Keep things from classes. Especially the syllabus and any major papers you write for the class.
Why?
Let me back up and talk about what prompted this. Standing in line waiting to get my sandwich at lunch today I was behind two local college students. There are about three major colleges and a community college in the town we're located in so I'm not sure which schools this guy was talking about. He was quite upset that he was trying to transfer between two of the schools here and the school that he wanted to go to was not going to take 35 of his credits. Understandably he was fairly upset about it and in the end decided not to do the transfer. (Or at least that is what I got out of my eavesdropping.)
What I really, really wanted to tell this guy was that the initial credit evaluation when transferring usually works out that way. Upon first glance you lose a bunch of credits. However, when this happened to me at my third school I was able to get about half of those lost credits put back onto my transcript because I was able to bring in syllabi and papers from the classes that they were not going to allow to transfer.
Typically the reason that a school disallows transfer credits is that they cannot see from the first glance what the course is about. You may know that English Language in America was a writing intensive class that counted for the writing requirement at School A, but School B can't tell that when looking at your transcript so it doesn't count. However, when you bring your syllabus from the class in that shows the ten papers you wrote for the class as well as a copy of your fifteen page term paper and give them either to your advisor or to the transfer office your chances are much better. (HINT: give them a copy because you may not get the original back!)
This process is expedited if you have the syllabi from the various classes you have taken, but in the case where you don't have it still you can try to email the professor and get a copy. This will be much for feasible if the class was in the past year; beyond that gets iffy. I realized that when I was missing the syllabus for one class (arg!) that I had taken five years previously and the professor had a new computer by then that didn't have any of the old syllabi, etc from his old computer and old classes. With no proof that the class was more than the transcript said it was I ended up having to re-take it at College #3. (This should also be another reason not to take eight years and 180 undergraduate credits across three colleges.)
Moral of the story: Make a folder for all your old syllabi. Keep it until you graduate from college... maybe longer. You may thank yourself someday.
Showing posts with label silly students. Show all posts
Showing posts with label silly students. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Friday, January 9, 2009
Oh, those professors.
Continuing with my blog addiction I came across a blog today that reminded me of why I love working with college students and college bound students. Plus it's Friday and I thought a little humor might be nice.
I'm going to go slightly out of order on this blog and tell you the moral first, which is this:
ATTN COLLEGE STUDENTS AND COLLEGE BOUND STUDENTS: Stop taking yourself quite so seriously. At some point you will make a fool of yourself by being so gosh darn serious about yourself and yes, the administrators and professors at the college will have a good laugh about it. (And if you could read what you wrote, you would too!)
I truly wish I still had some of the papers from when I was a TA (teaching assistant) in an intro level class. The class was comprised of mostly freshmen, and Fall semester was the best because they were trying soooo hard to sound highly academic or thoughtful or scientific or I don't even know what... now that they were in college that it turned into complete and utter gibberish. Weird analogies, made up jargon, bizarre imagery- you name it, it ended up in papers.
The professor that I was the TA for would take a few of the most choice samples throughout the semester and post them in the student lounge where the students in that particular major hung out between classes... it was always a day that everyone looked forward to because the samples were usually hilarious. The professor eventually got in a little trouble for posting these (I guess openly mocking the students was frowned upon), but really, I would think if someone was careless enough to A) write these things in the first place or B) actually think that they made some kind of profound academic statement should take a step back and have a good laugh about what he/she just wrote as well.
Those of us reading the papers do appreciate the thought put into it, but you do need to remember that we are normal people who usually come equipped with a sense of humor. Even I've looked back at a few things I've written in my early college years and I couldn't believe I subjected a professor to reading that. It may sound funny to say about academia, but "keep it real". Then again, it is one of the more appealing parts of teaching an intro level class... "I wonder what my students will write about THIS!"
Maybe it means we're horrible people, but I think you would laugh too if you heard some of the things students write into their papers or admissions essays. (We'll save excuses on grades for a different day, that's a completely different story... it should *not* be confusing why you're failing a class if you have never turned in a single piece of homework...)
So, when you're tempted to write "He spun round with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk" or "She is a swan of beauty and grace which sails through the portals of the mind into greater sunsets" please think twice. And finally, if you're going to use a statistic please make sure it's correct: "Like more than 90% of married women in that time, she married."
College students aren't the only ones prone to this, unfortunately. See what the best of academia has produced here: http://www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm
Of course, the opposite side to this whole blog is not to take yourself seriously at all, which the administrators and professors at the college find simply annoying in my experience. So find the happy middle ground, don't be afraid to laugh at yourself once in a while, and just enjoy the process of writing! Take a step back and look at the big picture... sometimes it looks a little different from back there.
I'm going to go slightly out of order on this blog and tell you the moral first, which is this:
ATTN COLLEGE STUDENTS AND COLLEGE BOUND STUDENTS: Stop taking yourself quite so seriously. At some point you will make a fool of yourself by being so gosh darn serious about yourself and yes, the administrators and professors at the college will have a good laugh about it. (And if you could read what you wrote, you would too!)
I truly wish I still had some of the papers from when I was a TA (teaching assistant) in an intro level class. The class was comprised of mostly freshmen, and Fall semester was the best because they were trying soooo hard to sound highly academic or thoughtful or scientific or I don't even know what... now that they were in college that it turned into complete and utter gibberish. Weird analogies, made up jargon, bizarre imagery- you name it, it ended up in papers.
The professor that I was the TA for would take a few of the most choice samples throughout the semester and post them in the student lounge where the students in that particular major hung out between classes... it was always a day that everyone looked forward to because the samples were usually hilarious. The professor eventually got in a little trouble for posting these (I guess openly mocking the students was frowned upon), but really, I would think if someone was careless enough to A) write these things in the first place or B) actually think that they made some kind of profound academic statement should take a step back and have a good laugh about what he/she just wrote as well.
Those of us reading the papers do appreciate the thought put into it, but you do need to remember that we are normal people who usually come equipped with a sense of humor. Even I've looked back at a few things I've written in my early college years and I couldn't believe I subjected a professor to reading that. It may sound funny to say about academia, but "keep it real". Then again, it is one of the more appealing parts of teaching an intro level class... "I wonder what my students will write about THIS!"
Maybe it means we're horrible people, but I think you would laugh too if you heard some of the things students write into their papers or admissions essays. (We'll save excuses on grades for a different day, that's a completely different story... it should *not* be confusing why you're failing a class if you have never turned in a single piece of homework...)
So, when you're tempted to write "He spun round with a sort of guilty bound, like an adagio dancer surprised while watering the cat’s milk" or "She is a swan of beauty and grace which sails through the portals of the mind into greater sunsets" please think twice. And finally, if you're going to use a statistic please make sure it's correct: "Like more than 90% of married women in that time, she married."
College students aren't the only ones prone to this, unfortunately. See what the best of academia has produced here: http://www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm
Of course, the opposite side to this whole blog is not to take yourself seriously at all, which the administrators and professors at the college find simply annoying in my experience. So find the happy middle ground, don't be afraid to laugh at yourself once in a while, and just enjoy the process of writing! Take a step back and look at the big picture... sometimes it looks a little different from back there.
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