Literally Do Your Work As Soon As You Know It Exists. If You Get Homework, Do It During Your Free Or

hey!! as a high school senior in the middle of college apps, i figured i could give some tips on the process for my fellow classmates & any underclassmen trying to start early (pro tip: start as early as you can!) so yeah, here are my tips for teacher recs, the first post in my college apps guide series!

choosing your teachers:

choosing who should write your recommendation can be a stressful process, but it’s the first step! whoever you choose depends on a lot of factors, including: how well they know you personally, how well they know you academically, and how well they know what you’ve done & what you do. also, oftentimes colleges require teachers of specific subjects depending on your major, so keep that in mind too. it can be very beneficial to have a teacher who teaches in the field of your chosen major so they can give a perspective on your academic success in that subject.

generally colleges take two recommendations, so it’s important to make sure that your rec letters are a good blend of perspectives and that they are not going to be the same letter. two similar recs are not effective, and you may as well send in one. so when choosing your teachers, make sure that they can bring varying points of view to your letter of rec.

a teacher may know you well academically and personally, or know what you’ve done and who you are, so if possible, you want to get all three perspectives within your two recs, and it’s ok if one of them is repeated. however, the one thing you don’t want is a teacher whose class you didn’t do to great in, even if they know you well. i would personally say to completely rule out that kind of teacher, but if they know you 100% and have seen you grow and change, then i suppose that rec may be viable- but it’s still not the best idea.

requesting your recs:

this is a pretty formal process, so you don’t want to mess up too terribly. you’re essentially asking your teachers to tell a college why it should accept you, so you want to approach them very tactically.

unless you’re asking them over the summer, approach them in person. this establishes that you care enough about their rec that you can meet with them & reminds them of who you actually are so you’re more than just a name asking for a recommendation.

be nice & throw in the compliments (but not too many). you want to sound as genuine as possible, so lay it thick but not too thick. tell them you loved their class & why you loved their class.

and then mention that you’re applying to colleges this fall and would be honored if they could write a rec for you.

those are the basics. a lot of people also give gifts to their teachers, either when asking for a rec or sometimes after. this isn’t absolutely necessary, but it’s a nice gesture and makes them happy!

what to provide:

even if a teacher knows you well, it makes things a lot easier for the both of you if you put a majority of your info on paper. many teachers or schools provide forms for you to fill out, but if they don’t, here’s what you could give them:

a resume, with enough descriptions of positions you’ve held & things you’ve done for them to get the whole picture

a brag sheet, covering your activities, grades, plans for the future, obstacles you’ve overcome, what you’d like them to highlight, etc… basically put everything you want them to know about you.

whatever you provide them with, make sure it also has: some of your grades or gpa on it, the colleges you’re applying to, and your intended major (if you’re undecided then just let them know you’re undecided)

time!! time is so important. teachers have lives and other things to do, and you’re asking a huge favor when requesting a recommendation, so please keep time in mind, especially if you’re applying early somewhere! they should at least have 2-3 weeks to write your rec (at least!)

also remember an envelope with postage stamp and all that jazz if they’re mailing the rec letter in. and if you’re requesting a rec online, make sure you actually send in that request. even if you’ve asked them for a rec, that request is your responsibility.

other things to do:

check in with your teachers some time after you’ve asked them for a rec, especially if you’ve electronically requested one, to make sure everything’s reached them.

stay friendly with them, try to smile if you see them in the halls, just be a nice person in general. once again, they’re telling a college why it should take you. you want to make a continuously good impression!

++ a lot of these tips apply for counselor recs too! your counselor pretty much knows they’re writing a rec for you, but you definitely want to make that request (online or in person if that’s how it’s done) and check up with them + make sure you’re nice to them and they know you. they should be able to recognize your face & know some of what you’ve done around the school.

more masterposts!!

5 top math tips

stem studying

study methods

precalculus

algebra (I + II)

geometry

(ap) chemistry

ap world history

studyblr-ing

the everything book

the pomodoro method

how to use flashcards

how to use sticky notes

welcome to high school

tiny study spaces

what’s in a pencil case

i think there’s an important process to know for teacher recs & i hope i covered everything in enough detail! recs are a very important part of your application, so please don’t push them to the side! anyway, i hope this helps!! keep shining like the star you are and remember to be awesome today!!

- Aza

10.23 im barely holdin on right now, having some trouble finding hope and falling in love with the world again but i will be okay

HOW TO APPROACH CLASSES A guide to getting the most out of your classes and lectures

By Eintsein

Design inspired by this post by @journalsanctuary

Some reminders about Dr. King before tomorrow:

US government agencies were implicated in the wrongful death lawsuit in a civil trial in 1999 that his family fought for years and which was then buried by the justice department. The full transcripts of the trial and the following press conference are available on the King Center’s website. http://www.thekingcenter.org/assassination-conspiracy-trial

He spoke out against police brutality, capitalism, and war.

He believed that white moderates were and are the greatest threat to civil rights, moreso than any hate group.

He was arrested over 10 times.

He was considered a dangerous radical by the majority of white Americans. 

He refused to condemn rioters, because “a riot is the language of the unheard.”

Any white person who voted for Trump who tries to use MLK or his words as a rhtetorical tactic to justify their bigotry and complain about people protesting can personally come to my apartment in the next 24 hours for an ass-kicking.

FREE SAT & AP PREP MATERIALS

Dear appblrs if you want to save some money and not spend hundreds of dollars on prep books these are some nice alternatives. (Both these files belong to me. )

Spread the word! Good luck studying :) 

SAT 

AP

I may have some additional stuff in october (past sat & psat exams) 

100 Things You’ll Learn Fourth Year of Medical School

Every year I’ve been putting together a list of 100 things I learned in that year of medical school. 

Here’s the (slightly belated) list for fourth year!! 

Read the other years here: 

First Year

Second Year

Third Year

Bonus: 75 Things I learned about Step 1 

This list includes things I learned about sub-internships, applying for and interviewing for residency, matching, and graduating! 

Sub-I is the smartest you will ever be in all of med school, enjoy it. 

ERAS will crash the day you apply. Don’t panic. 

Nothing feels as good as cancelling an interview. NOTHING 

Airport wine is ridiculously overpriced and often not that good, but so worth it after a long interview. 

Say thank you to all the people who got you here – it takes a village to make a doctor – you didn’t do this alone. 

Keep reading

How to Take Notes: from a Textbook

(Be sure to change the post type from link to text post when you reblog, if that’s what you want to do)

This method is best suited for textbook or article notes, and is a version of revised notes. It is also well suited for books you plan on returning to the bookstore or books you have rented, as it does not involve writing directly in the book itself.

First, you’ll need to find a notebook, and the pens you like the best. My favorite notebooks to work with for note-taking, especially for my “revised” notes, are the Moleskine, hard or soft cover, in size extra large. For this specific class (Intro to Gender and Women’s Studies), I decided that lined pages would suit my needs better. For my math, engineering, and science classes, I usually opt for squared paper, as I draw in lots of diagrams and graphs.

My favorite pens ever are Staedtler Triplus Fineliners, so even though they show through the pages a little bit, I still choose to use them. I just love the way they write. I usually write out my notes themselves with a Pilot G2 05 with black ink, as it writes with a finer line and doesn’t bleed through quite as much.

I usually try to set up my notebooks about a week or so before class starts, that way it’s ready to go on my first day of class.

You’ll want to start off by setting up your notebook. On my first page, I put my course code for my university, as well as the course title.

Next, and this is perfectly optional (I just like the way it makes the book look, especially at the end of the semester), I include some sort of related quote to the course. For my engineering courses (which are related to my major), I put a different quote at the beginning of each section. But as this is a two-month long course during the summer, I opted for one quote by Mohadesa Najumi at the beginning of my book.

Next I set up my table of contents and include a page with basic course information. As this course is all online, my course information just included the start and end dates of the course, what time content is posted and on what day, and the name of my professor. For my usual courses, I will include the days of the week the class meets on and where, TA names and contact info, as well as posted office hours for my professors and TAs and tutoring hours either in the library or in the College of Engineering.

Next is one of the things I’m most proud of.

While I religiously use my Erin Condren planner to map out my days, weeks, and months, I have found throughout my college experience that including monthly views for the months my class ranges has been helpful. This way, there’s no sifting through the multiple colors I have in my planner, and everything related to that class is in the same notebook.

On this calendar I include start dates of the class, the end date, the dates of exams or quizzes, assignment deadlines, office hours, etc.

For this course, as I just started a few days ago, I don’t have a lot of dates or information, so my calendars are still very empty.

Next up I go to my weekly overview. At the beginning of each week, I set up a weekly layout, and I include a list of assignments, tests, quizzes, tasks, projects, etc that need my attention throughout the week, and I place the days I plan on doing them or the days they need turned in onto the weekly layout.

Now you’re finally ready to get into taking the notes.

Gather your book, some sticky notes, and your favorite pen or pencil.

I color code my stickies so that the “revision” process later goes a bit smoother. In this case, I’m using blue to denote something interesting, intriguing, or thought provoking, greenish-yellow to represent the facts or important concepts, and pink for important vocabulary words and their definitions.

Read the selection once.

As you read along the second time, write notes on your stickies, and place them in a place of relevance directly on the page in the book. Just make sure you don’t cover up anything you need to keep reading.

Now, once you’ve read all the material in questions (you can choose to break it up however you want, but since Chapter 1 was assigned for the week, I’ve elected to break it into chapters), carefully remove your stickies one by one and lay them out on a flat surface. This is when having a separate color for vocab can be helpful, as I sometimes put all of my vocab at the beginning or end of a section, especially if the section of reading was particularly large.

Organize your stickies in an order that makes sense to you, and use this order as your basis for transferring those notes into your notebook. The order you choose can just be lumping them under similar headings. Some classes even lend themselves to a nice chronological order. Whatever you choose, just make sure it’s something that will make sense to you when you come back to it in the end.

Okay so up there I wasn’t following my own advice, I just thought I would include the picture because my handwriting looks nice…

Now organize the stickies!

Now you just start writing everything from the stickies into your notebook. I like to take each category or subgroup and put them in the book on the facing page, then put them back in my textbook as I finish with each post it.

Moving on to the next category.

Before you know it, you’ve written all of your stickies into your notebooks.

Now you’re revved up and ready to go. You can either keep going and make a note summary page (which I’ll show you next week), or you can leave it. These will also be helpful when reviewing for tests and quizzes. You can highlight or underline, or use even more stickies (which is what I usually do) as you review.

Well, that’s all I have for you right now. Happy studying!

(To view this post on wordpress, click here)

hi chelsea!! i'm an undergrad student right now, considering a career in academia. my adviser and all my professors tell me i have a lot of potential and i love the idea of spending my life teaching and doing research, but i've read so many horror stories about people trying to find & keep jobs and eventually leaving academia. i was wondering if you had any insight or advice, maybe even places where i could find a more positive & encouraging (but still realistic) perspective. thank u!!

i’m not sure i’m in a great place to answer this for you! the realistic picture is just… not encouraging. finding someone who’ll say “of course you’re going to get a job!” might make you feel better temporarily, but that person is lying to you, and the lie is going to come back around and hurt worse in five years or so. 

in other words, the horror stories are ubiquitous because the experience is ubiquitous (and tbh, though quit lit has def blossomed over the last few years, there’s still a far greater number of people leaving academia than are represented in those accounts–many people see leaving as “washing out” or admitting defeat, and don’t talk about their decisions to go). 

this is not to say that you shouldn’t go into academia. but as i tell my own mentees, you should not go into academia with the expectation of getting a job at the end. i went into grad school because i liked doing the work, and because i did some self-assessment and concluded that even if i didn’t leave six years later with a tenure-track teaching job, i wouldn’t regret taking the time & doing the work to get the doctorate. then i sat down and had a little chat with myself two-ish years ago and decided that yes, i was going to Go For It, which has meant avoiding quit lit for my own mental health and focusing on the positives (your professors! those are the extant examples of people who got the kind of research & teaching job you want!). asking your advisors about this directly is a great place to start; you can also read karen kelsky’s the professor is in, which i’ve mentioned here a few times, for a fairly realistic description of what the market is like at the moment. 

this is a dumb question, but how on earth does one get an interpretive thesis? everything I've come up with just sounds like it's describing stuff that happened, and I'm starting to think I'm just not cut out for writing this stuff....

oh man, okay, here is how to write an interpretive thesis:

find a but.

the easiest way to make your thesis interpretive is to have a “but” moment. It’s where you set up a particular picture of what other people might think is going on, and then you point out why that picture is incorrect, because X.

like my friend’s thesis which was “you may think that bioethics came into being in the wake of the the nuremburg trials, BUT the tuskegee syphilis experiments showed that these standards had yet to permeate the wider scientific culture”

or my thesis, which was “because of the way medical ethics developed as a discipline, it tends to focus on medicine through the lens of the clinical encounter BUT in our changing healthcare system, that is no longer a valid approach to take on the question of ethical practice”

it’s helpful if you find a lot of scholarship, or an influential scholar who you can disagree with; if you’re pushing back an established view within your field, or general knowledge. Most theses begin with a disagreement of some kind, and it’s a very fruitful place to begin.

I would also say there’s nothing wrong with….not writing a “but” thesis? One of my friends wrote his thesis on the intersection on current brain research, education, and those online services that claim to boost your brainpower. There’s not a lot of research in that specific area, so his was an exploratory thesis, suggesting a theory of its own based on what he had found.  If you’re already in a well-trod field with lots of literature around your topic, though, that might be harder.

Talk it over with your advisor! They should be able to point you in the right direction, or at least suggest some more avenues of research.

general language learning resources

dictionaries:

wordreference - has spanish, french, italian, portuguese, catalan, german, swedish, dutch, russian, polish, romanian, czech, greek, turkish, chinese, japanese, korean, & arabic

reverso translation - has arabic, chinese, dutch, french, german, hebrew, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish & turkish

bab.la - has spanish, arabic, chinese, czech, danish, dutch, finnish, french, german, greek, hindi, hungarian, indonesian, italian, japanese, korean, norwegian, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, swedish, swahili, thai, turkish, vietnamese, & esperanto

digital dictionaries of south asia - has dictionaries for assamese, baluchi, bengali, divehi, hindi, kashmiri, khowar, lushai, malayalam, marathi, nepali, oriya, pali, panjabi, pashto, persian, prakrit, rajasthani, sanskrit, sindhi, sinhala, tamil, telugu & urdu

resources for learning words in context:

reverso context  - has arabic, chinese (in beta), dutch, french, german, hebrew, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, romanian, russian, spanish & turkish (in beta)

linguee - has german, spanish, portuguese, french, italian, russian, japanese, chinese, polish, dutch, swedish, danish, finnish, greek, czech, romanian, hungarian, slovak, bulgarian, slovene, lithuanian, latvian, maltese, & estonian

for learning different writing systems

omniglot - an encyclopedia with literally any language you could think of including ancient languages

scripts - an app for learning other writing systems with a limited amount for free (you can do 5 minutes a day for free) - has the ASL alphabet, Russian cyrillic, devanagari, Japanese kana, Chinese hanzi, & Korean hangul

Wikipedia is also helpful for learning different writing systems honestly!

pronunciation

forvo - a pronunciation dictionary with MANY languages (literally an underrated resource i use it all the time)

a really helpful video by luca lampariello with tips on how to get better pronunciation in any language

ipachart.com - an interactive chart with almost every sound!! literally such an amazing resource for learning the IPA (however does not include tones)

another interactive IPA chart (this one does have tones) 

language tutoring

italki - there’s many websites for language tutoring but i think italki has the most languages (i have a referral link & if you use it we can both get $10 toward tutoring lol) - they say they support 130 languages!

there’s also preply and verbling which are also good but there aren’t as many options for languages - preply has 27 and verbling has 43

(obviously these are not free but if you have the money i think tutoring is a great way to learn a language!)

getting corrections/input from native speakers

hellotalk - an app for language exchanges with native speakers & they also have functions where you can put up a piece of writing and ask for corrections - honestly this app is great

tandem - language exchange app but unlike hellotalk you can choose multiple languages (although i think hellotalk is a little bit better)

LangCorrect - supports 170 languages!

HiNative - supports 113 languages!

Lang-8 - supports 90 languages!

verb conjugation

verbix - supports a ton of languages

Reverso conjugation - only has english, french, spanish, german, italian, portuguese, hebrew russian, arabic, & japanese

apps

duolingo - obviously everybody knows about duolingo but i’m still going to put it here - i will say i think duolingo is a lot more useful for languages that use the latin alphabet than languages with another writing system however they do have a lot of languages and add more all the time - currently they have 19 languages but you can see what languages they’re going to add on the incubator

memrise - great for vocab! personally i prefer the app to the desktop website

drops - you can only do 5 minutes a day for free but i still recommend it because it’s fun and has 42 languages! 

LingoDeer - specifically geared towards asian languages - includes korean, japanese, chinese & vietnamese (as well as spanish, french, german, portuguese and russian), however only a limited amount is available for free

busuu - has arabic, chinese, french, german, italian, japanese, polish, portuguese, spanish, russian, spanish, & turkish, 

Mondly - has 33 languages including spanish, french, german, italian, russian, japanese, korean, chinese, turkish, arabic, persian, hebrew, portuguese (both brazilian & european), catalan, latin, dutch, swedish, norwegian, danish, finnish, latvian, lithuanian, greek, romanian, afrikaans, croatian, polish, bulgarian, czech, slovak, hungarian, ukrainian, vietnamese, hindi, bengali, urdu, indonesian, tagalog & thai

misc

a video by the polyglot Lýdia Machová about how different polyglots learn languages - this video is great especially if you don’t know where to start in terms of self study

LangFocus - a youtube channel of this guy who talks about different languages which is always a good place to start to understand how a specific language works also his videos are fun

Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kató Lomb - this book is great and available online completely for free! 

Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner (on pdfdrive) - another great book about language learning

Anki - a flashcard app (free on desktop for any system & free on android mobile - not free on ios mobile) that specifically uses spaced repetition to help you learn vocabulary, it’s got a slightly ugly design but it’s beloved by many language learners & is honestly so helpful

YouTube - literally utilize youtube it is so good.

Easy Languages - a youtube channel with several languages (basically they go around asking people on the street stuff so the language in the videos is really natural) & they also have breakaway channels for german, french, spanish, polish, italian, greek, turkish, russian, catalan & english

there’s also the LanguagePod101 youtube channels (e.g. FrenchPod101, JapanesePod101, HebrewPod101) which are super great for listening practice & language lessons as well as learning writing systems!