Author: Paula

Since this is election season, I’ve decided it’s time to outline the Higher Ed platform I would run on, if I were running for office. In other words, Everything That’s Wrong With Higher Education and How I Would Fix It.

1 – Invest more money. When experts identify the reasons behind the rising costs of higher education – and the explosion of students graduating tens of thousands of dollars in debt – they note that states cutting back funding for public colleges and universities has been a huge factor. In-state tuition costs vary by state, from about $4000 in Florida to around $15,000 in most of the northeast. 

2 – Add a New Statistic to the Rankings. All this new funding isn’t going to help if it just gets sucked up by new management salaries or basketball stadiums. A second major factor in rising tuition affects private schools as well as public ones: spending on things that don’t support the university’s core mission of educating students. Additional and highly paid administrators, unnecessary new buildings, increased bureaucracy – none of these improve student education or outcomes. The ratio of ‘good spending’ to ‘bad spending’ should be factored into college rankings. Holding schools accountable for where they spend their money might encourage them to cut back on administrators and coaches and spend more money on things that directly impact their students – like faculty.

3 – Push Back Against the Idea that the Only Subjects Worthy of Study are STEM. For years, politicians, industry leaders and pundits have implied – or sometimes said outright – that humanities and social science degrees are not only useless but will condemn students to low paying jobs for life. However, recent studies suggest that while degrees in engineering and computer science do lead to higher paying jobs, humanities and social science majors end up with similar salaries to students with (non-engineering, non-computer science) science and business majors. This makes sense to me: engineering and computer science are essentially pre-professional jobs, equipping students with a specific skill set that allows them to do a particular job. Most other majors, whether it’s chemistry or English, develop more general skills: how to research, learn, share ideas and – most important – think critically. 

Many current students insist on studying something ‘practical,’ insisting that it’s irresponsible to major in the field they love and are good at, because they’ll never get a job. (Interestingly, I don’t think I’ve ever had a parent make this point, it’s always come from the student.) Of course, some students following this path complete the degrees (and end up with jobs they like about as much as the subject?) but in my experience, many of them don’t. They switch majors, often taking longer to graduate; or they transfer schools; or some drop out altogether.

4 –Separate Sports and Education.  Okay, I know this one is controversial, but here’s my idea: colleges and universities continue to have sports teams, but players aren’t required to be enrolled as students to be on these teams. Rather, they’re hired to do a job (play football/basketball/whatever) and they’re paid a salary for it. If they want to take classes, they probably could, but they don’t have to. This way, athletes would end up with fair compensation for the work they’re doing, without the worry about having to take a full academic courseload at the same time. In addition, it would take the athletic factor out of admissions decisions – an important point at elite schools where acceptance rates are in the single digits.

5. National Exam? My final idea isn’t well thought out yet, I admit it. And it goes in the opposite direction of all the schools deciding to ditch the minor role standardized tests currently play in admissions. But since pretty much every other country in the world uses a national test for university admissions, maybe there’s something to the idea? My idea – again, I’m just spitballing here – is that there would be two tests, one for students interested in the sciences, the other for humanities. And each school would set the score that you needed to get to apply there – and then at that point, it would be holistic admissions. I’m sure there are a million problems with this suggestion, so it definitely needs further thinking. My idea is something like Oxbridge admissions, I guess, a way to take some of the guesswork out of admissions decisions while still leaving room for each school to curate its own class.

Or maybe we go back to the pre-SAT age – each school sets its own admissions exam? 

Game On: Why College Admission is Rigged and How to Beat the System by Susan Paterno.

This book would have better served its readers, in my opinion, if the author had left off the second half of its title. To be fair, there are a few relevant mythbusters interspersed throughout the book, along with a great deal of anecdotal evidence about students who got rejected or admitted at particular schools, or whose financial aid packages were unfair/didn’t meet their need/left them deeply in debt. But there isn’t much advice on ‘how to beat the system’ and what there is isn’t presented in a way that makes it easy to find or access.

What Paterno does do really well is describe the financial incentives behind college admission decisions, and the history of changes in college finances in recent decades, as states have cut back funding and private colleges have raised their rates at astronomical speeds. She makes a convincing case that the real solution is more government investment in public education. Her bottom line on financial aid – basically that it’s almost impossible to know how much a college will give you until they make the offer – is an important point. And I was glad to see her acknowledge that some students may pay less at a private college than at a state school – while of course this isn’t true for everybody, I’ve known a number of middle class students who didn’t even apply to private schools, assuming they wouldn’t be able to afford it. 

If you want to read a book about why colleges have gotten so expensive, and personal stories showing the effect that has on students who graduate with a large amount of student debt, Game On is well written and easy to read. If you’re looking for tips on how to choose a college or get into the school of advice, you will probably find better advice elsewhere.

It’s August. The weather is still hot, the water is still warm, the smell of barbecue is still in the air. For most people, summer is not over by a long shot. Still, August is the month when back to school in on the horizon. More than 80% of US students in grades K-12 go back to school in August; most colleges start the fall semester in late August or early September.  Rising high school seniors have college application deadlines looming on the horizon, and I’m already hearing from panicked students that they’re worried that they’ve fallen behind.

Relax! Even if you haven’t started yet, you’re not behind. However, it’s not a bad idea to try to figure out a timeline for your applications –  what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it – before you plunge back into the hectic school year. From that perspective, what should you make sure to get done in August?

1. Make a tentative timeline/schedule/calendar – whatever you want to call it. Accept that things can and will go wrong, so try to give yourself two or three times the amount of time you think you’ll need for each task. Worst case scenario: you submit your applications early and get to relax for the rest of your senior year.
2. Decide which colleges you’re applying to. If you haven’t finalized your list yet, you should do that now. Note that you can always add colleges later (or even delete them), but having a clear idea of your application list means you can determine the deadlines and map out when you need to complete your essays.
3. Have a Rough Draft of the Common App essay. Again, not being finished with your Common App essay at this point isn’t a dealbreaker, but by this point you should definitely have some ideas of what you’re going to write about and how to structure the essay! 

Ideally you will have your college list and rough draft done by the middle of the month. At that point, you can:

1. Collect the supplemental essay prompts for the colleges you are applying to and start mulling over the topics.
2. Create a ‘brag sheet’ – a brief list of your accomplishment you can give to teachers and mentors when you ask them for recommendations
3. Organize your extracurricular activities and start filling out the Common App.

If you get to the end of the month and you’ve completed the above, you’ll be in a great position to submit your college applications with the minimum amount of stress and panic.

My 5-year-old niece stood at the edge of the ocean, yelling at seagulls as they divebombed the crabs left defenseless by the receding tide. “But Sarah,” I pointed out. “They have to eat something.”

“Why don’t they just eat chicken then?” she said, with the logic of someone who has not yet realized that the fluffy birds running around the barnyard and the meat on her plate were the same.

It’s a funny story, but it was also the start of Sarah’s quest to become a marine biologist. She raised hermit crabs, studied them, drew pictures of their various states. She spent hours staring into tide pools with a field notebook in her hands, and checked out so many oceanography books that the librarian began setting them aside for her. For high school, she applied to a school that offered an environmental engineering program, where she had several internships and was able to participate in marine research.

Over the course of her junior year, however, she was less enthusiastic about school, and stopped gushing about her research projects. And that summer, she finally admitted the truth: she still loved animals, but she’d lost interest in marine biology. She wanted to study art.

What seemed like an abrupt change startled us but really, why should it? Shouldn’t kids have the opportunity to fall in love with lots of different things before figuring out what they want to spend their lives doing? If you think about it, it’s sort of preposterous to ask kids no older than middle school to pick one thing and devote themselves to it throughout high school, with the idea of earning the opportunity to devote themselves to it for the rest of their lives. Of course, some kids do tend toward one thing – I decided I wanted to be a writer in third grade and, here I am, still writing. But many others try one thing and then another, take part in a wide variety of different experiences, are obsessed with something until they’re obsessed with something else.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that! The problem comes when a good student wants to get into a top college and the wide variety of unrelated activities on their application somehow suggests they lack ‘depth.’

What should you do if, like Sarah, you change your mind junior or senior year, are tired of what you’ve been doing and want to do something else? 

First: Remember that the application is not meant to sum up your soul! It’s a presentation of your experiences in high school. As long as you don’t make things up, you have the right to present what you want the way you want to. Just because you spent four years as first clarinet doesn’t mean you have to place it number one in your activities or have your essay center around music.

Second: Decide how to proceed. You can: a)Fill out your college applications as you originally planned, before your interests changed. This has the benefit of making you look like a strong, focused candidate with concrete evidence to back up that claim. 

Overall, for many students this isn’t a bad option. One potential problem is that some schools – particularly large universities – make you declare a major when you apply and it may be difficult or even impossible to transfer to a more competitive major later. So definitely check what’s required to study the major you want at any university you apply to. In addition, a lack of enthusiasm for the theme of your application may make it difficult to write compelling essays.

A second option is to b)refocus your application, using aspects of your high school career to show that you’re actually a strong candidate for your new area of interest. For example, I had one student whose courses and activities all focused on health care – but she decided as a senior that she wanted to study economics instead. Her discovery that she was far more passionate about the spreadsheets she made for her science clubs than the clubs themselves served as the basis for a powerful essay highlighting her skills, self-awareness and flexibility.

Sarah was able to take her long history of sketching the animals she loved and argue that she was interested in developing graphics that would make cutting edge biography more accessible. She was accepted into her top choice college with a hefty amount of merit aid. (Once there, she discovered her talent for organization and ended majoring in something that had nothing to do with either art or marine biology, evidence that we can, all of us, reinvent ourselves as often as needed.)

Of course, you may figure out other options for yourself – I have additional ideas, but as usual this post is getting too long. Maybe someday I’ll reinvent myself into a writer of concise but informative blog posts. 

Okay, that last might be a particular unlikely reinvention.

Here’s a list of books for aspiring physics majors:

Feynman, Richard P.  Six Easy Pieces.  Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of the mid twentieth century, gave a series of lectures in the 1960s that revolutionized the teaching of physics; here are those lectures on six key elements of physics- atoms, basic physics, energy, gravitation, quantum mechanics, and the relationship of physics to other topics.  

Gamow, George.  One, Two, Three…Infinity. Interesting, readable book that explains how math and physics really work. This is an older book – first published in 1947 – but many successful scientists link their interest in science to this book.

Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of Time. Very popular book that first surveys how the human understanding of the universe has developed with the scientific discoveries of the last few centuries. as well as discussing modern cosmology from the Big Bang to black holes, written in straightforward language.

Neuenschwander, Dwight E. Emmy Noether’s Wonderful Theorem.  This book provides an introduction to symmetry and invariance using the theorem Noether developed in 1915, including enough contextual information for readers to understand the importance and usefulness of the theorem. Neuenschwander also weaves in biographical and historical information and provides questions and problems at the end of each chapter.

Povey, Thomas.  Professor Povey’s Perplexing Problems: Pre-University Physics and Maths Puzzles with Solutions This charming book is a collection of physics problem, using a wide variety of topics, and their solutions.  Not just variations on the typical AP Physics problems; solving Povey’s problems will expand your understanding of physics and improve your problem-solving skills. 

Rovelli, Carlo. Helgoland.  This is a well written, even beautiful, explanation of the discovery of quantum physics and exploration for what that means for how we think about the world.

Stewart, Ian. In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations that Changed the World. Stewart explores how 17 equations made the advances of the modern world possible. Readable, informative and entertaining.

BONUS:

This is fiction, and old, but also very fun:

Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland. This novel, published in the 19th century is written from the perspective of a two dimensional square explaining what it’s like to live in only two dimensions. The writing is a bit old fashioned, but the book is short and often funny.

Should you major in STEM?

Yes! Absolutely! 100%! If you love STEM and can imagine yourself spending your life doing something STEM-related, then definitely choose a STEM major.

But I see a lot of people go into STEM even though their interests and talents align in a different direction, because they’re afraid that without STEM they’ll never get a job. The best writer in my daughter’s class applied to colleges as a chemistry major, a subject she had little interest in and no passion for. A very artistic student of mine went into architecture even though he hated math because well, it was ‘almost art’ but still STEM.

I get it, I really do.  College is a ton of time and even more money, and you don’t want to graduate with no prospects. For decades now, many loud voices have echoed each other, insisting that the only way to get a job is to have technical skills, and those technical skills only come with STEM degrees – preferably engineering or computers.  

And everyone’s heard the derisive ‘What are you going to do with that?’ about an English/History/Sociology/French degree. And the assumption that humanities degree holders are graduating with tens of thousands of dollars in debt and the only place that will hire them is Starbucks, if they’re lucky.

Is this true?  Is it true for you? 

To answer the first question, we can turn to statistics – statistics that show that STEM students make more money right after college but that social science and humanities students catch up by midlife; statistics that show that most STEM students actually don’t go into STEM fields; statistics that show employers want to hire people who can think critically and write clearly; statistics that show more and more students are majoring in STEM and more and more liberal arts departments are shrinking or closing down. 

Some of those statistics directly contradict each other; more importantly, none of them can answer the second, more important question: Will you be able to get a job if you don’t major in STEM?

Look at it another way: Does it make sense to spend four years of college studying something you’re not interested in and (probably) not that good at, just so you can get a job for the rest of your life doing something you’re not interested in and (probably) not good at?

My advice? If your talents lie in an arts and humanities field, go to a college or university that values that field, that is putting money into and hiring new faculty in that department. When researching a college, ask what efforts career services puts into getting internships and research positions for humanities and social science majors. What internships, scholarships, research positions are current students taking advantage of right now? 

In college, participate in clubs and activities that will help you produce written work and develop communication skills.  Look for internship opportunities in different fields – industry, non-profit, government, creative – not just to put on your resume, but to give yourself ideas about what direction you want to go in. Think outside the box for an entrepreneurial future.  Or think inside the box, and collect scholarships and awards that will serve as credentials. Or decide on a niche field you want to go into – polling, for example, or public gardens or popcorn or anything really – and build up a portfolio of writing and analysis on that field.

Be realistic and remember, whether we like it or not, we live in a hypercapitalist society. For example, if you major in art history, you most likely are not going to walk out of college and into a job as a museum curator.  But if you pair it with an interest in real estate or interior design (shown through coursework, internships, etc), you might be able to work with a company that specializes in historical renovations. Or a dual major with public policy and you might get hired to work on community projects. Figure out what it is you like about art history and what you might be happy doing, and you will be able to make a career out of the things you love. 

In my opinion, there’s only one real rule for writing college essays – or any essay, really – and that is: Don’t Be Boring.*

It’s true, of course, that one person’s boring topic is someone else’s deep passion.  Millions of people are obsessed with sports, for example, and millions of other people (or maybe the same people, who knows?) find celebrity gossip completely irresistible.  On the other hand, there are niche fields – the Lascaux cave paintings, for example, or the causes of World War I – that relatively few people follow religiously.

I have my obsessions – as anyone reading this blog has probably figured out by now! – but none of them are mentioned in the last paragraph. That hasn’t stopped me from becoming completely transfixed by books or articles about sports, celebrity gossip, the Lascaux cave paintings and the causes of World War I.  In each case, the author brought something special to the piece, something intriguing, that compels even those uninterested in the subject.  Insight into us as a society (Americans) or insight into us as a species (human beings), for example, extended metaphors that expose the reader to new perspectives, or just the sheer beauty of brilliant writing.  Good essays will be read by people who share the author’s interests and world view.  Really great essays will interest people in the author’s world and world view.  

This doesn’t mean you have to write an application essay so brilliant it could be published in the New York Times or win a Pulitzer Prize.  But it’s worth thinking about how you can write an essay that will spark interest in people who don’t know you, and make those people care about you and your life story.

*Of course there are technical requirements for essay submissions, like ‘no more than 650 words’ and ‘write in English.’  I’m talking about rules that can be broken like ‘Don’t Write About Sports’ or ‘Don’t Mention That You’re Neurodiverse,’ etc.

I was planning to write a three part miniblog (Is that a thing? I don’t think that’s a thing) called ‘Vagueness, the Plague of the College Admissions Essay’ – and don’t worry, I know you’re all panting to read it, and I will write it, but not today. Because I hadn’t written two sentences of that post when I got the idea for a completely different post and that – getting the idea, not the idea itself – gave me the idea for this blog post. (I know what you’re thinking: the essay I should be writing is ‘Convolution, the Plague of the Blog,’ or at least this blog. Is ‘Convolution’ even a word?…yes, it is.  “A convolution is an integral that expresses the amount of overlap of one function g as it is shifted over another function f”  Overlapping, shifting integrals, the plague of this blog.  Totally obvious, I know.)

All of this is to say: sometimes the way to get ideas about things is to do the thing. At least with writing, at least with me, that’s how it works. If I’m not writing, then my brain seems to fog up and I can’t think of anything to write about. But once I start writing, new ideas seem to pop up all over the place, both when I’m writing and when I’m not.  It’s like the act of writing stimulates the creative part of my brain. (Note: This is not a scientific study and may be completely wrong and/or impossible.)

Are you having trouble coming up with a topic for your essays? Well, you still have lots of time – here’s an experiment you could try. Write something, anything, everyday for a month.  Ideas (courtesy of The Idea Factory™):

1 – Write micro short stories – flash fiction pieces of 100-200 words

2 – Journal the events of your day

3 – Write your autobiography, going backwards, season by season (i.e Spring 2024 is the first entry, then Winter 2023, Fall 2023, etc.)

4 – Write reviews of your favorite books/movies/video games

5 – Pretend you’re traveling in imaginary places – Mordor, for example, or Wonderland, or Westeros – and write reviews of your hotel/restaurant/sightseeing experiences for TripAdvisor (Hmmm…I think I might do this one!)

6 – Write letters of advice to characters in books or movies who make stupid decisions

7 – Write rejection letters to famous people who have asked for your help

8 – Turn your most embarrassing elementary/middle school experiences into a children’s book; write one (or one half or one quarter) chapter a day

9 – Journal the events of somebody else’s day

10 – Write descriptions/character sketches of your friends or family

I’m sure you can think of much better ideas; this was just to give you a sense of the possible. It doesn’t have to be very long either – you could set a word count, and even if you haven’t finished the entry/review/letter/whatever, once you reach your word count, you’re done for the day. The idea is to develop your writing muscles.  (Did I seriously just write ‘develop your writing muscles’? That phrase sounds totally stupid.  Sadly though, it does a good job of describing what I mean.) Practice writing something fun, that you enjoy, and you will be a) learning to write well and b) developing your own voice and c) getting ideas for other things to write, some of which may lead to great ideas for an essay topic!

On Fridays, I’ve decided, I’m going to post about things that interest me. Not that I’m not interested in everything college, because of course I am, but Fridays are going to be about my passions: languages, cooking, fiction and whatever my next obsession is.

So to start with, The Fascinating History of the Word ‘Orange’:

Did you know that prior to the introduction of oranges to England in the 13th century, the English language had no word for the color ‘orange’?   In fact, orange wasn’t commonly used as a color word until the 16th century.  That’s why we use the word ‘red’ to describe red-heads, even though most of the time that hair color actually closer to orange.  

Smart people have traced the word ‘orange’ back through the Arabic and Persian ‘naranja’ to the Sanskrit ‘naranga.’  Some other European languages use variations on ‘naranja,’ like the Spanish ‘naranja’ or the Serbian ‘narandžasta.’  A number of Germanic languages, however, translate the fruit that we call orange as some kind of ‘Chinese apple’; for example, ‘appelsin’ in Danish.  And a number of Slavic languages use some form of ‘pomeranz’ – like the Czech ‘pomeranč’ – that derives from the French ‘pommes d’orange’ which means something like ‘orange apples.’ 

Interestingly, though, the common word for ‘orange’ in modern colloquial Arabic is ‘burtoqal’ which is also the Arabic word for ‘Portugal’.  Apparently Portuguese sea traders, after discovering sweet oranges in China and realizing how eating them could prevent scurvy, then planted them everywhere they went.  In Portuguese itself, however, the word is ‘laranja’ from yes, the Arabic ‘naranja.’ 

Soundbite: the Admission Secret that Gets You into College and Beyond by Sara Harberson

Years of working in college admissions led Sara Harberson to an important insight: students applying to college should figure out a single sentence that sums up who they are and then direct their application toward supporting that sentence.  She is absolutely right that if a student doesn’t do this, the admissions officers will do it for them, and in a way that the student might not like.

Harberson calls this single sentence concept a ‘soundbite’ and describes what she means by it in the first chapter.  Subsequent chapters include many, many examples of students who made good and not-so-good choices of their soundbites, and advice that can mostly be summed up as ‘play to your strengths.’  

Haberson’s book falls into the same trap as many others in this genre.  Most of the people who buy How to Get into College books are high school seniors and/or their parents.  However, much of her advice is really directed at middle schoolers and their parents, most of whom aren’t remotely thinking about college.  Start compiling a list of colleges in ninth grade, she suggests, figure out your passion early on so that you can have years of extracurricular activities that support it.  I don’t blame Haberson (or anyone else) for this disconnect.  It’s just a fact that most middle schoolers and/or their parents are worrying about high school not college and so wouldn’t pick up a book like this.

Although the first half of the book feels like she’s pounding the same point over and over again, she presents some really good ideas in the second half.  Her point about ‘describe yourself with nouns not adjectives’ is very smart.  Nouns tend to be more descriptive and specific than adjectives.  Just compare ‘rock-climbing champion’ to ‘bold’ or ‘hospice volunteer’ to ‘helpful.’  Her entire chapter on the Homegrown Idea, suggesting that rather than signing up for already established activities students start their own, is well worth reading.  

The takeaway from this book – the soundbite of Soundbite, you might say – that students applying to college should be able to describe themselves in a single sentence that they can center their application around, is an essential one.  Is it essential to read this book?  For students struggling with understanding or developing that sentence for themselves, I would say yes.  The many examples the author gives might well help spark ideas on this point.  Otherwise, it’s probably not necessary.  The soundbite is enough.