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15 Good Things to Do the Summer Before College
Tweet Share on Facebook May 26, 2010 Comment (7)Summer is typically the slow season for college students. Unless you're going to summer school, college is probably the farthest thing from your mind. But there are a number of things you can do to put yourself in the best position for college, come fall. Here are our 15 best ideas:
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Capping It Off: 7 Tips for the Senior Thesis
Tweet Share on Facebook May 19, 2010 CommentMany schools now have a "capstone" requirement: a longer writing project (sometimes called a "senior thesis") to be done in your final year. For some students this provides a golden opportunity to move to a more professional level of work in their chosen field. But for others, this is a dreaded, seemingly insurmountable obstacle standing between them and that fancy piece of paper with the university seal. In preparation for the fall, when many students will start working on this assignment, we offer you our best tips for staring down—and doing—the senior paper requirement:
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10 Reasons Parents Should Never Contact College Professors
Tweet Share on Facebook May 12, 2010 Comment (16)Parents come in all stripes. Some are hands-off with their college students: A brief "how are things going, dear?" is more than enough. Others are more interventionist: They want week-by-week (sometimes even day-by-day) progress reports on what their kid is doing at college. Still, others want to know almost every move: They've earned the name "helicopter parents" (for, like their namesakes, they hover closely overhead, trying to monitor all that goes on with the landscape below). But now there are "lawn-mower parents"—parents whose blades actually move across the ground as they try to mow down whatever stands in the way of their child's success.
One obvious target of some helicopter parents—and all lawn-mower parents—is the professor. It is he or she that can be causing trouble for the precious child, whether it's by giving a bad grade, not admitting the student to some closed course, not allowing an extension or incomplete, or, simply, not being as nice to the student as the parent would like. It's at that point that the trouble starts. That's when the parent takes the matter into his or her hands and E-mails or calls the professor directly. You might not have thought this would be so bad. But it is. Here are 10 reasons why:
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Top 7 Things Parents Can Learn From Their Tech-Savvy Kids
Tweet Share on Facebook May 5, 2010 Comment (1)Look around at today's students, and you'll find them spending inordinate amounts of time listening to mp3 players, texting and chatting online with friends, and posting and reading Facebook messages. Indeed, there's a new study by researchers at the University of Maryland showing that heavy users of "devices" can display symptoms similar to those of better-known addictions, such as alcohol and drug dependence. (Try this interesting "Internet addiction test" to measure whether you or someone you know is indeed hooked.)
We wanted to find out how the technological revolution affects—and should affect—the parents and teachers of technologically advanced students. We asked Larry D. Rosen, professor of psychology at California State University—Dominguez Hills and author of the new book Rewired: Understanding the iGeneration and the Way They Learn for some of his best findings. Here are his 7 best tips:
