliated departments. Interact with them as a young professional, respectfully but confidently. Eschew excessive humility; it inspires contempt. Do not forget the letters of recommendation that you will one day need them to write.
Minimize your work as a TA. Your first year will be grueling, but learn the efficiency techniques of teaching as fast as you can, and make absolutely, categorically, sure that you do not volunteer your labor beyond the hours paid. Believe me, resisting will take vigilance. But do it. You are not a volunteer and the university is not a charity. You are paid for hours of work; do not exceed them. Teach well, but do not make teaching the core of your identity.
Be aware that faculty members in a variety of departments will be able to direct you to different grant sources, which, over time, will help you to continue paying for your studies without accruing crushing debt. Not all faculty members are familiar with the same grant sources, so breadth is important.
Strategize your writing projects in your courses, theses, and dissertation, to form the basis of potentially publishable papers. If offered the option of writing a master's thesis, seriously consider taking it, as it can form the core of your first refereed journal article. Plan out a publishing trajectory to ensure that you have at least one sole-authored refereed journal article before you defend your dissertation.
Attend every job talk in your department and affiliated departments religiously. It matters not if those talks are in your field or subfield. Go to them all. Job talks and other job-search opportunities such as attending a lunch with a candidate, serving on a search committee, or simply examining an applicant's CV and file are the single best training you can provide yourself on the real requirements of the tenure-track job market (as opposed to your private and often delusional perceptions).
Attend national conferences annually. It's fine to also go to local and regional conferences, but they must never take the place of your national conference, which provides irreplaceable insight into trends in your field, the ethos and habitus of your discipline, and the behavioral norms of professional scholars. It also presents the opportunity to network and to attend seminars dedicated to professional skills such as writing grant proposals or journal articles.
Strategize how to travel to conferences, and work with your cohort to make it a habit of driving together to major national conferences, and lodging together.
Apply indiscriminately for money, and master the fine art of tailoring to meet the grant agency's mission. You'll be surprised by how much the act of transforming your project to meet a new mission reveals to you hitherto unrecognized potentialities and insights into the work itself. Applying for a wide range of grants is one of the best intellectual exercises in which you can engage.
Take every opportunity available to present your work publicly. While I emphasized the importance of national conferences for reputation purposes, actively pursue every possible local and regional opportunity for experience purposes. Public speaking is one of the core skills of an academic career. Make your mistakes in graduate school, where the stakes are low, so that you are a master of the podium when the stakes are high.
In Your Final Years of Graduate School
Avoid like the plague offers of publication in edited collections, which is where good publications go to die. If you have a piece of work that can pass muster as a publication, make sure that it goes into a refereed journal, the best one you can reasonably manage. Don't ever throw it away on conference proceedings, or the like. (That applies to the humanities and most social sciences; some conference proceedings in the sciences are legitimate publication venues. Know your field.) So do not be seduced by expressions of interest from editors of collections or third-tier journals following your conference presentations. The opportunity may seem easy but you will pay the price later when the collection is delayed for years or the publication is deemed too low status to help you on the market.
By your third year or so, apply annually to present a paper at your national conference. If you are in the humanities, do not waste time participating in poster sessions. If you are in the hard sciences or experimental social sciences, check with a trusted adviser about the value of posters. Near the end of your program, begin to organize panels for a conference. Your first foray in that direction can be with other graduate students, but don't organize more than one graduate-student panel in your career.
In the year before you go on the job market, organize and propose a high-profile panel for your national conference that is made up of young, up-and-coming assistant professors. Ask a well-known scholar to serve as discussant. Make efforts to have the panel respond to, or engage with, a trending topic in your field and/or one that is identified as the primary theme of that year's national meetings. This panel is your "coming out" party, and makes you visible on a national stage, framed and contextualized by the more senior scholars who already have reputations on the panel's topic. At the conference, do not forget to organize a lunch (or dinner or coffee) for the panelists to get to know them better and lay the groundwork for future collaborations and possibly letters of recommendation.
Cultivate a letter writer who is not from your Ph.D.-granting institution. Having all your recommendation letters come from your own committee or department is the sign of a relatively immature candidate. It is not a death knell in your first or second years on the market, but be aware that the strongest and most successful candidates will have a recommendation from an influential senior scholar from outside their home department who can speak to their standing in the field (and not simply to their performance as a graduate student in the department).
Write your dissertation with an eye to the publications that it will become. Be aware that in most fields, at least one refereed journal article while you are still A.B.D. is now necessary to get shortlisted for tenure-track jobs. At the same time, be aware that publications that date from before you accept your tenure-track job sometimes do not count toward tenure. So the balance is delicate indeed. You must publish enough to get a job without prematurely exhausting your supply of material you will need for tenure. (That is why I recommend writing a master's thesis, which will give you material for a publication without cutting into your dissertation material.)
If you are in a book field, be aware that presses will not look kindly at a book proposal in which more than half of the material has already been published in articles. Therefore, in a typical five-chapter dissertation, you want no more than two chapters to be put out as refereed journal articles. While writing the dissertation, have a publishing plan in place. You may write one chapter, for example, with an eye to fast publication while you are A.B.D. Set aside other material for refereed journal articles while you're on the tenure track. Meanwhile, write the dissertation itself as much like a book as your committee will allow. If your committee insists on methodology and theory chapters, write them with the full knowledge that they will most likely be removed from the ultimate book manuscript.
Remember that the best dissertation is a finished dissertation. Your dissertation must satisfy a committee, while your book must satisfy a set of reviewers and an editor who operate nationally and internationally. Do what it takes to satisfy your committee and finish. Leave the Sturm und Drang for when you are revising the manuscript into the book that will become the real mark of your scholarly reputation.
Be the sole instructor of at least one course but not more than three (if you can help it). After about three, the benefit of additional teaching experience diminishes, and becomes a distraction from the real capital-producing work necessary for the tenure-track job market, which (unless you're applying to community colleges) is publication and conference activity. If your department does not offer A.B.D.'s the opportunity to teach your own courses, then carefully seek an opportunity from another college in the area. Do a good job, but do not allow your teaching to derail you from the writing, publishing, grant writing, and conferences that are the core elements of the tenure-track search. TA experience is not an adequate substitute for teaching a course of your own.
Go on the market while A.B.D. because you want to make your worst mistakes while you still have a year of financial support from your home department. Most people who prevail on the market need at least two years to do so.
Cultivate a professional persona as a young scholar. That persona is separate from your previous identity as a graduate student and is, instead, confident, assertive, sophisticated, and outspoken. Devote as much time as it takes to writing out brief—and I do mean brief—summaries of your dissertation research, teaching techniques and philosophy, and your future publication plans. Practice delivering those brief summaries until they become second nature.
Make your application materials absolutely flawless. Take your ego out of the process and ask everyone you know to ruthlessly critique your CV, letter, teaching statement, and research statement. Prioritize the advice you receive from young faculty members who have recently been on the market, and from senior professors who have recently chaired a search committee.
Some graduate students will rush to follow these rules, some will panic and view the task as impossible, and others will indignantly deny the validity of these steps. The choice is entirely yours. But be aware that the best and most competitive candidates—the ones whom I have watched and assisted as they sailed through the job market—had every one of these elements of their record locked and loaded.
Excellent question. As a graduate student, your fate is in your own hands, and every decision you make—including whether to go to graduate school at all, which program to go to, which adviser to choose, and how to conduct yourself while there—can and should be made with an eye to the job you wish to have at the end.
To do otherwise is pure madness. I have no patience whatsoever with the "love" narrative (we do what we do because we love it and money/jobs play no role) that prevails among some advisers, departments, and profoundly mystified graduate students. But for those graduate students and Ph.D.'s who actually want a paying tenure-track job and the things that go with it—health insurance, benefits, and financial security—here is my list of graduate-school rules, forged after years of working in academe as a former tenured professor and now running my own career-advising business for doctoral students.
Before Graduate School
Ask yourself what job you want and whether an advanced degree is actually necessary for it.
Choose your graduate program based both on its focus on your scholarly interests and its tenure-track placement rate. If it doesn't keep careful records of its placement rate, or does not have an impressive record of placing its Ph.D.'s in tenure-track positions, do not consider attending that program.
Choose your adviser the same way. Before committing to an adviser, find out how many Ph.D.'s that potential mentor has placed in tenure-track positions in recent years.
Go to the highest-ranked graduate department you can get into—so long as it funds you fully. That is not actually because of the "snob factor" of the name itself, but rather because of the ethos of the best departments. They typically are the best financed, which means they have more scholars with national reputations to serve as your mentors and letter writers, and they maintain lively brown-bag and seminar series that bring in major visiting scholars with whom you can network. The placement history of a top program tends to produce its own momentum, so that departments around the country with faculty members from that program will then look kindly on new applications from its latest Ph.D.'s. That, my friends, is how privilege reproduces itself. It may be distasteful, but you deny or ignore it at your peril.
Never assume that the elite, Ivy League departments are the highest-ranked or have the best placement rates. Some of the worst-prepared job candidates with whom I've worked have been from humanities departments at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. Do not be dazzled by abstract institutional reputations. Ask steely-eyed questions about individual advisers and their actual (not illusory) placement rates in recent years.
Meet, or at least correspond, with your potential adviser ahead of time so that you understand whether he or she has a hands-on approach to professionalization training and will be personally invested in your success.
Do not attend graduate school unless you are fully supported by—at minimum—a multiyear teaching assistantship that provides a tuition waiver, a stipend, and health insurance that covers most of the years of your program. The stipend needs to be generous enough to support your actual living expenses for the location. Do not take out new debt to attend graduate school. Because the tenure-track job market is so bleak, graduate school in the humanities and social sciences is, in most cases, not worth going into debt for.
Apply to 6 to 10 graduate programs. If you are admitted with funding to more than one, negotiate to get the best possible package at your top choice.
Be entrepreneurial before even entering graduate school to locate and apply for multiple sources of financial support. Do not forget the law of increasing returns: Success breeds success and large follows small. A $500 book scholarship makes you more competitive for a $1,000 conference grant, which situates you for a $3,000 summer-research fellowship, which puts you in the running for a $10,000 fieldwork grant, which then makes you competitive for a $30,000 dissertation writing grant.
Early in Graduate School
Never forget this primary rule: Graduate school is not your job; graduate school is a means to the job you want. Do not settle in to your graduate department like a little hamster burrowing in the wood shavings. Stay alert with your eye always on a national stage, poised for the next opportunity, whatever it is: to present a paper, attend a conference, meet a scholar in your field, forge a connection, gain a professional skill.
In year one and every year thereafter, read the job ads in your field, and track the predominant and emerging emphases of the listed jobs. Ask yourself how you can incorporate those into your own project, directly or indirectly. You don't have to slavishly follow trends, but you have to be familiar with them and be prepared to relate your own work to them in some way.
Have a beautifully organized and professional CV starting in your first year and in every subsequent year. When I was a young assistant professor, a senior colleague told me that her philosophy was to add one line a month to her CV. Set that same goal for yourself. As a junior graduate student, you may or may not be able to maintain that pace, but keep it in the back of your mind, and keep your eye out for opportunities that add lines to your CV at a brisk pace.
Make strong connections with your adviser and other faculty members in your department, and in affiliated departments. Interact with them as a young professional, respectfully but confidently. Eschew excessive humility; it inspires contempt. Do not forget the letters of recommendation that you will one day need them to write.
Minimize your work as a TA. Your first year will be grueling, but learn the efficiency techniques of teaching as fast as you can, and make absolutely, categorically, sure that you do not volunteer your labor beyond the hours paid. Believe me, resisting will take vigilance. But do it. You are not a volunteer and the university is not a charity. You are paid for hours of work; do not exceed them. Teach well, but do not make teaching the core of your identity.
Be aware that faculty members in a variety of departments will be able to direct you to different grant sources, which, over time, will help you to continue paying for your studies without accruing crushing debt. Not all faculty members are familiar with the same grant sources, so breadth is important.
Strategize your writing projects in your courses, theses, and dissertation, to form the basis of potentially publishable papers. If offered the option of writing a master's thesis, seriously consider taking it, as it can form the core of your first refereed journal article. Plan out a publishing trajectory to ensure that you have at least one sole-authored refereed journal article before you defend your dissertation.
Attend every job talk in your department and affiliated departments religiously. It matters not if those talks are in your field or subfield. Go to them all. Job talks and other job-search opportunities such as attending a lunch with a candidate, serving on a search committee, or simply examining an applicant's CV and file are the single best training you can provide yourself on the real requirements of the tenure-track job market (as opposed to your private and often delusional perceptions).
Attend national conferences annually. It's fine to also go to local and regional conferences, but they must never take the place of your national conference, which provides irreplaceable insight into trends in your field, the ethos and habitus of your discipline, and the behavioral norms of professional scholars. It also presents the opportunity to network and to attend seminars dedicated to professional skills such as writing grant proposals or journal articles.
Strategize how to travel to conferences, and work with your cohort to make it a habit of driving together to major national conferences, and lodging together.
Apply indiscriminately for money, and master the fine art of tailoring to meet the grant agency's mission. You'll be surprised by how much the act of transforming your project to meet a new mission reveals to you hitherto unrecognized potentialities and insights into the work itself. Applying for a wide range of grants is one of the best intellectual exercises in which you can engage.
Take every opportunity available to present your work publicly. While I emphasized the importance of national conferences for reputation purposes, actively pursue every possible local and regional opportunity for experience purposes. Public speaking is one of the core skills of an academic career. Make your mistakes in graduate school, where the stakes are low, so that you are a master of the podium when the stakes are high.
In Your Final Years of Graduate School
Avoid like the plague offers of publication in edited collections, which is where good publications go to die. If you have a piece of work that can pass muster as a publication, make sure that it goes into a refereed journal, the best one you can reasonably manage. Don't ever throw it away on conference proceedings, or the like. (That applies to the humanities and most social sciences; some conference proceedings in the sciences are legitimate publication venues. Know your field.) So do not be seduced by expressions of interest from editors of collections or third-tier journals following your conference presentations. The opportunity may seem easy but you will pay the price later when the collection is delayed for years or the publication is deemed too low status to help you on the market.
By your third year or so, apply annually to present a paper at your national conference. If you are in the humanities, do not waste time participating in poster sessions. If you are in the hard sciences or experimental social sciences, check with a trusted adviser about the value of posters. Near the end of your program, begin to organize panels for a conference. Your first foray in that direction can be with other graduate students, but don't organize more than one graduate-student panel in your career.
In the year before you go on the job market, organize and propose a high-profile panel for your national conference that is made up of young, up-and-coming assistant professors. Ask a well-known scholar to serve as discussant. Make efforts to have the panel respond to, or engage with, a trending topic in your field and/or one that is identified as the primary theme of that year's national meetings. This panel is your "coming out" party, and makes you visible on a national stage, framed and contextualized by the more senior scholars who already have reputations on the panel's topic. At the conference, do not forget to organize a lunch (or dinner or coffee) for the panelists to get to know them better and lay the groundwork for future collaborations and possibly letters of recommendation.
Cultivate a letter writer who is not from your Ph.D.-granting institution. Having all your recommendation letters come from your own committee or department is the sign of a relatively immature candidate. It is not a death knell in your first or second years on the market, but be aware that the strongest and most successful candidates will have a recommendation from an influential senior scholar from outside their home department who can speak to their standing in the field (and not simply to their performance as a graduate student in the department).
Write your dissertation with an eye to the publications that it will become. Be aware that in most fields, at least one refereed journal article while you are still A.B.D. is now necessary to get shortlisted for tenure-track jobs. At the same time, be aware that publications that date from before you accept your tenure-track job sometimes do not count toward tenure. So the balance is delicate indeed. You must publish enough to get a job without prematurely exhausting your supply of material you will need for tenure. (That is why I recommend writing a master's thesis, which will give you material for a publication without cutting into your dissertation material.)
If you are in a book field, be aware that presses will not look kindly at a book proposal in which more than half of the material has already been published in articles. Therefore, in a typical five-chapter dissertation, you want no more than two chapters to be put out as refereed journal articles. While writing the dissertation, have a publishing plan in place. You may write one chapter, for example, with an eye to fast publication while you are A.B.D. Set aside other material for refereed journal articles while you're on the tenure track. Meanwhile, write the dissertation itself as much like a book as your committee will allow. If your committee insists on methodology and theory chapters, write them with the full knowledge that they will most likely be removed from the ultimate book manuscript.
Remember that the best dissertation is a finished dissertation. Your dissertation must satisfy a committee, while your book must satisfy a set of reviewers and an editor who operate nationally and internationally. Do what it takes to satisfy your committee and finish. Leave the Sturm und Drang for when you are revising the manuscript into the book that will become the real mark of your scholarly reputation.
Be the sole instructor of at least one course but not more than three (if you can help it). After about three, the benefit of additional teaching experience diminishes, and becomes a distraction from the real capital-producing work necessary for the tenure-track job market, which (unless you're applying to community colleges) is publication and conference activity. If your department does not offer A.B.D.'s the opportunity to teach your own courses, then carefully seek an opportunity from another college in the area. Do a good job, but do not allow your teaching to derail you from the writing, publishing, grant writing, and conferences that are the core elements of the tenure-track search. TA experience is not an adequate substitute for teaching a course of your own.
Go on the market while A.B.D. because you want to make your worst mistakes while you still have a year of financial support from your home department. Most people who prevail on the market need at least two years to do so.
Cultivate a professional persona as a young scholar. That persona is separate from your previous identity as a graduate student and is, instead, confident, assertive, sophisticated, and outspoken. Devote as much time as it takes to writing out brief—and I do mean brief—summaries of your dissertation research, teaching techniques and philosophy, and your future publication plans. Practice delivering those brief summaries until they become second nature.
Make your application materials absolutely flawless. Take your ego out of the process and ask everyone you know to ruthlessly critique your CV, letter, teaching statement, and research statement. Prioritize the advice you receive from young faculty members who have recently been on the market, and from senior professors who have recently chaired a search committee.
Some graduate students will rush to follow these rules, some will panic and view the task as impossible, and others will indignantly deny the validity of these steps. The choice is entirely yours. But be aware that the best and most competitive candidates—the ones whom I have watched and assisted as they sailed through the job market—had every one of these elements of their record locked and loaded.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Which School is Cheaper?
The posted prices of the schools are often not what a given family actually pays for a student to attend that university. Scholarships and grants and tuition reductions change that figure.
Here is an example which shows clearly that you can't really decide a school is too expensive by looking at its listed costs.
On Harvard's website, the net
calculator shows that a family of four with a $130,000 annual income could
qualify for as much as a $39,750 scholarship for the undergrad program. That reduces the $56,750 for freshman tuition, room and board at Harvard to $17,000.
At California State University in Los Angeles, the cost of tuition, room board and other fees is a mere $21,335 per year. However, that same family of four making $130,000 wouldn't qualify for any aid, according to their calculator.
At California State University in Los Angeles, the cost of tuition, room board and other fees is a mere $21,335 per year. However, that same family of four making $130,000 wouldn't qualify for any aid, according to their calculator.
Consequently, for this sample family, Harvard could well cost less than CSU-Los Angeles. Granted, if they are California resident, travel to Massachusetts will likely be more expensive than travel to LA. The education received and the friends made will be significantly different, however.
Net calculators only provide estimates. Those which ask numerous questions have been shown to be fairly accurate.
It pays to do your homework! Evaluate your potential schools' estimated net costs BEFORE you apply. If you need help, search here to find a certified college planning specialist in your area. I work with students all over the USA so can be a resource for you as well.
Katherine O'Brien, MA CCPS
Celtic College Consultants
Based in San Diego, serving families across the USA
www.CelticCollegeConsultants.com
Monday, March 19, 2012
Great Books programs Prepare Industry Leaders
Study of the Great Books is often looked at as a relic of the past, something we can't afford to have our students spend their time on because they need to be employable. This article on community colleges shows the inherent and abiding value of a great books education for the development of business leaders, managers, and industry leaders.
The ability to think critically, consider differing viewpoints, a great deal of information simultaneoulsy, and communicate coherently are all skills honed in the study of the great books. These skills, augmented by knowledge specific to a particular industry, make for a well balanced, effective leader and innovator in that industry.
Many colleges offer Great Books core curricula in addition to major fields of study. Such programs are worthy of serious consideration.
The ability to think critically, consider differing viewpoints, a great deal of information simultaneoulsy, and communicate coherently are all skills honed in the study of the great books. These skills, augmented by knowledge specific to a particular industry, make for a well balanced, effective leader and innovator in that industry.
Many colleges offer Great Books core curricula in addition to major fields of study. Such programs are worthy of serious consideration.
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