For teenagers and young adults that determine a college or university education is not for them they need to take a look at attending a technical college. Higher education is essential nowadays. The job market is becoming more and more competitive. The economic downturn has resulted in an increase of unemployment. These are just some of the reasons for considering higher education. The technical colleges offer an extremely flexible and easily accessible study option. [Read more...]
University Attendance is it For You?
December 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment
For many teenagers and young adults deciding if or how to continue your education beyond high school is a difficult task. Unfortunately, many young people assume that a university education is not for them. Often these reasons have little to nothing to do with them personally. Perhaps they have not had a family member who has graduated from college and believe that achieving a higher education is out of reach. The reality is that your future is all about you. You really have to look at the benefits, advantages and challenges ahead and evaluate them carefully. [Read more...]
What Degree is Best and What are the Choices?
September 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment
In the early nineteenth century, there were a limited number of degrees being offered in only a few traditional subjects. Those who took these degrees were forced to opt for the limited jobs available to suite their qualifications. Today, this is no longer the case and there is a vast range of degree courses and qualifications available to suit every need. [Read more...]
Teens, Youg Adults Get Educated for Hot Careers Over Next 10 Years
September 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment
College and trade school is on the minds of many teens and young adults. For those still in high school and those in college our future career is one of the most important decisions that we will make. 2009 was and 2010 has been a crucial year that has caused many professionals to reevaluate their skills so that they may follow the recent trends. As a student you will also want to evaluate your own likes, dislikes and skills. As you do this here is a bit of information that may be of service. [Read more...]
Planning Early for College and Future Career
August 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment
As a teenager it is only natural that we want money now to spend on our cars, video games, clothes and dates. Finding a part time job often becomes very important to us. Part time jobs can be great for they will give us that needed income and can teach us adult responsibilities such as budgeting our time and money. That said a teenager must not overlook their primary job of obtaining a good education. It is education that will enable us to be a success in a future career of our choice.
As a teenager it is your job to start thinking about college admission by the time you are entering high school. Starting early will give you a competitive edge over those that wait until their junior year of high school to do so. While getting into college is not difficult, getting into a more competitive college does require early planning and hard work. A consistent academic record, good grades, standardized academic testing, and extracurricular activities must all come together in a way that shows the college admissions officer that you will be an excellent addition to the school’s student body. In your adult life these same traits will be important to your employer as you advance in your career.
Many teenagers overlook the job of planning early for college and their future job. These teens do not recognize the importance of planning and wait until late in their junior year. These teenagers have no clue what they want to major in, what schools they want to apply to, or even if they will go to college at all. Most of these teens will go to the local community college or in state university. While this is a viable option, many more opportunities are available with early planning.
As a responsible teenager it is your job to start thinking about what general areas of study you want to pursue. Math and science or the liberal arts like history and languages. Start thinking about what kinds of careers these areas of study offer. Do any of those careers interest you? Do you have a natural talent or gift for something? Ask your friends and family what job or profession they think you would be good in. The answers might surprise you.
Next you want to start aligning your high school courses with those interests. Talk to your counselor about which classes to start with and ones that will let you advance in a logical progression. For example, if you choose a foreign language, you will start with Spanish 1, moving onto Spanish 2, Spanish 3, and finally Spanish 4 in your senior year. Math, science, and social study courses will have a similar progression. Ideally you will have 4 years of a foreign language, 4 years of math, and 4 years of science or history by your senior year.
Once you’ve outlined your class selections, start to think about extracurricular activities that your school and community offer. If you chose a math and science path, join the math team or biology club. Athletics such as football, basketball, and tennis can also add tremendous value to your academic resume. The key to choosing an extracurricular activity is to choose one or more that you know you can excel in. For example, when joining the math team, strive to become the team captain. If joining the student government, run for president. Anyone can join a club or participate in a sport, college admissions officers are looking for those that excel.
You can also do things in your community. Volunteer at the local fire station, museum or food kitchen. Look for ways to improve or add value to wherever you are. For example, if you volunteer at a local state park, maybe start a fund raiser to build a new playground, or form a team of students to pick up trash and recycle. Whatever you can think of, be sure to take the leading role and see the project to a successful completion. This will show the admissions officer that you take initiative, work hard, and see things to its finish.
However, do not forget how important your grades are. If any extracurricular activity starts to affect your grade point average, you need to take a pause. Your grade point average is a critical component to the college admissions officer. If you cannot handle high school class work, he/she will be harder to convince that you can handle college level courses and will be less likely to admit you despite all your other activities.
Just as important, and sometimes more important, is your class selection. As mentioned earlier, make sure they are focused and show a logical progression in the area of study you have chosen. Take the most advanced courses available up to AP level courses in your junior and senior year. Ideally, you will take 4 or 5 AP level courses in your senior year.
Your grade point average needs to remain consistent or improve as you take harder courses. Admissions officers do not like to see your grades deteriorate as you advance into harder courses. Even if your freshman year grades were horrible, if you really shine in your junior and senior year, you will make an excellent impression to the admissions officer.
Networking will be extremely important to you as you advance in your future career. As a student you also want to start building a network of people who can write letters of recommendations. This can be teachers, community leaders, or your counselors. Anyone who can vouch for your character and accomplishments. If you are very motivated, you may even want to visit the college of your choice and ask them if it is okay to attend one or two days of classes. Get to know the professors and admissions officer. Then, when you apply, ask the professor for a letter of recommendation!
Your next job is to start planning for standardized academic testing. The SAT, ACT, SAT Subject Tests, and AP Tests. Find out what the schools of your choice require. The most competitive schools will require the SAT and two SAT Subject Tests. For the SAT Subject Tests and AP Tests, choose the ones that match your area of study. For example, take SAT Math Level 2 and Physics if you are thinking about applying to a technology school. Take U.S. History and World History if you plan on going into the liberal arts.
There are several subjects to choose from. Ask your counselor or the college admissions offices which ones to take. The most important thing with standardized testing is the final score. Check the web site of the college or university you are interested in for averages and percentiles of admitted students. Generally speaking, for competitive schools, you need to be over 700 on each of the SAT Reasoning Test subjects – Critical Reading, Writing, and Math. You also need to be over 700 on the SAT Subject Tests. For the SAT subject tests, anything less than 700 is very unfavorable.
To improve your chances, look into schools that offer early action and early decision. Only the most competitive schools will offer one or both of these options. More than half of the students admitted to a competitive school apply early. Also, write a compelling essay. Do not choose a worn out subject about some childhood dream or the impact some event has made in your life. Write about how you used your talents to make a significant impact in your school, community, or on others. You want to project what is special about you and that you know how to use it.
Admissions officers are looking for students who are motivated, work hard, and will excel in their field of choice. Success will come to you if you take the job of education seriously and follow the guidelines above. Keep those grades up, apply early, and score well on the standardized tests and you will have an excellent chance of getting into a competitive school of your choice. While you may think of this as hard work it is one of the most important steps you can make towards rapid success in your future career.
Writing a Scholarship Winning Essay
June 11, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Scholarships are like money in the bank. Writing the scholarship essay is a critical step in the scholarship application process because it helps establish why a particular applicant is deserving of the money. Other scholarship criterion such as a high SAT score and a solid GPA, while still valuable, do not personalize the scholarship application like the essay does, as the essay appeals to the emotional aspect of one’s psyche. For this reason it is important that the scholarship essay is clear, concise and well-written.
So how does one go about creating a masterpiece scholarship essay? Well, the very first step would involve one absolving themselves of the notion that only those with talent have the ability to write well. If a person can talk they can write. However, because writing does involve a little bit more thinking than regular talking, it is important to follow a few guidelines during the writing process. These guidelines are detailed below:
1) Read other scholarship essays
Reading other winning scholarship essays is the best way to get a feel for what scholarship judges are looking for. It may also help provide ideas during times of writer’s block. Be careful, however, not to copy other people’s words unless they are properly quoted in the scholarship essay. This applies for both direct quotes and paraphrased statements.
2) Use outlines and brainstorm
Outlines are a great tool for a writer to get their thoughts together. A traditional outline format consists of a Roman numeral identifying the main heading, a capital letter identifying a subheading and numbers indicating topics under the subheading. Further points related to these topics can be denoted using small letters. Of course, for the scholarship essay an informal outline could work just as well… all that really matters is that the writer is aware of what they want to say before they actually start saying it.
3) Don’t be afraid of research
Some scholarship essays seem so essay… so why does a writer still encounter mental roadblocks when starting their piece? This is perfectly natural even on topics that one feels they are knowledgeable of. To get the brain cells functioning again, sometimes researching on topics directly and indirectly related to the main topic is helpful.
4) Write from the heart
Don’t try to sound like the latest best-selling author when writing the scholarship essay. This includes trying to sound ‘deep’, (unless of course ‘deep’ is one’s natural writing style), and littering the essay with big words. Scholarship judges can see through this and are usually turned off if they feel an essayist is trying to sound like someone else.
5) Be creative
As long as creativity doesn’t distract from the main theme of the scholarship essay, and assuming one is still using proper grammar, don’t be afraid to deviate from the ‘academic style.’ Believe it or not scholarship judges are human and tend to notice essays that touch their emotions in some way. Anecdotes, emotional personal accounts and even dialogues are creative approaches that have been used in winning scholarship essays. If the scholarship essay instructions allow for creative expression, go wild with it.
6) Use proper grammar and punctuation
Scholarship essays full of grammatical errors are the first to be disqualified even if the content is otherwise compelling. Therefore it is important that an essayist is fully aware of the rules of English grammar and writes in a formal manner. This means that when it comes to choosing to write a sentence with a traditional structure versus a ‘contemporary’ one, the writer should opt for the former. For example, even though it has recently become acceptable to use and or but at the beginning of a sentence, it should be avoided when writing the scholarship essay. There are still a lot of editors that feel uncomfortable with the idea of using a conjunction at the beginning of a sentence, so why even take the chance? A writer can never lose when choosing to write traditionally.
7) Use a standard essay format
A basic essay format consists of a thesis statement, three or four paragraphs expanding on points detailed in the thesis statement and a concluding paragraph. This traditional structure, despite being seen as generic by some writers, works very well. Why? Because it allows the essayist to clearly lay out their thoughts both for themselves during the writing process and for the judges who are reading the essay. This is an important factor when creating the scholarship essay, particularly for inexperienced writers who may have trouble clearly expressing the ‘main point’ in a non-traditional approach.
Follow the scholarship essay’s instructions
It is important that the scholarship essay addresses the points asked for in the instructions. No matter how brilliant a particular piece is, if it goes off on a tangent discussing irrelevant topics then it has not achieved the desired objective.
9) Get someone else to proofread your work
It is very easy for writers to not catch all of their mistakes, whether they are grammatical errors, typos or inconsistencies in the ‘logic’ of their piece. This is why it is important for everyone, even those who have previously written winning scholarship essays, to get their work proofread by a variety of sources.
10) Don’t get discouraged by ‘losing’ scholarship essays
Just because a scholarship essay didn’t win doesn’t necessarily mean that it was bad. Keep in mind that scholarship judges are responsible for reading hundreds sometimes even thousands of scholarship essays. Deciding who will win, particularly when there are so many good essays to choose from can be very difficult. Sometimes the final choice will be based purely on emotion… the judge may see factors in an essay that reminds them of their personal life. Either way, it is impossible to please everyone. This is why it is important to apply to as many scholarships as possible. As long as a person follows these guidelines and produces a well-written essay, the power of numbers shall be on their side. Good scholarship essays are bound to get noticed eventually.
Online Education – Earning a College Degree Online
June 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment
We are living in a time when education plays a highly important roll in how well we are likely to succeed. As many teens and young adults are discovering the job market is competitive and in some fields jobs are scarce. Teens are graduating high school entering the job market or preparing to earn a college or trade school degree. Many young adults are now earning their first degree and many others already in the job pool are retraining or thinking about retraining for a new career. For many the internet is a great way to improve ones qualifications or gain a new degree.
It was not long ago that there were a limited number of degrees being offered in only a few traditional subjects. Those who took these degrees were forced to opt for the limited jobs available to suite their qualifications. Today, this is no longer the case and there is a vast range of degree courses and qualifications available to sit every need. University education has become so evolved in the recent years, that there is a degree for any field you wish to specialize in. This is a great opportunity for teens and young adults that are ready for higher education and an opportunity for individuals who wish to make a career change or upgrade their education qualifications.
Thousands of results will show up if you log onto the Internet to search for online university degrees. Searching with the name of the course will give numerous results as well and you can conduct a comparative study of the entire list to make the right choice. Selecting the best course from the vast multitudes of available courses will take some hours of deliberation to arrive at a decision.
A good practice would be to search for the required course using a filter. For instance, if you are interested in a law degree, use your favorite search engine to find that subject by entering “law degree” and include the quotes. After conducting the comparative study, you can short list a few courses and begin to check out the institutions offering them. This can take at least a couple of weeks with the many options to choose from.
The first step however, is to be sure of the area you want to specialize in, be it law, medicine, information technology, management, administration or the many other top paying positions. You have to focus on that particular field and conduct the search accordingly to determine the right degree for you. If you consider the field of nursing for instance, then there are courses available for beginners, those looking for basic qualifications, or even registered nurses seeking to upgrade in their field. Therefore, it is essential to select the right field and the area you are interested in. You are the best judge for your personal goals, so conduct your research keeping this fact in mind.
There are so many choices available for online degree that one can be completely overwhelmed by the options. One way to start the search is by checking out an online college or university that you may have heard about or someone may have recommended. This way you are assured of the credibility of the institution and you will have a “real” valid degree at the end of the course. To help get you started here are a few sites that may be of interest to you:
Find criminal justice schools, colleges and degree programs at CriminalJusticeDegree.org
Find culinary and cooking college degree programs at CulinarySchools.net
Find film schools, colleges and degree programs at FilmSchools.com
Find healthcare schools and degree programs at HealthcareDegrees.org
Find web design schools and degree programs at WebDesignSchools.com
With the help of Internet searches, it is possible to select the right type of degree course suited to your requirements. It is your personal choice but you have to make sure that you are selecting a credible online university or college. With information overload and promotional talk, it is quite easy to get confused. Therefore, you need to examine all the options carefully before arriving at any decision.
Job articles for teens and students
Study Habits That Help You Earn That Scholarship
March 2, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Good study habits will contribute to a successful scholastic future. Good habits bring good grades, good grades mean admissions to better colleges and universities, possibly with a scholarship thrown in. This in turn will lead to a great career.
To succeed, the first thing you need to do is take responsibility for your actions. You are the only one who can decide your priorities and how to use your time and resources. Your actions determine what will happen tomorrow and in the foreseeable future.
The most important thing to learn to survive and succeed in the classroom, is to use your time outside the classroom effectively. Do a periodic review of your lecture notes and the appropriate chapters in your textbooks. Nightly review of your notes are ideal and will help you retain your lessons ten fold! This review will save time in the long run and prevent cramming. By being prepared in advance, you will be more relaxed and have better recall.
Be responsible for yourself. Your success lies in your own hands. Do not be influenced by your peers. Be a leader, not a follower. Do not allow your friends to dictate what is important. Keep friends who lead you towards your goals, not away from them. Don’t let friends influence you to not do your work. Not everyone has the same work ethic.
Prioritize your schedule. Have a to do list and put the most important project first. Once this is done proceed to the second most important project. Crossing off each project as you finish will give you a sense of accomplishment. Hang out with kids who have the same goals as you. In doing so, your resolve to be a successful student is made stronger by a support group who encourage and support one another.
Some students work well in the morning, some can study better in the afternoon, or at night. Different people work better at different times. Choose which time of the day you are most productive. If you study in the morning, plan to study your hardest subjects first. Choose a study space you can be comfortable in. Pay attention to other things that improve your productivity. Can you study well with soft music in the background? Make yourself comfortable while studying, not too hot or too cold, to increase productivity.
Always seek solutions to problems. If you have difficulty understanding a particular concept, re-read it. If you still cannot understand it, try something more aggressive like consulting with the teacher, professor, a tutor, an academic advisor, or a classmate. Many concepts build on top of each other, so seek assistance immediately or you may fall behind.
Look to continuously challenge yourself. Do not be content to just use your own prescribed textbooks. Ask questions and do your own research. Discover the opposing view of a particular theory for example. Share your knowledge and listen to others. Knowledge shared is knowledge doubled. In the process of teaching others, you learn more. Go the extra mile, as only you will reap the benefits.
Putting your best effort into your work is success itself! The satisfaction you will get from following the above study habits will provide you with a sense of achievement and increased self esteem. Your good grades will be the icing on the cake. You will be armed with life building attitudes of perseverance, hard work, discipline, honesty, curiosity, and a love for excellence! These habits will contribute to a secure and happy future!
Marketing Your College Degree
February 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Do you have something to offer that others don’t? Are you specialized to do something not everyone is? If so, you probably have a marketable college degree. Many people graduate college, or trade schools thinking they will be magically picked up by a company because of their degree. Sadly, many don’t realize that there are others marketing their specialties to companies making it harder for them to hire you instead of them.
The first thing one must do in order to market their degree is to define it. If someone graduates with a degree in business management, then market yourself towards business but be open-minded to various possibilities. This may sound elementary, but often people undervalue their profitability in the workforce. Think of all the types of businesses available, every single one of them needs someone with your expertise. While many will pick up their local classifieds and search for jobs, if the category is empty they will look for other work. Don’t settle. By marketing your degree you can land a job in the field you’ve been trained in. Specialized employees make more than those without one. Think in terms of the airline business. You have lower paid individuals putting the luggage on the planes, because this is not as specialized as the pilots who most likely make 3 to 5 times more money per year. This is because it’s much more challenging to become a pilot then let’s say a luggage handler. So holding a specialty degree will make you more desirable thus netting you a higher paycheck.
Let everyone know you have a unique degree and show them what you’ve learned. Often on job applications a section will have a title such as “industry specific training” or “special certification” this is where you want to begin. Enter in your degree and be sure to mention it in the interview as well. Don’t be afraid to show people what you have learned in your program.
Build upon experience so that you can become more marketable. Make your best effort every time you leave a job to get a new one that entails more responsibility, or allows you to experience more than your last job. This will help you build your experiences to make you more marketable to businesses and companies.
Don’t have any specific training under your belt? There is still time to make yourself marketable as a job candidate by going back to school. If you’re interested in a particular field check out their website and get started TODAY!
Job articles for teens and students