Goldieslearning - Big Plans, Baby!

it turns out that studying linguistics can change the way you think about gender, if only you’re willing to stretch a metaphor a little bit

tips for applying to colleges as a 21 year old?

Apply using the Coalition Application to save money and take special care to apply to colleges that have no application fee outside of the Coalition App. Go out of your way to apply to as many places as you possibly can and just have fun with your applications. I would apply to a variety of large state schools and smaller liberal arts colleges and have a huge mix going on so that your application pool is large and relatively varied. Apply to some huge SEC schools, apply to some cute liberal arts schools, apply to colleges with a few great scholarships, apply to colleges that you idolise, take the time to just have fun and apply all over the map. I applied to the American University of Bulgaria just for the thrill of it and I don’t regret a single application. Most colleges consider January 15th the last day to do applications but some have rolling admissions so try to get on that right now and get to applying to schools.

Don’t be afraid to move far and start anew, there’s nothing like a fresh beginning and you can be whoever you want to be. There’s no shame in moving away and getting away from your old reputation and recreating yourself, there’s no shame in making new friends and forgetting that you used to be shy and fearful, and there’s no shame in taking full advantage of all of your new opportunities. There’s no reason why you should refrain from moving and becoming your best self in a brand new city and making the choice to become who you were always meant to be and enjoying your life. I know so many women who had total glow ups and took the time to get thin, change their style, and fix what was hurt upstairs before they went to college as older students and I’ve seen how they’ve succeeded and actually ended up giving life another fair chance.

Apply for all of the grants and scholarships that you possibly can so you’ll have an excess. I used to apply for a huge amount of scholarships just so I could have an excess and spend it on the things that I wanted and so I could use my scholarship money to help fill out my savings account and offset my cost of living. If you get scholarships and you already have your tuition on lock, a lot of the time the money will just be given to you in check form, same with grants. I used to use the money that I got from grants to buy clothes and travel just so that I could continue improving my quality of life. Life is for living and college is for fun and if you have the ability to win scholarships and grants, some of the funds should be used for your own enjoyment and your savings account, not everything should be so serious.

Rush a sorority. I’m telling you. Rushing a sorority truly changed my life and has given me friends and so many opportunities that I would have never had had I not chosen to go through rush. My sorority has changed me and changed my life, it’s given me purpose, and it’s helped me get so many career opportunities and become friends with women who I literally would not be able to survive without. My sorority has given me access to so many things, I’ve been able to learn so much, I was helped with scholarships and with learning better English, my sorority has helped me through the hard parts of life, I’ve been able to learn and experience history, I regret not going to a school that gave me the ability to Go Greek for four years and have that family. I’m constantly recommending that women go through rush and I would strongly recommend that any older first year at university go through rush just so that she could have the ability to make friends and have all of the same benefits that I’ve been blessed enough to have. I’d consider Going Greek my best decision ever.

Go on tours!! So many colleges give you the chance to tour free, so many are easily accessible, and so many are accessible with minimal money spent and so my advice is to try to tour all of your top colleges and get a feel for where you want to be. Tours, having the opportunity to experience a college, and having the ability to see the campus and witness the culture are really what can make or break your decision. I’m a huge proponent of trying to go somewhere and trying to see what’s up before you make the decision to spend four years in said place. Going on tours helped me, I got to meet cool new people and have even cooler walks on the campuses where I went, and I got to have the time on campus that helped me decide if the university was for me or not. I did this with the schools I applied to for my year abroad and for my actual undergraduate uni and I had the ability to fall in love with both campuses. Tours are an essential part of applying to colleges and I would highly recommend doing affordable uni tours.

STUDY MASTER-POST

• Making a schedule

• Every schedule is different. You shouldn't feel the need to make every second productive just as long as you find enough time to finish what you need to for the day.

• Make sure to sort your to-do list first. Start from the things that are the most urgent and important. After you do this, you can choose to either start with the hardest task so that its out of the way. Or you can start with the easiest so it gets your momentum going.

• When you make your schedule, give extra time for yourself to finish a task. Suppose, if you say you will take 40 minutes to finish a summary, schedule it down to 60 minutes so even if you end up procrastinating in between or if you take an extra break, your entire schedule is not throw into a mess.

• Account for breaks. Always. Take regular breaks between every task. Don't make it too long, 2-5 minutes for a small task and 15-20 minutes for a big task.

• Once you're done with your to-do list, make a schedule with a set amount of time for each task. Try to start exactly when you planned you would.

• Make sure to do tasks in chunks of 20-60 minutes, whatever works for you. Because humans suck at focusing for more than 50 minutes in general.

• Take a small 5 minutes break after one chunk of 20-60 minutes. After you finish 4-6 chunks of 20-60 minutes, reward yourself with a long break, like 20-60 minutes depending on how much work you have left and what time you can spare.

• Getting stuff done

• Break bigger tests into small chunks so it's easier to get into. So rather than saying "I will completely this chapter today," you can do "I will finish 5 pages of this chapter now and then 7 in an hour. I will finish the remaining 9 pages, 4 hours from now." That makes the work smaller and you also feel more productive.

• Most people have a problem with starting. So just start the task and say you will do it for 5 minutes without getting distracted. Once you get through the first 5 minutes, you should have no problem getting through the rest of the task.

• If you still can't get yourself to work after 5 minutes, the problem is not you, its the task. See what's bothering you about the task. Do you not understand a concept? Or do you not have all the required resources for it? Look into it. If you can't find the problem with the task, move on and get to the next task. You can deal with this later.

• Your work space

• Work space can make or break your momentum. You can be the person who works best with all your materials sprawled on the bed. Or you can be the person who gets work done best in a library. Don't try to make things fits for you when they clearly don't.

• You could be the person who gets more work done at the evenings or in the mornings so don't feel pressured to get work done at the set time everyone says you should do at.

• Remove things that distract you. If you get distracted by the internet, I'll link some things that can help you out in the resources section down.

• Don't over crowd your working space, keep it to a minimum so you don't get too distracted.

• Self care

• The most important thing, no skipping this. Sleep well, everyday. For a minimum of 6 hours no matter what. You can break it up if you can't sleep for long hours in a strecth but make surr you get that sleep.

• Get fresh air and move around. For a minimum of 30 minutes everyday.

• Make sure to eat at least two full meals a day. Try to eat as healthy as possible and snack in between meals.

• Make time for the hobbies/interests you love. Let yourself explore and have fun. You deserve it, you're beautiful.

• How to avoid burnouts

• Break works into small chunks as I mentioned earlier. So rather than saying "I will completely this chapter today," you can do "I will finish 5 pages of this chapter now and then 7 in an hour. I will finish the remaining 9 pages, 4 hours from now."

• Make sure to reward yourself. Doesn't have to be anything big. Give yourself a nice cup of tea or bake a cake from time to time. Reward yourself.

• Do shower and change into a new set of clothes every single day. It really helps. Seriously.

• Make sure to at least work for 30 minutes a day on days you don't feel motivated enough to work so that you don't slip into leisure mode.

• Make sure to maintain a school-life balance. It's a very thin line so make sure to finish your important tasks before going out and doing something fun.

• Resources

• This chrome extension blocks websites.

• This blocks websites for the Mac book users. (This is free but there's also paid verified alternatives here.)

• This website gives alternatives to any software or website, paid or free. Mac or PC or LinusX compatible versions.

• This lets you print any website without all the clutter in it.

• This lets you highlights parts of a web page and lets you share it.

• This checks your writing for grammatical and spelling errors.

• This is also for checking your spellings and voicing in anything you write.

• This lets you convert URLs into QR codes/ shorten URLs.

I'll add more but I gotta dash to class so just these for now.

Have a nice day. ^^

Reblog or like if you're a studyblr/bookblr! I just came back from a year long hiatus and many I followed are now inactive

*copying the thai alphabet* ooh loopies hell yeah this is so cool

*reading typed thai* where are all the loopies

Webb captures Jupiter's faint rings, auroras & hazes

l composite from its NIRCam instrument(x)

it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.

example: it’s been well-documented for a long time that urban spaces are more dangerous for kids than they are for adults. but common wisdom has generally held that that’s just the way things are because kids are inherently vulnerable. and because policymakers keep operating under the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about kids being less safe in cities because that’s just how kids are, the danger they face in public spaces like streets and parks has been used as an excuse for marginalizing and regulating them out of those spaces.

(by the same people who then complain about kids being inside playing video games, I’d imagine.)

thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that kids are inescapably less safe in urban spaces. the causality goes the other way: urban spaces are safer for adults because they are designed for adults, by adults, with an adult perspective and experience in mind.

the city of Oslo, Norway recently started a campaign to take a new perspective on urban planning. quite literally a new perspective: they started looking at the city from 95 centimeters off the ground - the height of the average three-year-old. one of the first things they found was that, from that height, there were a lot of hedges blocking the view of roads from sidewalks. in other words, adults could see traffic, but kids couldn’t.

pop quiz: what does not being able to see a car coming do to the safety of pedestrians? the city of Oslo was literally designed to make it more dangerous for kids to cross the street. and no one realized it until they took the laughably small but simultaneously really significant step of…lowering their eye level by a couple of feet.

so Oslo started trimming all its decorative roadside vegetation down. and what was the first result they saw? kids in Oslo are walking to school more, because it’s safer to do it now. and that, as it turns out, reduces traffic around schools, making it even safer to walk to school.

so yeah. this is the kind of important real-life impact all that silly social justice nonsense of recognizing adultism as a massive structural problem can have. stop ignoring 1/3 of the population when you’re deciding what the world should look like and the world gets better a little bit at a time.

there is also a wikipedia in your language

Right now, I’m sifting through 50+ applications for a new entry-level position. Here’s some advice from the person who will actually be looking at your CV/resume and cover letter:

‘You must include a cover letter’ does not mean ‘write a single line about why you want this position’. If you can’t be bothered to write at least one actual paragraphs about why you want this job, I can’t be bothered to read your CV.

Don’t bother including a list of your interests if all you can think of is ‘socialising with friends’ and ‘listening to music’. Everyone likes those things. Unless you can explain why the stuff you do enriches you as a person and a candidate (e.g. playing an instrument or a sport shows dedication and discipline) then I honestly don’t care how you spend your time. I won’t be looking at your CV thinking ‘huh, they haven’t included their interests, they must have none’, I’m just looking for what you have included.

Even if you apply online, I can see the filename you used for your CV. Filenames that don’t include YOUR name are annoying. Filenames like ‘CV - media’ tell me that you’ve got several CVs you send off depending on the kind of job advertised and that you probably didn’t tailor it for this position. ‘[Full name] CV’ is best.

USE. A. PDF. All the meta information, including how long you worked on it, when you created it, times, etc, is right there in a Word doc. PDFs are far more professional looking and clean and mean that I can’t make any (unconscious or not) decisions about you based on information about the file.

I don’t care what the duties in your previous unrelated jobs were unless you can tell me why they’re useful to this job. If you worked in a shop, and you’re applying for an office job which involves talking to lots of people, don’t give me a list of stuff you did, write a sentence about how much you enjoyed working in a team to help everyone you interacted with and did your best to make them leave the shop with a smile. I want to know what makes you happy in a job, because I want you to be happy within the job I’m advertising.

Does the application pack say who you’ll be reporting to? Can you find their name on the company website? Address your application to them. It’s super easy and shows that you give enough of a shit to google something. 95% of people don’t do this.

Tell me who you are. Tell me what makes you want to get up in the morning and go to work and feel fulfilled. Tell me what you’re looking for, not just what you think I’m looking for.

I will skim your CV. If you have a bunch of bullet points, make every one of them count. Make the first one the best one. If it’s not interesting to you, it’s probably not interesting to me. I’m overworked and tired. Make my job easy.

“I work well in a team or individually” okay cool, you and everyone else. If the job means you’ll be part of a big team, talk about how much you love teamwork and how collaborating with people is the best way to solve problems. If the job requires lots of independence, talk about how you are great at taking direction and running with it, and how you have the confidence to follow your own ideas and seek out the insight of others when necessary. I am profoundly uninterested in cookie-cutter statements. I want to know how you actually work, not how a teacher once told you you should work.

For an entry-level role, tell me how you’re looking forward to growing and developing and learning as much as you can. I will hire genuine enthusiasm and drive over cherry-picked skills any day. You can teach someone to use Excel, but you can’t teach someone to give a shit. It makes a real difference.

This is my advice for small, independent orgs like charities, etc. We usually don’t go through agencies, and the person reading through the applications is usually the person who will manage you, so it helps if you can give them a real sense of who you are and how you’ll grab hold of that entry level position and give it all you’ve got. This stuff might not apply to big companies with actual HR departments - it’s up to you to figure out the culture and what they’re looking for and mirror it. Do they use buzzwords? Use the same buzzwords! Do they write in a friendly, informal way? Do the same! And remember, 95% of job hunting (beyond who you know and flat-out nepotism, ugh) is luck. If you keep getting rejected, it’s not because you suck. You might just need a different approach, or it might just take the right pair of eyes landing on your CV.

And if you get rejected, it’s worthwhile asking why. You’ve already been rejected, the worst has already happened, there’s really nothing bad that can come out of you asking them for some constructive feedback (politely, informally, “if it isn’t too much trouble”). Pretty much all of us have been hopeless jobseekers at one point or another. We know it’s shitty and hard and soul-crushing. Friendliness goes a long way. Even if it’s just one line like “your cover letter wasn’t inspiring" at least you know where to start.

And seriously, if you have any friends that do any kind of hiring or have any involvement with that side of things, ask them to look at your CV with a big red pen and brutal honesty. I do this all the time, and the most important thing I do is making it so their CV doesn’t read exactly like that of every other person who took the same ‘how-to-get-a-job’ class in school. If your CV has a paragraph that starts with something like ‘I am a highly motivated and punctual individual who–’ then oh my god I AM ALREADY ASLEEP.