Get Clear. Get Into Grad School. Get On With Your Life. by Dr. Khia on May 14, 2012
It is a rude awakening to be hit smack dab in the face with the realization that a lot of people just don’t understand much about higher education beyond signing up and paying for classes. This is what happened to me this week.
I’m a college professor in addition to a grad school coach. Every semester I see over one hundred students in my courses. I teach mostly introductory courses – those filled with first and second year students. These are students who are still deciding what they want to do with their life, who may change their major once or twice or three or four times before they settle on a career path, and those have not a single solitary soul who has ever been to college in their family.
Misinformation, Misrepresentation, and Assumptions
I come face to face with a lot of misinformation and assumptions that unwittingly lead people astray in their pursuit of higher education. Most of my students are on the road to earning an associates degree. Many students have aspirations to move beyond, some even expressing interest in a masters or Ph.D., and there are tons of questions on how to get from HERE to THERE in less time, less money, and with the least confusion. Without a reliable source of information, students are left to draw their own conclusions (some of them incorrect) about college and life after college, especially their careers. [click to continue…]
Get Clear. Get Into Grad School. Get On With Your Life. by Dr. Khia on May 12, 2012
One of the best perks of being a grad school coach is having friends in high places. I’m saying this in a tongue-in-cheek manner, by the way. But forserious (not a real word), the wonderful wonderful people at Magoosh have come up with a resource that I think you all need to hear about.
Magoosh Test Prep brings expert GRE and GMAT test preparation advice right here for YGSC readers, but their entire mission is to do test prep the 21st century way – online! You can read more of where I’ve sang their praises before on this blog. They really do know their stuff!
The GRE has changed so many times since I took it way back when that it’s hard to keep up. Unless you’re Magoosh because keeping up with the GRE is what they do. So they have created this TOTALLY FREE ebook to keep you abreast of all of the changes and how you can score high on the newly Revised GRE. [click to continue…]
Get Clear. Get Into Grad School. Get On With Your Life. by Dr. Khia on April 26, 2012
Here are more tips from the Magoosh test preparation experts on scoring high on the GRE exam!
The solution to many GRE Text Completion questions lies in the following approach: identify the keywords, come up with your own word for the blank(s), and match with the answer choice. Yet this strategy won’t always be successful. Sometimes we need to work backwards from the answer choices to see if we can create a sentence with a coherent meaning. [click to continue…]
Get Clear. Get Into Grad School. Get On With Your Life. by Dr. Khia on April 5, 2012
There’s this really cheesy R&B song from the early ’90s that goes “I wanna be rich, ba ba ba-ba-ba-da-ba.” It was a pretty big hit at the time. The melody and hook runs through my head every time I daydream about untold riches.
Tonight, I started reading Ramit Sethi’s book “I Will Teach You To Be Rich,” of which there is a highly successful blog that is its namesake. In the very first chapter, “Would You Rather Be Sexy or Rich,” he references the average college student’s dreams of being a millionaire by 40 years old. He doesn’t mention it explicitly but I imagine that for many of these college students, their imagined path to wealth involves a trek through grad school, which begs the question: [click to continue…]
Get Clear. Get Into Grad School. Get On With Your Life. by Dr. Khia on March 27, 2012
I consider myself a writer. Reading and writing have always been among my great passions in life. I was one of those kids who took great delight at a trip to the library because this is where I felt at home. So many books and so many interests, I wandered up and down the aisles in search of my next great adventure.
In time, I wanted to write, and I did. I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote as a middle schooler and high schooler. When faced with the decision of what to major in in college, I was torn between English and Psychology. Psychology won out and I designated English as my minor.
As an undergrad and Ph.D. student, one of the most consistent praises I’ve earned is for my writing style. Late last year, I contributed a chapter to the Legacy Letters anthology. The Legacy Letters project creator and editor told me (and I take as an extremely high compliment):
“You write with an authenticity and transparency that is interesting and inspiring.” – Lisa Nicole Bell
And it is my intention to bring the same authenticity, transparency, inspiration, along with a heavy dose of usable advice and guidance here to grad school admission seekers. [click to continue…]
