My House Is Turning Into A Natural Historic Museum, I Guess

Where to save up to $1600.00 in college supplies.

After the Stafford loan interest rate hike I researched further into ways to save for school and found some pages that would cover most of your basic college needs past textbooks. If you find cheaper things let me know and I’ll show those off too. If you need help researching a specific item feel free to lmk, I’m willing to help you out in my spare time. 

Textbooks

Scientific Calculators

Tablets and Computers

Headphones from $9.99

Notebooks and Writing Pads

Pack of Highlighters from a dollar

Towel Sets, Mattress pads, and Desk chairs

Dining Essentials for a Dorm or small Apartment

Backpacks and laptop carriers

Cell Phone Accessories

External Hard Drives

Printers and Ink

Mini-Fridge

Best of luck!

hey everyone! so, after creating a studyblr, i have found so many essay writing resources and since writing (whether or not it’s for academic purposes) is something i and several others struggle with on a daily basis, i decided to put together a bunch of excellent resources in this little masterpost. hope you enjoy (bc writing can be very fun when you feel like you actually know what you’re doing) and hope this helps!

I. ESSAY WRITING

+ where do i start?

how to: brainstorming

how to write an outline

essay checklist

writing an essay, in a nutshell

write a university-level essay

how to write a great essay

how to write a great essay pt. ii

a great ppt by a true lifesaver

+ how do i connect my ideas?

writing transitions

masterpost of transition words

transition words for different purposes

+ different types of essays

narrative essay

expository essay

descriptive essay

literary analysis essay

college application essay

descriptive narrative essay

argumentative/discursive essay

+ tips and advice

general advice

avoiding cliches

for: history essays

for: literature essays

writing ur best college essay

+ even more college essay tips

II. OTHER ACADEMIC WRITING

formatting ur papers

general academic writing tips

planning + writing literature papers

III. RESUME WRITING

+ where do i start?

resume template

guide to writing a good resume

writing a resume when u have 0 xp

+ tips and advice

44 tips

25 tips

IV. WRITING ESSENTIALS

+ tips and advice [for writing in general]

funny little guide to writing well

improve ur writing habits asap

create mind maps to organize ur ideas

+ resources for research

refdesk

webMD

wolfram alpha

google scholar

state health facts

u.s. census bureau

internet public library

the library of congress

the old farmer’s almanac

finding data on the internet

+ grammar/vocab/spelling essentials

the owl [grammar resources from the purdue uni]

tip of my tongue [find a word u can’t remember properly]

hypergrammar 

grammar girl

+ revising and editing

hemingway [checks the readability of ur essay]

paperrater [rates ur essays and papers]

autocrit [checks grammatical errors + more]

editing checklist [by grammar girl]

+ citations

citation guide

create a bibliography

citation machine

google cite!!!

+ fun stuff

freerice [donate rice while testing ur vocabulary]

rainymood [listen to the rain]

coffitivity [listen to coffee shop sounds]

rainycafe [combination of rainymood + coffitivity]

find out which author u write like

+ my other masterposts

a complete guide to studying (well)

note-taking

more to come soon!

this entire list includes some of the best writing resources (imo) but feel free to message me in case 1) any of the links are broken, 2) u want me to add on to something, 3) u have a suggestion for a masterpost [i would love that so go ahead and ask if u do] or if u just wanna talk! also, feel free to reblog and add ur own comments/resources. hope this helped someone!!! 

SYNESTHESIA // an instrumental mix to fill you up with wonder and paint your vision rich with color

i. a fuoco - ludovico einaudi | ii. arrival of the birds - the cinematic orchestra | iii. atonement - dario marianelli | iv. fragile n.4 - dustin o’halloran | v. mescaline - abel korzeniowski | vi. forrest gump suite - alan silvestri | vii. gymnopédie no.1 - erik satie | viii. sherlocked - david arnold & michael price | ix. tennessee - hans zimmer | x. main titles - rachel portman | xi. stars and butterflies - jean-yves thibaudet | xii. we move lightly - dustin o’halloran | xiii. the king’s speech - alexandre desplat | xiv. arabesque no.1 - claude debussy | xv. divenire - ludovico einaudi

{listen}

tips for graduate grants, awards, & fellowships

hello! usual disclaimer applies: i’m a phd student, not an expert. i work in an english department with a medical humanities project, so this advice may not apply to STEM folks, undergraduates, or to all fellowships or grants. use your own common sense & discretion. beneath the cut: 

finding the money

keeping track of the money 

actually applying for the money, feat. the world’s longest treatise on project proposals

soliciting (& receiving) letters of rec

Keep reading

10/09/2017

this week’s spread :)

So I was back in Mandarin class and the teacher let us know that in ancient times sometimes they wouldn’t even give their girl children names. Their attitude was why bother getting attached to her when she’s just going to grow up and belong to someone else? She doesn’t need her own identity because she is the property of her future husband. If they needed to refer to a woman they would say that’s Wang’s wife. In the same way you would say oh, that’s Wang’s car or Wang’s house. Let’s remember that we give names to dogs, horses, ships and buildings but some human women don’t deserve such recognition. She also touched on sex-selective abortion for a bit and it was all in all a pretty sad discussion today.

I was really moved but it felt like everyone else didn’t care or thought that stuff doesn’t matter because it doesn’t happen anymore. And yet even now women’s identities are being erased when they get married. Their personal history and family ties are untraceable because they are “adopted” into their husbands family. It’s disgusting and I hate that its so nomalized and I hate that even women’s names are not our own. We might as well never have been given names in the first place.

adapted from this response

1. Write your notes in a way where you can test your retention and understanding. 

Many people write notes that do a great job summarizing their materials but their notes are not designed to promote learning, retention or diagnosis of their weaknesses. But my notes can – and so can yours. Simply put my notes can be used like flashcards because I write them in a form where I separate a “stimulus” from a “response.”  The stimulus are cues or questions (think: front side of flashcard), while the response is the answer to the cue (think: back of flashcard).  But the stimuli are to the left of a margin, while the responses are to the right. The key advantage of this is that just by putting a sheet of paper on top of your notes, you can hide the responses, while leaving the stimuli visible. You can have multiple margins and multiple levels of stimuli and response for greater information density. When you get good at this you can write notes in this form in real-time. To get some idea of what I’m talking about google for “Cornell Notetaking method”. My notetaking method is a variant of this. I usually use completely blank paper to do this because regular lined paper has too small a margin. To give you an idea of how powerful this notetaking method can be, I learned several courses just hours before the exam and still got an “A” in all of them during a difficult semester where I had too many competing priorities to spend long hours studying. Had it not been for this notetaking method I don’t think that would be possible. 2. Develop the ability to become an active reader (this is the perhaps the most important advice I have to share). 

Don’t just passively read material you are given. But pose questions, develop hypotheses and actively test them as you read through the material. I think the hypotheses are part of what another poster referred to when he advised that you should develop a “mental model” of whatever concept they are teaching you.  But a mental model can be much more than simple hypotheses. Sometimes the model resembles a story. Other times it looks more like a diagram. But what they all have in common is that the explain what is going on. Having a mental model will give you the intuition and ability to answer a wider range of questions than would be otherwise possible if you lacked such a mental model. Where do you get this model? You creatively develop one as you are reading to try to explain the facts as they are presented to you.  It’s like guessing how the plot of a movie, before it unfolds. Sometimes you have to guess the model based on scarce evidence. Sometimes it is handed to you. If your model is a good one it should at least be able to explain what you are reading. Having a model also allows you to make predictions which can then be used to identify if your model is wrong.  This allows you to be hypersensitive to disconfirming evidence that can quickly identify if your model is wrong. Oftentimes you may have two or more models that can explain the evidence, so your task will be to quickly formulate questions that can prove one model while disconfirming the others. To save yourself time, I suggest focusing on raising questions that could confirm/disprove the mostly likely model while disproving the others  (think: differential diagnoses in medicine). But once you have such a model that (i) explains the evidence and (ii) passes all the disconfirming tests you can throw at it then you have something you can interpolate and extrapolate from to answer far more than was initially explained to you. Such models also make retention easier because you only need to remember the model as opposed to the endless array of facts it explains.  But perhaps more importantly, such models give you intuition. Of course, your model could be wrong, but that is why you actively test it as you are reading, and adjust as necessary. Think of this process as the scientific method being applied by you, to try to discover the truth as best you can. Sometimes you will still be left with contradictions that even your best models cannot explain. I often found speaking to the professor after class to be a time efficient of resolving these contradictions. I discovered mental modelling as a survival mechanism to pass my studies at the University of Waterloo – where their teaching philosophy is misnomer because their teaching philosophy is to not teach as well as they could. You can see this from their grading philosophy. Although they don’t use a bell curve or other statistical grade adjustment, they make their exams so hard that the class average is usually between 68 (C+) and 72 (B-) in spite of the fact that their minimum admission grades are among the highest in Canada (you need more than A+ to get into several of their engineering programs). The only way they can achieve such low test averages from otherwise high performing students is by holding back some of what they know, and then testing what they didn’t explain well in lecture on their exams; or by not teaching to the best of their ability.   This forces students to develop the ability to teach themselves, often from materials that do not explain things well, or lack the introductory background knowledge needed to understand the material. I realized I could defend against such tactics by reverse engineering the results into theories that would produce those same results; i.e. mental model induced from scarce facts.     Then when I got to MIT I found myself in a place with the opposite teaching philosophy. Unlike Waterloo, if the whole class got an “A” the MIT professors would be happy and proud (whereas at Waterloo an “A” class average would be the cause for a professor’s reprimand). The mental modelling skills I developed at Waterloo definitely came in handy at graduate school because they enabled me to learn rapidly with scarce information. 3. Be of service to your fellow classmates.

I’ve personally observed and heard anecdotal stories that many students in highly competitive programs are reluctant to share what they know with their peers; a good example being the vast number of students in a top ranked science programs competing for the very few coveted spots in med school. I’ve seen people in such situations be afraid to share what they know because the fear it could lead to the other students “getting ahead” while leaving them behind. I would actually recommend doing the opposite: share liberally. You can’t expect help from others if you are unwilling to help others yourself. I spent hours tutoring people in subjects I was strong in. But, conversely those same people were usually happy to help me with my weaknesses when I needed it. I also found it easier to get good teammates – which is essential to getting good grades in team-based classes. I found I learned a LOT from other people. And their questions helped me to prepare for questions I may not have thought of – some of which would appear on the exams. 4. Understand how the professor grades. 

Like the real world, the academic world is not always fair. You need to understand who is grading you and what they are looking for. Oddly, if you actually answer questions as written, you won’t get full marks from some teachers. Some professors expected more than the answer. Some only accepted the answers taught in class as opposed to other factually correct answers – which coincidentally can easily happen if you rely heavily on mental models. Some expected you to not even evaluate whether the answers to their multiple choice answers were true or not; only to notice which answer choices aligned or did not align with the theories taught in class.  Some highly value participation in which case you ought to have a mental model of what they are teaching based on their assigned readings. The sooner you know who you are dealing with, the sooner you can adjust to their way of grading. Thankfully I considered the vast majority of my professors to have graded in a fair manner. 5. Get involved in research while still in undergrad.

Academics is a means to an end. To me that end was “solving problems” and “building stuff” specifically systems and organizations.  Depending on the school you apply for, your research may be just as important, if not more important, than your grades. In fact if all you have are good grades your chances of getting into a top ranked CS program with a research component (e.g. MIT, CMU) are slim to nil; though you might still be able to get into a top-ranked courseware-based Masters (such as Stanford where there is no masters thesis). I did an Artificial Intelligence research project in undergrad and posted it on the internet. Not long after it was cited in three patents from IBM, AOL and another inventor. Then 40 other people cited my work. I feel this helped me get into MIT because they saw that I could come up with theories with practical applications. It also led to internships with top research teams whose work I am still in awe of. This research also helped my graduate application. None of this would have been possible if I didn’t do research in undergrad. 6. Attend classes.

I do not understand the students who claim they did well without attending class. Many professors will only say certain things in class. Many classes only present some of the material in class. If you don’t attend class you simply won’t get that material. You also won’t be able to ask immediate follow-up questions. I also found speaking to the professor after class was an efficient way to resolve contradictions I had found with my mental model. 7. Time management is key – especially in undergrad. 

In my competitive undergrad program I once learned that a friend who achieved top 5% status actually timed how long he ate. While I do not suggest going to such extremes I offer this modest advice. I suggest spending no more than 30 minutes trying to solve a problem you can’t solve by yourself before appealing to office hours or another knowledgeable student. I also suggest you ask questions of your professor during or after class as opposed to leaving the class confused. This reduces wasted time in an environment when time is a very precious commodity. 8. Going out and having fun is conducive to good grades. 

In my early undergrad years I studied as hard as I could. And I thought this meant putting in as many studying hours as possible. But I later realized that going out and having fun refreshed the mind and increased grades. Unfortunately it took at least 2 years for me to understand this lesson. 9. Learn how to do advanced Google searches.

This is an essential skill that enables you to answer your own questions, quickly. At a minimum I suggest you learn how to use the following Google search operators  ~, -,*, AND,OR, and numeric ranges via the double dot (“..”) operator.  The “site:” operator is also often helpful. I also found adding the word “tutorial” to a Google search often yields great introductory materials. 

10. Turn weaknesses into strengths.

While studying for standardized exams I learned the importance of addressing one’s weaknesses as opposed to ignoring them.  If you make a mistake on a question, it is because of a weakness within you. If you do not address that weakness it will follow you to the exam. I learned this lesson when studying for standardized exams. I was able to legally buy 30 old exams and thought the best approach to studying for the exam was to do as many old problems as possible. But as I completed each exam I kept getting the same score  (+/- 5%) over and over. I had plateaued! But then I made a tiny tweak and my scores kept going up. Specifically, after each old exam, I would identify my weaknesses that led to each wrong answer, prioritize the weaknesses according to the degree to which they affected my score, and would address them in that order.  When I did that, my scores increased steadily all the way to the highest possible percentile (99%). I later realized that such standardized tests are designed to provide consistent scores (if the student does not study in between the subsequent exams to address their weaknesses). In fact that is one of the statistical measures used to measure the quality  of a standardized exam and it’s called “Reliability”  (Google for “psychometric reliability” to see what I’m talking about).

DEAR RESEARCHERS OF TUMBLR

You know what’s awesome?  Research.  You know what’s not awesome?  Not being able to get access to research because it’s stuck behind a paywall and you don’t belong to an institution/your institution doesn’t subscribe to that particular journal.

FEAR NOT.

Here is a list of free, open access materials on a variety of subjects.  Feel free to add if you like!

GO FORTH AND LEARN SHIT, MY FRIENDS.

Directory of Open Access Journals- A compendium of over 9000 journals from 133 countries, multilingual and multidisciplinary.

Directory of Open Access Books- Like the above, but for ebooks.  Also multidisciplinary.

Ubiquity Press- Journals covering archaeology, comics scholarship, museum studies, psychology, history, international development, and more.  Also publishes open access ebooks on a wide variety of subjects.

Europeana-  Digital library about the history and culture of Europe.

Digital Public Library of America- American history, culture, economics, SO MUCH AMERICA.

Internet Archive- In addition to books, they have music and videos, too.  Free!  And legal!  They also have the Wayback Machine, which lets you see webpages as they looked at a particular time.

College and Research Libraries- Library science and information studies.  Because that’s what I do.

Library of Congress Digital Collections- American history and culture, historic newspapers, sound recordings, photographs, and a ton of other neat stuff.

LSE Digital Library- London history, women’s history.

Wiley Open Access- Science things!  Neurology, medicine, chemistry, ecology, engineering, food science, biology, psychology, veterinary medicine.

SpringerOpen-  Mainly STEM journals, looooong list.

Elsevier Open Access-  Elsevier’s kind of the devil but you might as well take advantage of this.  Mainly STEM, also a linguistics journal and a medical journal in Spanish.

Hot tea is refreshing to me the same way rain is. They both make me feel like I have a fresh start. I’m late again, but Day 11 of the April challenge by @journa