Good Links for Students
Swarthmore Professor Timothy Burke, of Easily Distracted blog, has authored a couple of valuable posts for students. While Professor Burke most often posts about his area of expertise, Modern African History, he’s written some very insightful pieces for prospective and current College Students.
First is Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay . Professor Burke navigates through the common mistakes young essay writers make. Awkward sentences, poor choice of tenses, overwriting, and confusion of source materials are just some of the mistakes he covers. In part 2 of his post, Burke offers suggestions and archetypes for writing better analytic essays. The post is very informative and simple at the same time. Taking a moment to read this post will definitely improve any student’s essay writing aptitude.
In, How to Read in College, Professor Burke proposes some great tips for mastering your reading workload.
"The first thing you should know about reading in college is that it bears little or no resemblance to the sort of reading you do for pleasure, or for your own edification.
Professors assign more than you can possibly read in any normal fashion.
We know it, at least most of us do. You have to make strategic decisions about what to read and how to read it. You’re reading for particular reasons: to get background on important issues, to illuminate some of the central issues in a single session of one course, to raise questions for discussion. That calls for a certain kind of smash-and-grab approach to reading. You can’t afford to dilly-dally and stop to smell the lilies."
Finally, for the soon-to-graduate College Senior or the recent College Grad, Professor Burke offers Should You Go to Graduate School? This post is a sort-of "Graduate School for Dummies," offering a behind-the-scenes peek at what Grad School is really like. Burke has an interesting take on the nature of learning in contemporary Graduate Schools.
"Graduate school is not about learning. If you learn things, it’s only because you’ve already internalized the habit of learning, only because you make the effort on your own and in concert with fellow graduate students…Graduate school is not education. It is socialization. It is about learning to behave, about mastering a rhetorical and discursive etiquette as mind-blowingly arcane as table manners at a state dinner in 19th Century Western Europe."
Update: I also want to reccommend Steve Pavlina’s 10 Tips for College Students . As usual Steve has some great advice, though I’m not sure I would take point #3 (take an extra class each semester) as a must.
Technorati Tags : College, Success, Writing, Reading, High+School, Graduate+School
