As the number of returning and adult students continues to grow in an economy where advanced skills are necessary to not only land a good job but keep that job, it was only a matter of time when we’d start seeing more students in school at the same time as their parents. We’ve already written about growing community college enrollment . The numbers speak for themselves—nationwide, full-time enrollment at community colleges is up 24.1 percent since 2007, with overall community college enrollment increasing 16.9 percent over the same period, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. Many of those enrolled are returning adult students who want to amp up their skill sets or start on a path toward a new career, perhaps due to a recent layoff or desire to go into a more desirable field. Community colleges have also always been an affordable option for traditional students either looking for a two-year start before transferring to a four-year university, or a two-year associate’s program that will get them out onto the market faster. It’s only natural then that there would be some overlap, with students and their parents taking courses at the same time. In Illinois, college students who are 40 and older make up about 23 percent of the community college populations. A recent article in the Chicago Tribune looks at mothers and daughters taking community college courses together, such as Diana Gudowski, a 52-year-old attending Prairie State College in Chicago Heights with her 19-year-old daughter Marissa. The two found themselves on the same campus when the family decided collectively that they could not afford Marissa’s first choice, the $30,000 per year St. Mary-of-the-Woods College . Marissa plans to complete her prerequisites at the community college and then transfer to Northern Illinois University. Meanwhile, her mother is taking classes toward a bachelor’s of fine arts in photography; she already has an associate’s from Prairie State in photographic studies. Although their courses don’t overlap, their schedules do—the two carpool to campus, as the family shares one car. “When I got out of high school, I thought ‘Cool. … Now I can take my first class at noon.’ But four out of five days, my Mom starts at 8 a.m.,” Marissa said in the article. The article’s focus is on mothers and daughters because the female population has been hit harder by the struggling economy. Despite some upturns, there are still more than 15 million people out of work across the country, and many of those are older women with limited educations, according to the Tribune. Are you (or your parents) interested in the community college option? Try our free college search or look through our library of resources for more information.

Read the original post:
College Experience Becoming Family Affair

Popularity: 1% [?]

Every so often, we hear a student question what a particular topic in class has to do with the real world. The savvy professor or instructor addresses that question at the beginning of the semester – not only identifying what students should expect to learn and demonstrate by the end of the semester, but also how they will use their new knowledge when they leave the classroom. When it comes to study abroad, parents, faculty or even students can overlook the potential career development benefits from a semester in a foreign country. After all, what can wandering the cobblestone streets of an open market or sampling tapas in a restaurant teach students? A great deal. Aristotle once said, “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” The successful study abroad program creates opportunities for active learning, identifies what students should expect to learn and demonstrate by the completion of their program, and spells out how he or she can demonstrate those outcomes on their resume, in a job interview or when applying to a graduate studies program. To do so, we first must build on what the research conducted by scholars, study abroad program administrators and program providers shows us: • Students who study abroad show gains in those skill sets that are valued by employers seeking to hire workers with specific competencies such as: increased intercultural sensitivity, language acquisition and problem solving skills; • Study abroad impacts career development and influences career direction in the years after graduation (even for students who may not have considered an international career at the time they were abroad); • Study abroad creates a strong foundation for future employment in an international context and can lead to further international experiences that strengthen intercultural competencies. CEA’s study abroad programs lead students beyond simple, passive observation and engage them in their surroundings. They’re not just shopping, they’re learning how to barter a fair price in another language. When they visit a restaurant, they’re learning to adapt to the social norms of the host culture’s society. Interviewing international executives and touring their offices yields insight into how businesses conduct themselves across cultural and political boundaries. Those very real benefits are all too often missed when the study abroad student returns home and adds his/her experience to a resume as only an afterthought: “Spent semester in Rome.” What does that mean? The reviewer of the resume may translate that cryptic expression as “Partied in Italy.” Images of the college social scene abroad overshadow the tangible outcomes students should be prepared to articulate upon completion of a superior study abroad program. Those tangible outcomes can include such desirable job skills as: • Language proficiency – even short of true fluency • Ability to approach obstacles and problem-solving with respect to multicultural differences in the workplace • Comfortable working in diverse, foreign and changing environments • Ability to work independently and without much direction or oversight How can advisors – including career advisors – help? • Talk to your students pre-departure about what expectations they have for study abroad. • Outline your own expectations for your students following their study abroad experience, including how you expect students to demonstrate those outcomes (could include increased language skills, cross-cultural awareness, and independent/critical thinking skills). • Talk to your students following the study abroad experience and assess together which expectations have been met and which have not. • Identify with the student how he/she can articulate those outcomes on a resume, in a job interview, or in applying for graduate programs. Go over sample resumes that outline some outcomes, or practice role-playing a job or graduate school interview. • Identify steps students can take to share those outcomes with peers on campus, including blogging, speaking in front of students at study abroad fairs or new-student campus visits, etc. By laying the groundwork for a successful study abroad experience and following up with the student at program completion, students and their advisors can affirm the kind of cross-cultural skills employers are seeking today. The result will be graduates better-equipped to meet the demands of tomorrow’s job market and on the path to true global competence. Dr. John D. Heyl is the Vice President of Global Education at CEA.

See the original post here:
Study Abroad and Careers – The Correlation

Popularity: 1% [?]

More and more students are considering majoring in business now that the GRE is accepted in lieu of the GMAT at many business schools, and the job market has been looking a little better for business school graduates as the economy finally starts to pick up. This means business scholarships are even more common, as schools and organizations want to help those future businessmen and women cover their college costs. This week’s Scholarship of the Week is one such opportunity. The National Business Association Scholarship Program doles out awards to children of members of the organization and members of the organization, which is a nonprofit interested in providing supports to small businesses and entrepreneurs. Don’t limit your search if you don’t have connections to the group, though. There are many business scholarships out there that you may be specifically eligible for, even those aimed at accounting majors , marketing majors, or those interested in other business-related fields. Prize: Up to five $1,500 scholarships will be awarded each year. Eligibility: Those eligible to apply for the NBA scholarships are high school seniors, college freshmen, sophomores and juniors who are dependent sons and daughters of NBA dues-paying Members, or NBA members themselves. Institutions of attendance must be accredited, nonprofit two or four-year colleges/universities in the United States. A student may transfer from one institution to another and retain the award. Academic achievements will be considered;  high school applicants should rank in the top third of their senior class but not in the top 10 percent. Standardized test scores should range from 18 to 26 for the ACT, or between 850 to 1170 on the SAT combined. Students enrolled in college should present college GPAs that range from 2.5 to 3.5. Deadline: April 1, 2010 Required Material: By February 1 of each year, the NBA announces the start of the scholarship competition. Those interested must fill out an application packet, which will ask for things like your academic achievements, community service work, and other interests. Further details about the application process can be found by conducting a free college scholarship search on Scholarships.com. Once the search is completed, students eligible for this scholarship award will find it in their search results.

Read the original here:
National Business Association Scholarship Program

Popularity: 1% [?]

Pete is the CTO at Knewton, where he and his team are working hard to get ready for the launch of our new SAT prep course.

If you’re a recent or soon-to-be college grad (or maybe you realized your undergrad degree in Art History ain’t gonna pay the bills) and you are passionate about computers and computer programming, here are my tips for becoming a successful practicing software engineer. Many of these things probably aren’t the things they taught you in your college programming classes, but all of these are important.

Read more after the jump.

1. Practice! Practice! Practice! You learn to code by, um, reading and writing code! If you don’t have much experience and want to get started, find an open source project you care about and contribute a patch or two.  The “View Source” feature of Web Browsers and the open source movement are 2 of your greatest assets when learning to code.  Use them! As someone who started his career copying BASIC programs from Compute! and Byte magazines, I can’t tell you how great it was to discover the magical “View Source” menu item in Netscape.  Open Source projects will teach you about packaging, style guidelines, automated testing, bug tracking, and version control — while also giving you much needed practice. Don’t forget, your code doesn’t *work* until someone else uses it.  If you can’t work at a startup and need to get code into the hands of users quickly, open source projects are a great way to go.  I still recommend going with the startup, though.  At Knewton, everyone from summer interns to new full-time engineers ship code (that customers actually use) in their first couple weeks of starting.  I’d like to get this down to the first day.In your early practicing, make sure to develop really strong habits.  I learned the most of my habits from Steve McConnell’s Code Complete and Kent Beck’s eXtreme programming.  Write code others can support if they need to, but try to make it so they don’t need to support it I’d also recommend checking out PragDave’s Code Kata site to work on solving problem:
   

   http://www.codekata.com

2. Work at a startup! You will learn more in your first month at a startup than you will in your first year in any other company.  The first company I worked for was a 3-person shop in Syracuse, NY.  I learned everything from how to become a practicing software engineer, to how to be a customer support person, estimate and bid consulting jobs, write requirements, QA, write user manuals, configure SQL Servers, configure IIS Servers, configure linux firewalls … If your first job entails you being handed requirements that you then write code for and hand “over the wall” to QA – run!Don’t just take my word for it.  Here’s what one of our former interns who recently graduated and landed a sweet job in CO had to say:
   

   “I had NO experience as a coder.  You guys gave me a LOT.  In fact, more skillz than you can really understand. Things that transferred over beyond Ruby, RUnit, Rails, MySQL unix commands (I’m loving that I actually understand how to use the CLI in my Ubuntu set up btw…), etc – more the ability to take a bunch of instructions I barely understood and google my way/solve my way to a solution.”

   Chris Dixon also has a couple nice posts on this topic:

   Joining a startup is less risky than you think.

   Every time an engineer joins google a startup dies.

3. More specifically, work for my startup:
   Knewton jobs.
4. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes! or Perfection is for popes and Chinese emperors.
   In 1999, I got my first big job at an online brokerage (Datek) in NYC.  This was back when everyone, probably including you, traded online and doubled their money daily – basic fundamental laws of economics changed… until they didn’t.  The day of my first big release, I took down the ability to login to the production site at market open.  This was, as my CTO at the time reminded me, “reeeeaaaaaaalllllly baaaaaddddd.”  However, we talked through the problems and took the appropriate steps to ensure I couldn’t make the same mistake again (it involved improper DB connection handling, lack of performance testing, deployment timing and rollback procedures).  If he fired me, maybe I’d feel differently about making mistakes.  Fortunately, for me, he understood these types of mistakes will happen — as long as you’re willing to grow from the mistakes and not repeat the same mistake twice.Don’t forget that coding is a creative endeavor; typically, there is no one correct solution.  Be prepared to try several.

5. Reality… zen and the art of “boring” tasks.
   You studied sexy problems in school, you know how to solve nine-queens efficiently, find shortest path in a graph, compute Chebyshev distance in a metric space…the large part of your day as a software developer will not be spent working on such problems. More than likely you will spend a day on a far wider range of tasks that are comparatively less interesting in an engineering/problem-solving sense. These lower-level tasks are generally more simple and yet each decision that is made in their execution can be evaluated and perhaps improved upon. Design details as small as method signatures, naming conventions, loop constructs or recursion, tail-recursion or not (maybe even that’s too sexy!), are both extremely important and regularly overlooked. A large program is built on many lines of code. Each line contains required prior decisions to produce. An appreciation for these small details will contribute a lot not only to the quality of the program as a whole, but to the education of the coder.If you’re not already in a coding-related field, look for ways to make your current job more efficient through automation.  This can be as simple as creating access databases, word mail merges and batch files to automate tasks that used to take you hours or days to complete.  This is actually how I got my start coding professionally, by building MS Access database apps that made week-long tasks takes hours (mass mailings to customers at an HVAC rep and students at the SU Masters of Public Administration program).

6. Finish!
   You don’t get any points for effort.  You need to finish what you start.  Half-written, incomplete code atrophies very, very quickly.  If you find yourself starting more than you finish, you need to revisit the scope of your problems.  Code against smaller problems, but finish the code!
   

Continued here:
On becoming a practicing software engineer

Popularity: 1% [?]

Pete is the CTO at Knewton, where he and his team are working hard to get ready for the launch of our new SAT prep course.

If you’re a recent or soon-to-be college grad (or maybe you realized your undergrad degree in Art History ain’t gonna pay the bills) and you are passionate about computers and computer programming, here are my tips for becoming a successful practicing software engineer. Many of these things probably aren’t the things they taught you in your college programming classes, but all of these are important.

Read more after the jump.

1. Practice! Practice! Practice! You learn to code by, um, reading and writing code! If you don’t have much experience and want to get started, find an open source project you care about and contribute a patch or two.  The “View Source” feature of Web Browsers and the open source movement are 2 of your greatest assets when learning to code.  Use them! As someone who started his career copying BASIC programs from Compute! and Byte magazines, I can’t tell you how great it was to discover the magical “View Source” menu item in Netscape.  Open Source projects will teach you about packaging, style guidelines, automated testing, bug tracking, and version control — while also giving you much needed practice. Don’t forget, your code doesn’t *work* until someone else uses it.  If you can’t work at a startup and need to get code into the hands of users quickly, open source projects are a great way to go.  I still recommend going with the startup, though.  At Knewton, everyone from summer interns to new full-time engineers ship code (that customers actually use) in their first couple weeks of starting.  I’d like to get this down to the first day.In your early practicing, make sure to develop really strong habits.  I learned the most of my habits from Steve McConnell’s Code Complete and Kent Beck’s eXtreme programming.  Write code others can support if they need to, but try to make it so they don’t need to support it I’d also recommend checking out PragDave’s Code Kata site to work on solving problem:
   

   http://www.codekata.com

2. Work at a startup! You will learn more in your first month at a startup than you will in your first year in any other company.  The first company I worked for was a 3-person shop in Syracuse, NY.  I learned everything from how to become a practicing software engineer, to how to be a customer support person, estimate and bid consulting jobs, write requirements, QA, write user manuals, configure SQL Servers, configure IIS Servers, configure linux firewalls … If your first job entails you being handed requirements that you then write code for and hand “over the wall” to QA – run!Don’t just take my word for it.  Here’s what one of our former interns who recently graduated and landed a sweet job in CO had to say:
   

   “I had NO experience as a coder.  You guys gave me a LOT.  In fact, more skillz than you can really understand. Things that transferred over beyond Ruby, RUnit, Rails, MySQL unix commands (I’m loving that I actually understand how to use the CLI in my Ubuntu set up btw…), etc – more the ability to take a bunch of instructions I barely understood and google my way/solve my way to a solution.”

   Chris Dixon also has a couple nice posts on this topic:

   Joining a startup is less risky than you think.

   Every time an engineer joins google a startup dies.

3. More specifically, work for my startup:
   Knewton jobs.
4. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes! or Perfection is for popes and Chinese emperors.
   In 1999, I got my first big job at an online brokerage (Datek) in NYC.  This was back when everyone, probably including you, traded online and doubled their money daily – basic fundamental laws of economics changed… until they didn’t.  The day of my first big release, I took down the ability to login to the production site at market open.  This was, as my CTO at the time reminded me, “reeeeaaaaaaalllllly baaaaaddddd.”  However, we talked through the problems and took the appropriate steps to ensure I couldn’t make the same mistake again (it involved improper DB connection handling, lack of performance testing, deployment timing and rollback procedures).  If he fired me, maybe I’d feel differently about making mistakes.  Fortunately, for me, he understood these types of mistakes will happen — as long as you’re willing to grow from the mistakes and not repeat the same mistake twice.Don’t forget that coding is a creative endeavor; typically, there is no one correct solution.  Be prepared to try several.

5. Reality… zen and the art of “boring” tasks.
   You studied sexy problems in school, you know how to solve nine-queens efficiently, find shortest path in a graph, compute Chebyshev distance in a metric space…the large part of your day as a software developer will not be spent working on such problems. More than likely you will spend a day on a far wider range of tasks that are comparatively less interesting in an engineering/problem-solving sense. These lower-level tasks are generally more simple and yet each decision that is made in their execution can be evaluated and perhaps improved upon. Design details as small as method signatures, naming conventions, loop constructs or recursion, tail-recursion or not (maybe even that’s too sexy!), are both extremely important and regularly overlooked. A large program is built on many lines of code. Each line contains required prior decisions to produce. An appreciation for these small details will contribute a lot not only to the quality of the program as a whole, but to the education of the coder.If you’re not already in a coding-related field, look for ways to make your current job more efficient through automation.  This can be as simple as creating access databases, word mail merges and batch files to automate tasks that used to take you hours or days to complete.  This is actually how I got my start coding professionally, by building MS Access database apps that made week-long tasks takes hours (mass mailings to customers at an HVAC rep and students at the SU Masters of Public Administration program).

6. Finish!
   You don’t get any points for effort.  You need to finish what you start.  Half-written, incomplete code atrophies very, very quickly.  If you find yourself starting more than you finish, you need to revisit the scope of your problems.  Code against smaller problems, but finish the code!
   

More:
On becoming a practicing software engineer

Popularity: 1% [?]

Pete is the CTO at Knewton, where he and his team are working hard to get ready for the launch of our new SAT prep course.

If you’re a recent or soon-to-be college grad (or maybe you realized your undergrad degree in Art History ain’t gonna pay the bills) and you are passionate about computers and computer programming, here are my tips for becoming a successful practicing software engineer. Many of these things probably aren’t the things they taught you in your college programming classes, but all of these are important.

Read more after the jump.

1. Practice! Practice! Practice! You learn to code by, um, reading and writing code! If you don’t have much experience and want to get started, find an open source project you care about and contribute a patch or two.  The “View Source” feature of Web Browsers and the open source movement are 2 of your greatest assets when learning to code.  Use them! As someone who started his career copying BASIC programs from Compute! and Byte magazines, I can’t tell you how great it was to discover the magical “View Source” menu item in Netscape.  Open Source projects will teach you about packaging, style guidelines, automated testing, bug tracking, and version control — while also giving you much needed practice. Don’t forget, your code doesn’t *work* until someone else uses it.  If you can’t work at a startup and need to get code into the hands of users quickly, open source projects are a great way to go.  I still recommend going with the startup, though.  At Knewton, everyone from summer interns to new full-time engineers ship code (that customers actually use) in their first couple weeks of starting.  I’d like to get this down to the first day.In your early practicing, make sure to develop really strong habits.  I learned the most of my habits from Steve McConnell’s Code Complete and Kent Beck’s eXtreme programming.  Write code others can support if they need to, but try to make it so they don’t need to support it I’d also recommend checking out PragDave’s Code Kata site to work on solving problem:
   

   http://www.codekata.com

2. Work at a startup! You will learn more in your first month at a startup than you will in your first year in any other company.  The first company I worked for was a 3-person shop in Syracuse, NY.  I learned everything from how to become a practicing software engineer, to how to be a customer support person, estimate and bid consulting jobs, write requirements, QA, write user manuals, configure SQL Servers, configure IIS Servers, configure linux firewalls … If your first job entails you being handed requirements that you then write code for and hand “over the wall” to QA – run!Don’t just take my word for it.  Here’s what one of our former interns who recently graduated and landed a sweet job in CO had to say:
   

   “I had NO experience as a coder.  You guys gave me a LOT.  In fact, more skillz than you can really understand. Things that transferred over beyond Ruby, RUnit, Rails, MySQL unix commands (I’m loving that I actually understand how to use the CLI in my Ubuntu set up btw…), etc – more the ability to take a bunch of instructions I barely understood and google my way/solve my way to a solution.”

   Chris Dixon also has a couple nice posts on this topic:

   Joining a startup is less risky than you think.

   Every time an engineer joins google a startup dies.

3. More specifically, work for my startup:
   Knewton jobs.
4. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes! or Perfection is for popes and Chinese emperors.
   In 1999, I got my first big job at an online brokerage (Datek) in NYC.  This was back when everyone, probably including you, traded online and doubled their money daily – basic fundamental laws of economics changed… until they didn’t.  The day of my first big release, I took down the ability to login to the production site at market open.  This was, as my CTO at the time reminded me, “reeeeaaaaaaalllllly baaaaaddddd.”  However, we talked through the problems and took the appropriate steps to ensure I couldn’t make the same mistake again (it involved improper DB connection handling, lack of performance testing, deployment timing and rollback procedures).  If he fired me, maybe I’d feel differently about making mistakes.  Fortunately, for me, he understood these types of mistakes will happen — as long as you’re willing to grow from the mistakes and not repeat the same mistake twice.Don’t forget that coding is a creative endeavor; typically, there is no one correct solution.  Be prepared to try several.

5. Reality… zen and the art of “boring” tasks.
   You studied sexy problems in school, you know how to solve nine-queens efficiently, find shortest path in a graph, compute Chebyshev distance in a metric space…the large part of your day as a software developer will not be spent working on such problems. More than likely you will spend a day on a far wider range of tasks that are comparatively less interesting in an engineering/problem-solving sense. These lower-level tasks are generally more simple and yet each decision that is made in their execution can be evaluated and perhaps improved upon. Design details as small as method signatures, naming conventions, loop constructs or recursion, tail-recursion or not (maybe even that’s too sexy!), are both extremely important and regularly overlooked. A large program is built on many lines of code. Each line contains required prior decisions to produce. An appreciation for these small details will contribute a lot not only to the quality of the program as a whole, but to the education of the coder.If you’re not already in a coding-related field, look for ways to make your current job more efficient through automation.  This can be as simple as creating access databases, word mail merges and batch files to automate tasks that used to take you hours or days to complete.  This is actually how I got my start coding professionally, by building MS Access database apps that made week-long tasks takes hours (mass mailings to customers at an HVAC rep and students at the SU Masters of Public Administration program).

6. Finish!
   You don’t get any points for effort.  You need to finish what you start.  Half-written, incomplete code atrophies very, very quickly.  If you find yourself starting more than you finish, you need to revisit the scope of your problems.  Code against smaller problems, but finish the code!
   

Visit link:
On becoming a practicing software engineer

Popularity: 1% [?]

Overview The College proposes to elect up to three Fellows by Examination (elsewhere known as Junior Research Fellow). Candidates should have an Honours degree or an equivalent qualification and have completed, or be near to completing a doctorate or other post-graduate research. They will already have demonstrated outstanding promise in their chosen field. Requirements Applicants must not have completed more than a total of 4 years of research-based graduate and postdoctoral study, in aggregate, by 1 October 2009. Years spent taking taught courses as part of a Master’s or Doctoral programme are not included in this total. Applicants should not have completed their doctoral studies earlier than 1 June 2008. There is no restriction on the number of times an applicant may apply for this post. Value of this fellowship Each Fellowship is tenable for three years at a stipend starting at £20,000 per annum with increments in the second and third years. The Fellow is a member of the Governing Body of the College and is entitled to: single accommodation in College free of charge or, alternatively, to a taxable housing allowance currently set at £10,000 per annum; a research allowance; and free lunches and dinners. It is likely that successful candidates will be required to live within a certain radius of Oxford during the period of their appointment. How to apply Application forms and further particulars can be obtained from the Administrative Secretary, Magdalen College, Oxford, OX1 4AU (telephone: +44(0)1865 276060 +44(0)1865 276060, e-mail: elizabeth.martin@magd.ox.ac.uk) or to download at www.magd.ox.ac.uk/vacancies/. The closing date is Monday, 29 March 2010. Please kindly mention Scholarization.blogspot.com when applying for this fellowship

Visit link:
UK: Fellowship by Examination (JRF) at Magdalen College, Oxford

Popularity: 1% [?]

Overview The University of Birmingham invite applications for several prestigious fellowships funded by EPSRC and aimed at the highest-calibre scientists and engineers wishing to establish and pursue a career in academic research. A minimum of 4 doctoral fellowships are available for researchers who have previously received EPSRC support (fees and/or stipend) for their PhD studies. Posts are available in the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, College of Life and Environmental Sciences and College of Medical and Dental Sciences. Each fellowship can last between 6 and 12 months but must end no later than 30 September 2011. Salary Starting salary of £27,183 a year , in the range of £27,183 to £35,469 (potential progression on performance once in post to £37,651 ) Eligibility Requirements As the fellowship is intended to help launch a successful career in research by increasing the impact of their PhD (in terms of publications, knowledge transfer, outreach activities etc), candidates must have submitted their PhD by the time of taking up the fellowship note that the viva does not need to have taken place). Potential candidates who have already accepted an offer of postdoctoral work are not eligible to apply. A good publication record commensurate with their career to date, as well as a desire to pursue a career in academic research is required. Subjects covered are those within the EPSRC remit: i.e. Physical Sciences, ICT, Engineering and Technology, Medical Engineering. Informal enquiries may be addressed to phdplus@contacts.bham.ac.uk Closing date: 31 March 2010 Ref: 43519 How to apply To download further details and submit an electronic application online visit: www.hr.bham.ac.uk/jobs. Alternatively information can be obtained from 0121 415 9000 0121 415 9000. Please quote Scholarization.blogspot.com as your reference when applying for this scholarship

More:
PhD Plus Research Fellowships at University of Birmingham – College of Life and Environmental Sciences

Popularity: 1% [?]

Spring break is fast approaching. Some college students already have their all-inclusive vacations planned out for beach-side locations like Cancun and South Padre Island, taking the week to relax, kick back, and take a break from campus life . Others, however, have alternative plans, and hope to give back a little in the wake of a number of recent devastating natural disasters. An article in Inside Higher Ed yesterday describes the plans of David Adewumi, a Pennsylvania State University student who will join 10 of his peers on a relief trip to Haiti . They plan to spend the week of their spring break helping with minor medical care, food distribution and building shelters for those who lost their homes and livelihoods in the recent quake. A group of 20 to 25 students from the University of Maryland, College Park , and Howard University have similar plans to spend their spring breaks in Haiti, training Haitians to build homes using dirt-filled bags. The earthquake in Chile on Feb. 27 may cause some to divert their spring break attentions to that country as well. Some schools, like the City University of New York, have already expanded their relief efforts to include both Haiti and Chile. (So far, all students who had already been living or visiting in the South American country have been reported safe , including 27 University of Notre Dame students and faculty members, a group of business-school students and faculty members from the University of Tennessee , and students studying abroad from the University of South Carolina at Columbia .) Organizers of alternative spring breaks say college students’ relief trips are nothing new. But the speed with which students have mobilized to assist countries with recent disasters is. Students have expressed so much interest that some organizers, relief agencies, and college administrators worry that the situation in both Haiti and Chile is not stabilized enough to make for a meaningful experience for spring breakers. In the Inside Higher Ed article, Suzanne Brooks, the director of the Center for International Disaster Information, says inexperienced volunteers should wait a year before planning any relief missions to Haiti. “I don’t think it’s impossible that a year from now for spring break there may be some programs up and running, but I really don’t think it makes sense for this year,” she said in the article. It may also not be the safest option, other say, or even a wise idea to send more relief agencies out there when those already on site have had trouble finding sufficient food, water, and housing. Lucky for you, there are plenty of options if you want to organize an alternative spring break closer to home. At Tulane University , “ service learning ” has become a part of the curriculum, as students work to continue rebuilding a city still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Katrina. Those interested in local community service opportunities should also be aware that many nonprofits reward those good deeds with scholarships.

Link:
College Students Plan Alternative Spring Breaks

Popularity: 1% [?]

As more states continue passing medical-marijuana laws (14 and counting), it was only a matter of time before higher education would take notice. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education takes a look at Oaksterdam University, an Oakland, Calif., institution that provides “quality training for the cannabis industry.” Oaksterdam (named after Oakland and Amsterdam) has been offering weekend seminars and semester-long courses since November of 2007, when a group of marijuana-legalization activists their burgeoning movement deserved a trade school. The main school exists in a 30,000-square-foot converted office building, with satellite campuses in Los Angeles, Sebastopol, Calif., and Flint, Mich. Its academic departments, which admittedly began as a “political stunt,” according to the article, now include coursework in biology , political science , horticulture, and “methods of ingestion,” a class that teaches the benefits and history of extracted medicine, the chemistry behind it, and the different extraction methods and equipment used. Although classes at the school aren’t transferable – Oaksterdam isn’t an accredited institution – that fact hasn’t seemed to hurt enrollment. The “campus tour” described in the Chronicle article included an out-of-work engineer looking for a new career and a teenager who decided against majoring in horticulture at the University of California at Davis in favor of Oaksterdam. “I was convinced it was the best road for me to go down,” he said in the article. MedGrow Michigan Cannabis College is the Midwest’s version. Students there take one class a night for six weeks, and take a cooking and concentrates lab, a history of cannabis class, and several horticulture lectures. The school’s site boasts that more schools outside of its current Southfield, Mich., location are coming, and the faculty there include attorneys, professors in botany, and a professor of history who was one of the first 500 patients in the state of Michigan to obtain his patient ID card for medical marijuana use. Cannabis colleges aren’t the only kind of school taking advantage of career changers looking to pick up new skills and improve their job outlooks . Michigan’s ABC School of Bartending and Casino College has been training potential new employees for new casinos planned across the border in Ohio. Students at the casino school learn how to deal cards and count poker chips, among other tricks of the trade, to prepare for the more than 7,500 potential jobs at casinos to be built in Columbus, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo. A new school that recently opened in Tinley Park, Illinois, Bette Baron’s Art of Body Coloring School, offers a two-week intensive program in body art.

See the rest here:
Cannabis Colleges Cropping Up Across the Country

Popularity: 1% [?]