PrepPoint, a test prep, academic tutoring, and college advising group, has a great list of books and resources for students in the pre-college phase of their existence. The list is long enough that I won’t regurgitate it here, but it includes several resources in the following four categories:

Academic Performance
Test Prep
College Admissions
Online Resources

Posted by Alexa Harrington

When I was a college student, the courses I always felt I learned the most from, took the most away from, and enjoyed the most while I was in them were the lab courses: chemistry, physics, biology, anatomy, etc. Witnessing the tangible proof of the information the professors and the books had been spewing set that knowledge solidly into my grey matter.

Non-lab courses always seemed to me as if I read gallons of information, sat through endless talking-only lectures, and I had to just take everyone’s word for everything. The math courses were somewhere in the middle of those two extremes; no actual lab work, but everything was provable. Plus, once I understood how to do the problem in question, it was incredibly satisfying on some deep-seated, wing-nut level in my brain to sit for hours and obsessively solve equations. I’m such a freak—it’s making me all warm and zennish and deeply calm just thinking about calculus, trig and algebra. Does math affect everyone else that way or does it just do that to me?

As part of MIT’s OpenCourseWare site, anyone can access course materials from pretty much every undergraduate and graduate course taught at MIT (there are currently 1800 of them available). It’s free and it kicks ass and physics geeks like me can watch Professor Walter Lewin’s totally entertaining lectures/circus performances.

If physics isn’t your thing, here’s a list of all the other courses with audio/video components.

Here are the courses geared toward high school students and teachers, including AP biology, calculus and physics.

Here’s the course list in its entirety. Dang. It just makes you want to learn shit for the rest of your life. It’s a total time-suck and you can do it all in the name of education.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Education doesn’t stop, even after you’ve finished that last final exam and have turned in that last paper. Fruit flies have an average life span of only 37 days, their brains are minuscule, and they still have to endure learning experiences every damn day. So, comparatively speaking, humans have thousands more learning opportunities in our lifetimes.

Not news you want to hear right after graduation, I realize. Please don’t kill the messenger. I recall hollering with glee, ”I’m never reading anything but fiction again!” after what I thought would be my last final for a while. And then I went back to school because I just couldn’t get enough.

To help you with the learning part of life, and to hopefully avoid the painful mistakes, I have an awesomely simplified resource for post-college adult responsibility that will help you to understand the grown-up world of money, even if you’re in your twenties and are pretty sure you don’t need to know about something you don’t have yet.

Most college graduates are pretty new to the concept of money coming in, even if it’s at a trickle. Ramit Sethi’s site, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, has a huge number of articles, resources and advice on how to deal with the having (or not, as the case may be) of money. Sethi explains the hell out of retirement planning; a two-year-old could understand it (and find it necessary). He’s also got great information on simple stuff college students can use, like how to use a separate debit card for an enveloping system, or more complicated topics like personal entrepreneurship or investing.

Go learn something and try not to screw up your finances at a young age.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Online colleges have increased in popularity and ease of use over the past decade. A lot of that probably has to do with the convenience factor of online courses—no travel time, no sitting in class, no moving to another city, etc. In addition, the fact that the technology has improved on both ends—the school/instructor end and the student end—makes the whole concept more feasible for anyone who might be considering online education as an option. There are pros and cons to an online education, but for an increasing number of students, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

As far as online course options go, there are two: you can take online courses from a fully online college, which would enable you to earn an entire degree online; or you can take online courses from a traditional brick-and-mortar college that offers online courses in addition to their regular in-classroom courses.

Online college resources:

All Online Schools
The Open University (in the UK, but a good resource nonetheless)

Taking online courses from a known brick-and-mortar college makes the question of accreditation a little less sketchy. Because anyone can pretty much do and say whatever they want online, if you’re looking into a fully online education at a fully online college, you owe it to yourself to check their accreditation status. Fake diplomas from diploma mills don’t tend to look stellar on the résumé.

Here are some good accreditation resources:

Council for Higher Education Accreditation
U.S. Dept. of Education

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Catch-22 is safely ensconced in my top ten books list; it’s been there since I read it over a decade ago and I can’t imagine that it will ever be demoted. It’s such a perfect, perfect description of being caught in some bureaucratic, red-tape moment wherein the powers that be are unmoved by your pointing out of the obvious, utterly effed-up impossibility of your situation. You’re screwed because you’ve managed to find a special little corner of Rule Hell in which the guidelines contradict themselves and now there can be no forward or backward motion that might enable your extrication from the situation.

The job-hunting process can definitely be heavy on the Catch-22 nuances. This is especially true for the newly graduated. Your brain is packed full of (mostly) worthwhile information, but you lack any real job experience. Employers would prefer not to hire someone who has ridiculous amounts of knowledge but few real-world job skills. This realization usually makes the young job applicant scream (on the inside) something along the lines of How can I get any job experience if I can’t get an effing job, you freaks!

And there it is: you can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get experience without a job. Right out of college, you pretty much have a diploma and some summer job experience to bullet-point on your résumé.

And that is why god created the internship: the unpaid, coffee-fetching rite of passage that won’t make you much money but will teach you how to do the job you want so badly that you’re willingly to work for free to learn how to do it. Internships are also invaluable networking venues; connecting with pertinent individuals in your field will be beneficial to future job searches and career moments.

Searching for internship opportunities is pretty similar to the job search process: search for “internships” on any job search site and a list of possibilities will magically appear. Alternatively, you can apply for an actual job, and note on your résumé that you’d like to be considered for the little- to no-pay internship version of the available position. What fool employer would turn down someone who’s willing to work for free? (This may not work in the law, medical or air traffic control fields).

If you’re still in college and are financially fortunate (or are really good at being poor) you can use the summer to do an internship. It’ll give you an extra bullet point on the résumé and will give you a better idea of what a job in your chosen field entails and whether you actually want to continue pursuing this career. Colleges and universities always have some informed person (librarian, career advisor, department secretary, etc.) who can hook students up with internship links, info, ideas and lists.

Further reading:

Internships a ‘win-win’ to help get job

Resources:

The Benefits of Volunteer Work
Top Eight Tips for Finding an Internship
How to Become a Volunteer to Gain Work Experience
Idealist.org
Undergraduate Students: Gaining Work Experience

Posted by Alexa Harrington

According to this article in the CS Monitor, more and more parents are keeping their kids home and sending them to virtual schools in which the teachers and coursework are accessed online. Any extra supplies are sent by mail to the students’ homes. One mom describes the idea of sending her kid to a virtual school as “the 21st-century, middle-class version of the private tutor.”

Kids who attend virtual schools can spend the extra time on the subjects they have a harder time grasping, and can more speedily attack the subjects they’re comfortable with. In an actual classroom, the teacher has the difficult job of having to walk that middle road: teaching at the average students’ learning pace. The unavoidable results of this are that the kids who are having a tough time get left behind, which affects them academically as well as socially and emotionally, and the kids who understand the information immediately can end up feeling bored and unchallenged.

The idea of sending kids to virtual school is gaining popularity:

Enrollment in online classes last year reached the 1 million mark, growing 22 times the level seen in 2000, according to the North American Council for Online Learning. That’s just the start, says a new paper by the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. Its authors predict that by 2019 half of courses in Grades 9 to 12 will be delivered online.

But, as with every new notion, the implementing of it often involves some working out of the inevitable kinkage. Monitoring learning hours accurately, issues with funding, and having better “official oversight” in place is still being worked out. I think it’s worth the effort to have it be a workable option for kids who either don’t have access to adequate schools, or who don’t fit into their available school for whatever reason.

I’m fortunate enough to live in a city with a decent public school system, and (so far) I have the time and energy to be there when my daughter is doing her homework and to spend time helping her with her extra reading every day. Which is all by way of saying I feel confident that between her day at a good public school and being home in the evenings with her not-utterly-exhausted parents, my kid is going to be covered on all educational fronts.

However, if Seattle schools sucked or if my daughter had issues that I didn’t feel the public education system was handling effectively, I would be stoked of I had solid online options available.

Further Reading:

NPR: Public Schools Expand Curriculum Online

Resources:

North American Council for Online Learning
Virtual School Clearinghouse
University of California College Prep
K12

Posted by Alexa Harrington

College enrollment has maintained a generally upward trend for the past several decades. (Being educated has turned out to have been an excellent idea.) In keeping with the increased enrollment trend, the number of adults pursuing education has been on the rise. According to the N.C.E.S., the adult education numbers for Fall 2007 were 6,956,000 adults aged 25 and over enrolled in college (compared to 10,825,000 18 to 24-year-olds enrolled).

I can’t see that the numbers of adults seeking higher education will diminish any time soon, as we have the Baby Boomers beginning to hit retirement age. As far as generations go, the Boomers are a highly educated group. A lot of them are looking at retirement as the perfect excuse to go back to school.

Being severely technical about it, traditional college students are ages 18 to 24, and nontraditionals are age 25 and up. The ‘traditional’ window is only six years (so you’d better get on with it), and yet those students are the norm and have a smoother college career than most nontraditional students. That may have something to do with the fact that attending college is their main focus. Also, everyone expects them to be there and doing nothing beyond going to school, which simplifies things a bit.

The nontraditionals, however, have a slightly more complicated and less normal postsecondary education process. Things are getting easier as time goes on and the powers that be realize that there’s a decently-sized chunk of the college student population that has different needs, issues, and requirements like childcare, funding, and access to evening, weekend and online courses. Going to school as an eighteen-year-old is different than being a college student with a whole separate non-college life that you can’t disengage from.

Younger students can immerse themselves completely in the college life. Adult nontraditional students can end up having a little bit of a schizophrenic superhero alter ego thing going on. I was a lucky little girl and got to experience college as a traditional and as a nontraditional student. The younger version had a lot more fun and a lot less stress and a somewhat less mature work ethic. The older version had no fun, stupid amounts of stress and had a work ethic capable of turning a lump of coal into a diamond in about two weeks.

I have such fond memories of my first degree—everything is college-campus gorgeous and is rosy-golden and halcyon-hued. My second degree has not one happy moment and is steeped in so much reality it reeks. As such, I would highly recommend not having a newborn in tow when heading back to school. Most adult students head back into the fray when their progeny are at a more independent age and I’m certain this yields better results.

There are more and more adult education-seekers out there these days, which will help their situation considerably. Evening, weekend and online courses are widely available and are usually the best option for adult students who have a career or a family to consider. Not going the traditional daytime college-campus route means missing out on the full college experience, but decreasing the daily commute time or being able to continue working is the most feasible plan for some. Another perk, of course, is that all the other nontraditionals with whom you can commiserate with are more likely to be taking the online, weekend and evening courses.

Adult Education Resources:

AdultStudent.com

Top Ten Adult Student Books

Fun With Statistics:

N.C.E.S.: Participation in Adult Learning

U.S. Census Bureau: 2006 School Enrollment

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Wendy Boswell at Lifehacker posted this amazing article on the great dot-edu sites out there and what bastions of mind-blowing information they are. She does point out, however (and I agree) that the time-suckage factor is astronomical: you can fritter away hours perusing university art gallery sites. It’s just so easy to justify educational time-wasting…

Posted by Alexa Harrington