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Top 4 Tips for Making Your College Application List
Tweet Share on Facebook June 9, 2010 Comment (3)For many high school students, the summer before senior year is the time when they start thinking seriously about applying to college. With more than 4,000 choices—most of which one knows almost nothing about—the task can be daunting, indeed. But how you start the process can have important ramifications for how the choice turns out. To help you approach the task, here are some of our top tips for composing the list of colleges to which you'll apply. (Check back next week for more tips on this topic.)
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12 Lessons Students Can Learn From the Food Network
Tweet Share on Facebook June 2, 2010 CommentYou might have thought that a college student glued to the TV watching cooking shows is wasting his or her time. Au contraire. There's lots of good advice for college to be gleaned from Bobby Flay and Paula Deen, if you only know where to look. Here are a dozen of the most important tips:
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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:
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10 Reasons to Go to a Research University
Tweet Share on Facebook April 28, 2010 Comment (14)May 1 is a new holiday on the college calendar: National Candidate Reply Date, also referred to by many as Decision Day. That's the day by which more than 2 million students must decide where to go to college and tell the school of their choice. Some students will be choosing between a college that focuses on teaching and a university that emphasizes research. And many will think that a teaching college would always be the obvious best choice. After all, you're going there to learn, so why wouldn't you go to a college that emphasizes teaching? But there are some real advantages to the research university that might be worth your while to consider. Here are 10:
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15 Ways to Boost Your Confidence at College
Tweet Share on Facebook April 21, 2010 Comment (24)It's easy to feel a lack of confidence at college. Lectures with hundreds of students can make one feel no bigger than a worm. And even smaller classes can make you feel low when it seems like the student in the front row has all the answers. Luckily, like every other skill, confidence can be learned and increased over time—especially if you follow our 15 practical tips:
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10 Best iPad Apps for College Students
Tweet Share on Facebook April 14, 2010 Comment (21)The iPad is hot: 400,000, 500,000, maybe even 600,000 sold—and that's just in the first week. Many college students will be hopping onto the bandwagon, and so we asked our friend Ryan Wood, a graduate of the University of Findlay in Ohio, and now working at 148Apps.com, for his top 10 picks for college students. (Reviews of the apps listed below are available at 148Apps.com.)
Here are the winners:
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What a Department Chair Can—and Can't—Do
Tweet Share on Facebook April 7, 2010 Comment (4)Every department at a college has one: a chair who, typically, is a faculty member in that department, assigned by the dean to manage the department. The department chair usually has the plush corner office in the new Albert E. Hoofalos Center for Academic Excellence, or at least the 8-by-10 office in the pre-World War II hovel that doubles as the economics department. Regardless of the physical surroundings, most students have absolutely no idea what this person does—and doesn't do. And it's no wonder. In the complex university structure, even the chairs themselves often don't know exactly what their powers and responsibilities include.
Nevertheless, it behooves students to know more about the role of the chair, because sometimes the chair can be a lifesaver. Here's a firsthand look at what chairs can, and cannot, do to solve student problems—from Lynn, herself a chair for the last seven years:
Professors' Guide
If you liked the advice in this column, you’ll love the 637 tips, tricks, and strategies in our new book The Secrets of College Success. You can order a copy here at a special discounted price.
Additional tips are available at the Professors’ Guide™ website. And if you have a question or a topic you’d like to see covered, we’d love to hear from you at professors@professorsguide.com
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