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Posts Tagged ‘School’
The Law School Expert team is constantly working to bring you all the news you need to know about law school admissions. We wanted to let you about some new and easy ways to keep the good advice and information coming your way. With a debut issue in January 2012 Law School Expert [...]
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Your go-to source for straightforward answers to law school admission questions brings you a new tool for your journey. Law School Expert has teamed up with FindTheBest to bring you all the need-to-know information to compare law schools and find the best one for you. Just as the Law School Expert…
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For those of you who just took the LSAT, or those of you who have simply been procrastinating, here is a plan to help you move through the application process as speedily as possible without freaking out that you are late in the game. December 5,6,7: Brainstorm ideas for your personal statement….
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An increasing number of law schools are asking you to address your reasons for attending law school, and their law school in particular, as part of your personal statement or in an optional essay. After all, my recent survey of 100 law school applicants showed that 39% felt they “knew…
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The best way to understand earning power—no matter what your age—is to understand the factors that go into it. For example, most people who have careers that are plateauing usually have a learning problem that manifests itself as an earning problem.
And for parents, schooling discussions are really earning discussions. Because you can say that kids with a love of learning are lifelong learners (essential for workplace success today), but truly, who wants an unemployed Ph.D candidate? You don't want a lawyer who can't get a job because of poor social skills, you don't want a kid with perfect SAT scores who marries for money because supporting oneself seems too hard. Every parent wants to raise a kid who is capable of supporting himself and capable of finding engaging work for a stable life.
Here's how schooling affects earning power.
1. Focus on pre-K through third grade.
Why focus on pre-K? There is very solid data that the earning power of kids who attend a pre-K program is so much higher than kids who don’t that Head Start is one of the most sacred of all publicly funded programs in the US. So the school impact on one’s earning potential starts in pre-K.
Why third grade? Research from Project STAR shows that after third grade, the quality of one’s classroom has little impact on one’s future earning potential. There is clear data (spanning 25 years and researchers at six universities) that shows that test scores after third grade are not indicators of future earning potential.
2. Ignore standardized test results, obsess over self-confidence levels.
This means, of course, that it doesn’t matter how one performs on national standardized tests since those test scores do not have impact on the sixty years one spends in the workforce.
And this conclusion is consistent with one of my favorite studies in the whole world: It is from Alan Kreuger, professor at Princeton, that shows that while it is true that kids who go to Harvard and Princeton have advantages over others when it comes to future earning, you can get those same advantages just by applying to those schools. It’s having ambition and believing in yourself that are the real harbingers of success. The fancy diploma is a red herring.
3. Teach kids to find mentors.
Faye Crosby, professor at the University of Santa Cruz says that the two most important factors in a person’s earning potential are quality of schooling and quality of mentoring. Now we know that the schooling part of this equation is up to third grade. So maybe, starting in fourth grade, we should be teaching our kids how to get the best mentors.
Let’s consider what life would look like if you took all fourth graders out of school and started teaching them how to get mentors. First of all, the act of finding a mentor is very consistent with what current research on education reform says that kids should be doing: Following the paths that interest them and finding someone to guide them.
4. The best schooling after third grade is unschooling.
Here is a fascinating article from Psychology Today about why school reform will not work because schools are so incredibly ill-suited for teaching kids. In fact, the formula for school—telling kids what they should learn and how they should learn—is a method only for killing their creativity.
Lisa Neilsen, who manages teacher training for New York City public schools, also comes down hard on the classroom structure. She tells parents that kids should learn in a project-based program where the lesson plans are dictated by a child’s current interests. Neilsen says that if the school won’t do that for your kid, take your kid out of school.
5. Aim for out of the box. Way out of the box. That's when things will look right.
So let’s say you take the advice of people whose job is to study what is the best way to teach your kid. Let’s say you take the advice of the reams of research about what factors influence a child’s future earning potential.
What you are left with is waking up every day, asking your child what he or she wants to do, and then finding someone to help them, if you are are not the right person. Some days you will offer up some ideas, some days your kid will say no to everything and decide to play video games.
Here’s what I’m doing to increase my fourth-grader’s earning potential: Pottery.
He told me he wanted to do clay. He said he’s upset that each year of school he got to do a clay project, and this year, since we’re homeschooling, he’s going to miss it.
So I did a little Googling, and I found a pottery studio: Bethel Horizons. (It is Christian, of course. Everything in rural America that has funding is either government or Christian.)
The minute I walked into the studio, I knew we were so lucky. Krista is the pottery teacher, and she took incredible care to make sure each step was a way to focus mentally and "connect with the clay."
She showed him how to use machines and tools and she showed him that part of the process is keeping the workspace neat and clean so the brain and the hands can work in peace.
Then Krista told my son he'd make a pot each time he sits at the wheel. I thought about the study about pottery in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. Students who were asked to make one, great pot, learned much slower than kids who made a terrible pot each time at the wheel. Greatness comes from lots of terribleness, so I liked that we were on that path.
I coach so many people who want advice about their career, but so often, these people really just need to learn how to figure out what they want: experiment, find what might be fun. Try it for a bit. People need coaching on how to take risks and not worry if they fail. People need coaching on how to find a mentor who is invested in their particular path. I see that all these things are related to earning power, and all these things are what kids learn when they direct their own curriculum.
So, my son probably will not grow up to make expensive pots to sell. But I know that while he's skipping school and managing his pottery-learning himself, his earning power is going up, and it's a joy to watch.
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I’m going to be posting some excerpts from my new book, The Law School Decision Game: A Playbook for Prospective Lawyers, now available. It just came out last week and is under on Amazon. I look forward to your comments and questions about the book. I surveyed more than 250 attorneys from…
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The following is an excerpt from The Law School Admission Game: Play Like an Expert, page 92: 5 Words & Phrases that Make Me Cringe in Personal Statements: 1. “Personally”- It’s a personal statement. Of course everything you say is your own personal opinion. If it’s not,…
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It’s pretty well established that non-science degrees are not necessary for a job. In fact, the degrees cost you too much money, require too long of a commitment, and do not teach you the real-life skills they promise.
Yet, I do tons of radio call-in shows where I say that graduate degrees in the humanities are so useless that they actually set you back in your career in many cases. And then 400 callers dial-in and start screaming at me about how great a graduate degree is.
Here are the six most common arguments they make. And why they are wrong.
1. My parents are paying.
Get them to buy you a company instead. Because what are you going to do when you graduate? You’re right back at square one, looking for a job and not knowing what to do. But if you spent the next three years running a company, even if it failed, you would be more employable than you are now, and you’d have a good sense of where your skill set fits in the workplace. (This is especially true for people thinking about business school.)
2. It’s free.
But you're spending your time. You will show (on your resume) that you went to grad school. Someone will say, “Why did you go to grad school?” Will you explain that it was free? After all, it’s free to go home every night after work and read on a single topic as well. So in fact, what you are doing is taking an unpaid internship in a company that guarantees that the skills you built in the internship will be useless. (Here’s how to get a great internship.)
3. It’s a time to grow and get to know myself better.
If you’re looking for a life changing, spiritually moving experience, how about therapy? It’s a more honest way of self-examination—no papers and tests. And it’s cheaper. Insurance covers therapy because it’s a proven way to effectively change your personal disposition. There’s a reason insurance doesn’t cover grad school.
4. The degree makes me stand out in my field.
Yes, if you want to stand out as someone who couldn’t get a job. Given the choice between getting paid to learn the ropes on the job and paying for someone to teach you, you look like an underachiever to pick the latter. If nothing else, you get much better coaching in life if you are good enough and smart enough to get mentorship without paying for it.
There are very very few jobs that require a non-science degree in order to get the job. (And really, forget about law school if that's what you're thinking.) So if you don’t need the degree in order to get the job, the only possible reason a smart employer would think you got the degree instead of getting a job was because you were too scared to have to apply or you applied and got nothing. Either way, you’re a bad bet going forward.
5. I’m planning on teaching.
Forget it. There are no teaching jobs. In an interview last week, the head of University of Washington’s career center even admitted to a prospective student that getting a degree in humanities in order to get a teaching job—even in a community college—is a long-shot at best. And, the University of Washington career coach confirmed that there is enormous unemployment among people who are qualified to teach college courses but cannot get jobs doing it. This is not just a Washington thing. It's a welcome-to-reality thing.
6. A degree makes job hunting easier.
It makes it harder. Forget the fact that you don’t need a graduate degree in the humanities to get any job in the business world. The biggest problem is that the degree makes you look unemployable. You look like you didn’t know what to do about having to enter the adult world, so you decided to prolong childhood by continuing to earn grades rather than money even though you were not actually helping yourself to earn money.
Also, you also look like you don’t really aspire to any of the jobs you are applying for. People assume you get a graduate degree because you want to work in that field. People don’t want to hire you in corporate America when it’s clear you didn’t invest all those years in grad school in order to do something like that.
7. I love being in graduate school! Everything in life is not about careers!
Sure, when you're a kid, everything is not about careers. But when you grow up, everything is about earning enough money for food and shelter. So you need to figure out how to do that in order to make the transition from childhood to adulthood. This is why millionaires have stopped leaving their money to their kids—it undermines their transition to adulthood. But instead of making the transition, you are still in school, pretending things are fine. The problem is that what you do in school is not what you will do in a career. So if you love school, you'll probably hate the career it's preparing you for, since your career is not going to school.
When I met the farmer, one of the first things he told me was that he went to school for genetic biology. But in graduate school his research was in ultrasound technology for pigs. But he missed being with the pigs, which is what he wanted to do for his job. So he left school.
And every time I see the pigs on our farm I think about how he took a risk by dumping a graduate program in order to tend to pigs. I love that.
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After yesterday’s post, about how stupid grad school is, a lot of people asked, what is an alternative to grad school?
This is a great question.
I see this picture outside my window at least once a month.
I have only a little idea of what's going on. Should I go to graduate school to figure it out? I could. I could get in. And it's clear that the next stage in my life will involve some sort of work related to farming. A business. Or writing. Or marketing. But I'm not going to graduate school to learn about agriculture because I have tried going to graduate school to get a jump on my job prospects and it doesn't work.
When I graduated from college, I was supposedly going to graduate school in history. But I kept writing entrance essays about why I wanted to tell stories about people and history is a good way to do that. And finally, my professor who had stood by me for four years, getting undergraduate research grants for me to study mass movements in colonial America, said, “Forget it. You don’t want to be a historian.”
What she really meant was, “I’m not pulling strings to get you into Yale.”
And that was the only place I applied. Because she said she’d get me in.
Every job interview I went on seemed stupid: An incredible combination of not enough money to live on and a job description that was one step up from slave.
So I played professional beach volleyball. I got as high as #17 in the US rankings. But when I went back down 32 I had no competitive urge to get back up. So I knew I needed to do something else.
But I couldn’t get a job. I mean, I could. Working for my boyfriend. But that had sucked before. So I knew it would suck again.
I took the GRE and scored in the bottom 20th percentile in quantitative reasoning, which got me into an English master’s program.
It took me a year and a half and ,000 in loans to realize this degree would never get me a job.
I tried to date a few professors, but they were already adept at judging whether or not a grad student was too messed up.
Now I’m going to tell you what I did to make things come together in my career.
First, I stopped doing work that wasn’t going to lead to a job. I got a C in Victorian Literature, a D in Film and Literature, an A in modern literature only because I plagiarized from the New York Times Book Review.
Meanwhile, I taught myself HTML before people knew what the Internet was. I presented a paper at the Dartmouth Technology Conference while my fellow English grad students were writing novels.
I left grad school a month before it ended. I just left. Went back to Los Angles.
I was the thinnest I have ever been in my life because I had no money for food. People worried about me and brought me leftovers. I ate them. This was happening when you had to send out resumes on thick, expensive white paper, and I used food money for postage.
I got an interview 50 miles from where I lived. I borrowed a friend’s car and got the job.
I was hired to run the whole Internet for a Fortune 500 company, Ingram Micro. My job was to enforce the AP Style guide even though I’d never read it. I was in charge of the web development team even though I didn’t know anything about development besides the HTML pages I wrote in grad school.
I gave myself a graduate course in Internet. And a graduate course in copy writing. And a graduate course in management. I read books. I read magazines. I tried stuff out and took way too long and then tried it again.
I worked 15 hour days, and I felt like I was a student. I was learning all the time.
So it’s logical to me that this is what everyone should do. Find a foot in a door and then start learning everything you can to open that door wider.
I got fired for having sixteen non-work projects on my work computer. At the time I was horrified. Now I think it was the inevitable result of me taking control over my own education.
If you are thinking of going to graduate school, you need to understand that the process of discovering what value you bring to the adult world is a very hard process to endure. Because you are probably smart, and you like to learn, and most jobs are not about paying you to learn. You have to create that for yourself.
The best thing I did is that I kept my learning curve very high even outside of school. I saw where the opportunities were, and I started learning in that area, trying to figure out where I fit.
So look. Brazen Careerist has a Social Media Bootcamp. Everyone who is thinking of going to grad school should take the course. It’s 5, which is nothing—nothing—compared to grad school loans. And the course can show you a way out. The Bootcamp is about possibilities. A course cannot answer your big life questions for you. But it can show you that you have more options than you think you do.
If you are thinking of going to grad school, it's because you don't like the choices you see in front of you. Maybe nothing gets you excited. But you can use social media to bridge the type of learning you loved to do in school with the type of learning you can get paid to do. And you can use social media to see how to make jobs for yourself that get you excited.
It might seem like a harder path to sign up for Social Media Bootcamp instead of getting a graduate degree. It seems harder because you won't have someone's stamp of approval. But credentials don’t get the job. Experience does. So, in fact, Social Media Bootcamp is the path of least resistance. Your safety net is not a degree, but practice learning new ideas on your own and implementing them. So you know you can do that again and again.
Life should be a process of learning and doing, learning and doing. Grad school is all learning. It’s an imbalance that is not fair to you, and not right for you. Create your own grad school. Open your own doors. Sign up right now.
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