Many applicants to the most selective university programs share high grades, high test scores, solid recommendations and generous doses of community service and volunteer activities. Yet, if they want to set themselves apart from the pool of exceptional students, a significant research experience in STEM or the social sciences helps.
Often students are asked about their passions: exercise, the LA Dodgers, the German language, or coding in C++?
However, a better question, according to an article by Jon Jachimowicz, Three Reasons it’s so Hard to Follow Your Passion, in the Harvard Business Review 15 October 2019, is what is your purpose? Central to the article is a Deloitte Survey of 3000 full time workers across all types of job levels. It found only a fifth were ‘passionate about their work.’
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the inventor of the Internet, has a full portfolio of high-tech ventures from accelerating molecular discoveries for new medicines, coatings, and dyes to Adaptable Navigation Systems so users (particularly the military) can navigate should GPS based systems get jammed or are not available because of geography.
Ken Bain, a professor of history, and an ardent educator who never stops searching for a better way to educate students in how to discover the truth, published a book, ‘What the Best College Teachers Do.’ A key chapter deals with the expectations these best teachers have for their students. On page 85 he focuses on students’ ‘Intellectual Development.’ Bain actually captured this ‘inventory of reasoning’ from Arnold Arons, a physicist at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Critical thinking entails, at a minimum, a series of 10 reasoning and abilities and habits of thought:
Virtually every college counselor preaches the importance of discovering something, anything, and pursuing it passionately. The earlier in one’s high school career that one discovers this passion, the better, because the longer one dedicates yourself, the sooner you might gain mastery over a hard to acquire skill that just might place you near the top of the applicant heap.
For high school students the number of tests is relentless and steady. Sadly, depending on the professional course taken, the frequency and importance of these tests only intensifies over time. So, learning how to deal with test stress is a necessity whether one is planning to become an accountant, architect, or dentist.
Obviously, test stress can have severe ramifications, so gaining a raw familiarity with the key elements to control this stress is worthwhile.
The New York University (NYU) application essay reads: ‘NYU is global, urban, inspired, smart, connected, and bold. What can NYU offer you, and what can you offer NYU?’ Whatever you might offer NYU, NYU offers you a place in the elite of haunted campuses, along with a very good scare above and beyond its annual tuition rate of $45,000.
Founded in 1831, NYU has over 20,000 souls buried beneath its main campus. The land comprising Washington Square Park, NYU’s Greenwich Village location, was a ‘potter’s field,’ a graveyard for the indigent. It also served as a mass grave for the thousands who died in the Yellow Fever epidemic of the 1820s. The Old University building, one of the first buildings built on the campus, was haunted by a young artist who committed suicide in one of its turrets.
The world of higher education is undergoing change. At the moment the change might not be easily perceived, but it is occurring, because it must.
The primary factor behind the change is higher education’s inexorably rising costs. Over the last two decades college costs have been rising annually at 1.6% above inflation.
The confluence of rising tuition, increasing student debt, and declining employment opportunities for recent graduates is raising questions about the value of a bachelor’s degree. These concerns have been around for years, but the good news is there are rays of hope in the form of tuition rates beginning to freeze or even contract. Better still, over the next five years, expect the use of online classes to snowball across the postsecondary universe. Institutions that fail to respond will, in all likelihood, start to fall to the wayside—unless the size of their endowments insulates them.
