Month: October 2013

Make Learning GRE Vocabulary Fun for Yourself with this Hilarious (But True) ‘History of the English Language in Ten Minutes’

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Here’s a fun help for GRE verbal section preparation – especially for those students who find learning the vocabulary a bore! This hilarious video by the Open University, England gives you insights into the ingredients that have been combined to create that wonderful melting pot that we call the English vocabulary.

Some highlights: Shakespeare’s contributions to the vocabulary of the English; before that the additions to the language through the invasions of tribes such as the Jutes, Angles, Saxons and the role of conquerors such as the Normans from France and the Romans. Towards the end of the video there are even parts on the role of the Internet, of America and even India! Definitely worth a watch, maybe even several! Happy viewing!

 

P.S. just in case the embedded video is not working here’s the link:

The History of the English Language in Ten Minutes

Related Links

American Universities and Colleges on Social Media: What Information is Out There?

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Social media platforms are proliferating. Free and increasingly sophisticated technological tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter offer easy access to information about colleges and universities in America – and both colleges and students are trying to take advantage of the trend.

One of the more positive things that graduate schools do in the social media space is to post content about faculty research and what their students are doing. Facebook is responding to this trend with the launch of “Groups for Schools” which will allow only those students (current and prospective), faculty and staff members with a valid “.edu” email address from their schools to sign up and join the group. Using these groups admissions departments can reach and attract prospective students by posting admission information, answers to frequently asked questions, and relevant articles.

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Great Ways to Build Your LinkedIn Profile

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  • Keep adding contacts. After you have added all the relevant contacts from your email list (the first step when you join LinkedIn) send requests to connect to:
  1. Teachers whose courses you are taking. Those with a good standing in the field are especially desirable as contacts.
  2. Project guides (internal and external)
  3. Teachers and professionals who you consult about seminars, research papers, curricular projects and those for competitions etc.
  4. Classmates in college who share your academic/professional interests (keep touch with the others on Facebook)

These steps will help you build a large network in a short time. Start this process now while at your college here in India and continue when you join your American university. The contacts that you make at your American university during internships, while working on projects, research or papers are likely to be among the most useful and important ones you make.

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Dr. Harchol-Balter on the Statement of Purpose

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The statement of purpose is an extremely important part of your application packet (click here for an explanation). A well-written SOP that brings out the most important facts about you as a candidate for higher studies, can open the doors of opportunity for you. On the other hand an SOP that tries to impress but focuses on facts that the admissions committees consider irrelevant can lose you the opportunity that you have dreamed of.

In the extract below Dr. Harchol-Balter, an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie-Mellon University points out two common mistakes that many applicants make:

• The grade regurgitator – “In my high school, I was ranked Number 1. Then I got a perfect score on my college entrance exams. Then I competed in a statewide math competition and I was the best. Then I competed in a national programming competition and I was 5th. In college, my GPA was 3.95 out of 4.0. For these reasons, I believe I will do well in your graduate department.”
What’s wrong with this? This portion of the essay is a waste of space. Awards are certainly relevant, however any award you won should be listed on a separate piece of paper which is titled “Awards and Honors” and which you can include with your application. There is no reason to tell us all this in your essay. It will only piss-off the people reviewing your application because they already read all this information earlier in your application and they now want to hear about research.
• The boy genius – “When I was born, my mother gave me a glass ball to play with. I would lay and look at the prisms of light shining through my ball. At age 3, my father brought home our first computer and I disassembled it and then put it back together. It was then that I knew I wanted to become a computer scientist. By age 5, I had taken apart every appliance in our house. At age 6, I became a chess whiz ….”
What’s wrong with this? We simply don’t care what you did as a child, and we don’t believe you either. You’d be surprised how many applications from Einstein-wanna-be’s we get. If you really think this is relevant, put the important facts on a separate sheet of paper, and include it in your application. It’s best if your essay can stick with stuff you did in college and later.

 

Related Blogs on Application Documents

Related

 

Great FREE Application Tools on DOA Online: Part 2 – University Checklists Feature

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Our first post in this series on the free application tools available on online.dilipoakacademy.com was on the University Info feature. This is a great tool that simplifies the admission process for you by making available one website key facts about the top 220 universities – most importantly, the departments and courses available there. One of the other important things that the University Info feature makes available, however, is a standard university checklist.

What are University Checklists and Where Can I Get Them?

The university checklists we are talking about here, are lists of the standard documents required by all universities. Our University Info feature provides the standard checklists for each of the top 220 American universities that it covers. When you select a university from our University Info feature, you can access the standard checklist for the university by clicking the checklist button (see screenshot below – right-click it to enlarge it).

Why is the University Checklist Feature Important?

The reason we have the University Checklist feature is to make sure that you do not forget to send any of the required documents. Sending your documents and application packet before the deadline is crucial for the following reasons:

  • Forgetting to send even a single document can cause long and inconvenient delays in your application process.
  • You may also end up spending a lot of money to send the additional documents by courier
  • In fact, you may even lose out on getting admission to a good college or university.

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Why You should Join the LinkedIn Student Portal

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According to LinkedIn about 200,000 college students join every month. As a result, companies are realizing that it makes sense to use the site to recruit interns and entry-level employees. Thus, when you join LinkedIn you become part of a network that Human Resource professionals in various organizations regularly scan for potential employees. The advantage is that companies search for recruits on LinkedIn even when recruits are not searching for them. (This is what is called ‘passively’ searching for a job.)

But keep in mind that people are more likely to check you out as a prospective employee if your profile is complete. (Recommendations are a key part of a complete profile, so make sure that you ask your professors and others whom you have worked with to endorse you.) Having a complete LinkedIn profile may get you a much coveted internship. So, make it your goal to have an updated LinkedIn profile even during your master’s studies. It will help bring you to the notice of potential employers.

But, the great news is that LinkedIn has a student portal which will help you in a number of other ways:

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Deadlines for Spring 2014 in this Month (Oct 13)

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The application season is on, December is just round the corner …and the deadlines for spring 2014 are drawing to a close. So here are the deadlines for spring that are falling due in this month.

Important Question: “Do you know which university you should apply to?”

A deadline is of use only if you know what university you should apply to. For those of you who are not too clear, here is how to decide:

1. Talk to seniors and decide which specialization you should apply for (examples: Networking, Data Bases etc. for Computer Engineers; Digital Signal Processing, VLSI etc. for Electronics and Telecommunications Engineers; MEMS, Robotics etc. for Mechanical Engineers)

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5 Reasons Why Students Going to America Should Join LinkedIn

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LinkedInIf you are reading this blog the chances are that you are a net savvy user, you have accounts on Facebook and Twitter and you are a student going to America for higher education. But have you ever thought of signing up for a LinkedIn account? Probably not: LinkedIn is supposed to be meant for professionals, and none or few of your friends are on it, so what good would it do a student to have a LinkedIn account?

When you don’t know many people on LinkedIn, it is easy to think that it doesn’t matter. Actually however, there are 5 reasons why having a LinkedIn account is very useful if you are heading for higher education in the States.

 

  • LinkedIn offers several tools to help get information and ideas from experts in your field viz.:
  1. LinkedIn Groups
  2. LinkedIn Answers
  3. LinkedIn Today

For college students these tools offer a great way of learning the professional language of your field, keeping up with the latest trends and topics in the field and becoming a well-informed ‘insider’. With more than 120 million users worldwide, LinkedIn offers a lot of potential avenues for learning.

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Ratan Tata Part 3 – the Visionary: a Legacy of Sustained Growth

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This is the third and final part of a three-part series on Ratan Tata. This part focuses on the dynamism, the independence and the integrity of the man who raised the Tata group to a position of international prominence.

Based on an article by Girish Kuber in the Sunday edition of Loksatta dated 23 Dec 2012

Translated by Runa Mookerjee

Series Editor DOAonline

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Ratan Tata was a mold breaker and a trend setter. An architect and structural engineer by training (he holds a B.S. in architecture and a Master’s in structural engineering, both from Cornell) Ratan Tata’s inclination for path-breaking thinking was evident even in his automotive ventures – the Tata Indica and the Nano. As an architecture student, Ratan Tata’s favorite subject was ‘Design;’ it was one that remained close to his heart throughout his career. Doodling new designs was a favorite pastime of his, and both the Indica and Nano were born out of his sketches. But this is just one small part of the story.

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Ratan Tata Part 2: Building Brand TATA!

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Tata LogosThis is the second of a three-part series on Ratan Tata, fifth Chief Managing Director (CMD) of the Tata Group. This part focuses on the changes he brought in his tenure of over 20 years as CMD from 1991-2012, bringing the robust, independent companies that made up the 144-year old Tata Group, under a strong unified brand.

Based on an article by Girish Kuber in the Sunday edition of Loksatta dated 23 Dec 2012

Translated by Runa Mookerjee

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Tata Group’s product range spans commodities from table salt to automobiles. About 7% of the volume of shares traded daily on the volatile Indian market consists of those listed by the Tata Group’s diversified holdings. The group contributes 3% of India’s corporate tax and 5% of its excise duty. That’s twice the amount paid by any other Indian industrial house. Some won’t think much of these figures. Others will point out that there are business houses that are even bigger. But few of them command the strong brand recognition that the Tata Group does. So, how did the Tata Group become such an instantly (and even internationally) recognizable brand?

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How I Realized I Had to Do a PhD

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For some people the realization that they are really meant to do a PhD comes only after having got some research-related work experience. In fact Dr. Harchol-Balter recommends it before jumping into a doctoral program. Here’s how her career path led her to the realization that she should be doing a PhD:

“After I finished my B.A. in CS and Math, I went to work at the Advanced Machine Intelligence Lab at GTE in Massachusetts. At first I was very excited by my paycheck and the great feeling of being independent. I also really enjoyed my area of research at the time: pattern recognition and classification. I was working with frame-of-reference transformations involving eigenvectors of autocorrelation matrices. It was exciting! However I quickly realized that I wanted to know more. I wanted to know why some algorithms produced good results and others didn’t. I wanted to come up with my own algorithms. I worried that I didn’t have enough of a mathematics background to answer my own questions. In summary, I wanted to delve deeper. Everyone around me thought I was odd for wanting these things. I left after 2 years and went to graduate school. That first month of graduate school I looked around and realized that everyone there was just as weird and obsessed as I was, and I knew I had made the right decision.”

Read Dr. Harchol-Balter’s own article on Applying to Ph.D. Programs in Computer Science from which this has been excerpted.

Read a review of Dr. Harchol-Balter’s article here.

Read excerpts from her article on recommendation letters and statements of purpose,

Great FREE Application Tools on DOA Online: Part 1 – the University Info Feature

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Is the Admission Process Becoming a Hassle?

If you have been struggling with the complexities of getting admission to an American university, then you need to know about the great FREE tools available on our ‘online‘ site. They are great for two reasons. First, they will simplify the process of applying to American universities for you. Second, they are free.

There’s no payment and there are no obligations even for students who haven’t enrolled for admissions counseling at Dilip Oak’s Academy. To use them, all you have to do is sign up and start using them. So, tell all your friends about them so they can benefit from them too! This week we will begin with the University Info feature.

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