How To Avoid Infecting Kids With Your Anxiety
I work with too many kids with anxiety these days, so when I saw this I thought I would repost. Worth a read!
Source: Fatherly.
UPenn’s New Way of Reading Applications
Penn is encouraging other universities to pilot a team admissions strategy that Penn implemented four years ago—and Swarthmore has already adopted it.
The tactic is used to increase efficiency, fairness and morale among college admission officers. Under the old system, admissions staff would divide applications and read them individually, usually on self-set hours in solitude. After reading, officers would write up notes with their thoughts and a recommendation to reject, defer, or advance the candidate in the admissions process.
Under Penn’s new regimen, admissions officers split into teams of two and read one application at the same time in the office. Then they discuss the application together and come to a consensus before passing it along.
After the team of two screens the application, it is given to admission officers responsible for the geographic region where the applicant lives. An exceptional applicant may skip this step and be handed immediately to a selection committee that includes school-based representatives. This committee will make the final decision on a potential acceptance.
“Penn, along with many other schools, has had an increasing number of applicants every year and yet they keep to the same timetable,” said Laurie Kopp Weingarten, director of admissions counseling at One-Stop College Counseling. “They have to release the decisions on the same date.”
It is in Penn’s interest to process applications efficiently: from 2002 to 2012, total applications to Penn increased from 18,827 to 31,280. Last year Penn received more than 37,000 applications.
“We also are doing the work in a more efficient way,” said Dean of Admissions Eric Furda. “We don’t have four times as many people in this office as when we had 10,000 applications.”
Penn has held conferences with admissions officers from other universities to introduce them to the method.
“We started with regional schools to come take a look at the work that we were doing to as a way of a) sharing our experiences but then also b) getting a larger groupthink over the work we were doing,” Furda said.
Swarthmore adopted Penn’s method of application reading with small alterations after two admissions officers from Swarthmore saw a presentation at Penn.
“It was different from what we were currently doing but we were really excited about it,” said J.T. Duck, director of admissions at Swarthmore. “We decided to adopt it because it looked like a more viable way of still doing holistic admissions but getting through applications in a more efficient manner than in a past.”
After seeing a 40 percent surge of applications in the 2014-15 application cycle, Swarthmore was looking to improve their application reading process.
Duck is satisfied with the switch. The new process relieves the isolation that admission officers can experience while reading applications for weeks on end, and allows officers to train each other while reading.
Dean Furda compared the new process to an in-class midterm instead of a take-home test.
“When it’s complete, it’s complete,” he said. “And then you go on.”
Source: The DP
Get Smarter: The Buffett Formula
“The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.”
— Charlie Munger
“Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.”
— Charlie Munger
Most people go though life not really getting any smarter. Why? They simply won’t do the work required.
It’s easy to come home, sit on the couch, watch TV, and zone out until bedtime rolls around. But that’s not really going to help you get smarter.
Sure you can go into the office the next day and discuss the details of last night’s episode of Mad Men or Game of Thrones. Sure you know what happened on Survivor. But that’s not knowledge accumulation, it’s a mind-numbing sedative.
You can acquire knowledge if you want it.
In fact there is a simple formula, which if followed is almost certain to make you smarter over time. Simple but not easy.
It involves a lot of hard work.
We’ll call it the Buffett formula, named after Warren Buffett and his longtime business partner at Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger. These two are an extraordinary combination of minds. They are also learning machines.
“I can see, he can hear. We make a great combination.”
— Warren Buffett, speaking of his partner and friend, Charlie Munger.
We can learn a lot from them. They didn’t get smart because they are both billionaires. No, in fact they became billionaires, in part, because they are smart. More importantly, they keep getting smarter. And it turns out that they have a lot to say on the subject.
How to get smarter
Read. A lot.
Warren Buffett says, “I just sit in my office and read all day.”
What does that mean? He estimates that he spends 80 percent of his working day reading and thinking.
“You could hardly find a partnership in which two people settle on reading more hours of the day than in ours,” Charlie Munger commented.
When asked how to get smarter, Buffett once held up stacks of paper and said he “read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge builds up, like compound interest.”
All of us can build our knowledge but most of us won’t put in the effort.
One person who took Buffett’s advice, Todd Combs, now works for the legendary investor. He took Buffett’s advice seriously and started keeping track of what he read and how many pages he was reading.
The Omaha World-Herald writes:
Eventually finding and reading productive material became second nature, a habit. As he began his investing career, he would read even more, hitting 600, 750, even 1,000 pages a day.
Combs discovered that Buffett’s formula worked, giving him more knowledge that helped him with what became his primary job — seeking the truth about potential investments. [Omaha World-Herald]
But how you read matters too.
You need to be critical and always thinking. You need to do the mental work required to hold an opinion.
In Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed Buffett comments to author Michael Eisner:
Look, my job is essentially just corralling more and more and more facts and information, and occasionally seeing whether that leads to some action. And Charlie — his children call him a book with legs. [Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed]
Continuous learning
Eisner continues:
Maybe that’s why both men agree it’s better that they never lived in the same city, or worked in the same office. They would have wanted to talk all the time, leaving no time for the reading, which Munger describes as part of an essential continuing education program for the men who run one of the largest conglomerates in the world.
“I don’t think any other twosome in business was better at continuous learning than we were,” he says, talking in the past tense but not really meaning it. “And if we hadn’t been continuous learners, the record wouldn’t have been as good. And we were so extreme about it that we both spent the better part of our days reading, so we could learn more, which is not a common pattern in business.” [Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed]
It doesn’t work how you think it works
If you’re thinking they sit in front of a computer all day obsessing over numbers and figures? You’d be dead wrong.
“No,” says Warren. “We don’t read other people’s opinions. We want to get the facts, and then think.” And when it gets to the thinking part, for Buffett and Munger, there’s no one better to think with than their partners. “Charlie can’t encounter a problem without thinking of an answer,” posits Warren. “He has the best thirty-second mind I’ve ever seen. I’ll call him up, and within thirty seconds, he’ll grasp it. He just sees things immediately.” [Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed]
Munger sees his knowledge accumulation as an acquired, rather than natural, genius. And he’d give all the credit to the studying he does.
“Neither Warren nor I is smart enough to make the decisions with no time to think,” Munger once told a reporter. “We make actual decisions very rapidly, but that’s because we’ve spent so much time preparing ourselves by quietly sitting and reading and thinking.”
How can you find time to read?
It takes time and energy to read. One way to help make that happen is to carve an hour out of your day just for yourself.
In an interview he gave for his authorized biography The Snowball, Buffett told the story:
Charlie, as a very young lawyer, was probably getting $20 an hour. He thought to himself, ‘Who’s my most valuable client?’ And he decided it was himself. So he decided to sell himself an hour each day. He did it early in the morning, working on these construction projects and real estate deals. Everybody should do this, be the client, and then work for other people, too, and sell yourself an hour a day. [The Snowball]
It’s important to think about the opportunity cost of this hour. On one hand you can check Twitter, read some online news, and reply to a few emails while pretending to finish the memo that is supposed to be the focus of your attention. On the other hand, you can dedicate the time to improving yourself. In the short term, you’re better off with the dopamine laced rush of email and Twitter while multitasking. In the long term, the investment in learning something new and improving yourself goes further.
“I have always wanted to improve what I do,” Munger comments, “even if it reduces my income in any given year. And I always set aside time so I can play my own self-amusement and improvement game.”
Reading is only part of the equation
But reading isn’t enough. Charlie Munger says, “We read a lot. I don’t know anyone who’s wise who doesn’t read a lot. But that’s not enough: You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.”
Commenting on what it means to have knowledge, in How To Read A Book, Mortimer Adler writes: “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”
Can you explain what you know to someone else? Try it. Pick an idea you think you have a grasp of and write it out on a sheet of paper as if you were explaining it to someone else. (see The Feynman Technique and here, if you want to improve retention.)
Nature or nurture?
Another way to get smarter, outside of reading, is to start surround yourself with people who are not afraid to challenge your ideas.
A Guide to Getting a Bachelor’s Abroad
There was a time when the self-confident undergraduate took a semester or two abroad to taste an unfamiliar culture and dip a toe into the waters of higher education on a foreign shore. Today, tasting is timid stuff.
While graduate programs have long attracted international students, undergraduates are seizing upon the vast opportunities to enroll in foreign colleges for a complete bachelor’s degree. The number of options to do so is growing by the year. The online platform StudyPortals reports an estimated 5,670 English-language degrees in non-Anglophone countries. In Europe alone, 300 colleges and universities offer more than 1,500 English-taught bachelor’s degrees, according to Beyond the States, an international college adviser.
The benefits of a thoroughly international education in the age of globalization are conspicuous. But the game-changer is that college abroad can save parents tens of thousands of dollars. In many countries, including Turkey, Thailand, Brazil, Iceland and some in continental Europe, college is either free or virtually so, with tuition less than a couple thousand dollars. Many other universities offer a bachelor’s degree for under $7,000 a year.
Icing on the cake: It’s possible to obtain financial aid, both need- and merit-based, from universities outside the United States, as well as government aid from home. (The Department of Education website lists nearly 900 foreign colleges and universities where Americans can use federal financial aid.)
A bachelor’s abroad isn’t for everybody. Students must be prepared to immerse themselves in the customs of an unfamiliar habitat far from home. It’s an endeavor for the intensely curious and resourceful, those who can adapt to systems that do grading, testing and instruction quite differently. Forget intercollegiate sports, frats and clubs. Even partying is not the same — less binge drinking, for example — and campus life, when there is any, isn’t as cozy. But the rewards are great, say graduates and educators, and recognized by employers seeking go-getters.
Giovanni Hashimoto, a 23-year-old out of Washington, D.C., transferred to the University of Milan after two years at Pacific Union College in California. Though it took some digging online and follow-up emails, Mr. Hashimoto, who speaks no Italian, found what he wanted in the university’s English-language political science and economics program. With tuition at $4,000, he calculates he saves $20,000 a year studying in Italy.
But, more critically, acquaintances in Washington’s world of public policy and politics, where he wants to eventually work, told him that a foreign degree “connotes a willingness to try things outside one’s comfort zone” and would work in his favor.
Read about college options abroad in the UK, Ireland, Continental Europe, Australia, and Singapore here.
If I Were President . . . of My Club, My Class, My College, My Country
The NYT’s asked students what they would do if they were in charge, what their concerns and hopes for the future would be. Empathy and forgiveness—a plea for more—and climate change were recurring themes, as well as issues political and personal. Here are condensed selections.
Do We Give Children Too Many Trophies?
I think so, and I might not be alone.
Ashley Merryman, the co-author of “NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children,” argues that participation trophies can send a dangerous message:
If children always receive a trophy — regardless of effort or achievement — we’re teaching kids that losing is so terrible that we can never let it happen. This is a destructive message, because how we react to kids’ failure is just as crucial as celebrating their success. A recent study found if parents thought failure was debilitating, their kids adopted that perspective. If parents believed overcoming failure and mistakes made you stronger, then their children believed it, too.
Thus letting kids lose, or not take home the trophy, isn’t about embarrassing children. It’s about teaching them it can take a long time to get good at something, and that’s all right. Kids need to know they don’t have to win every time. It’s O.K. to lose, to make a mistake. (In a study of Gold Medal Olympians, they said a previous loss was key to their championships.)
It’s through failure and mistakes that we learn the most.
We must focus on process and progress, not results and rewards.
Read more here and join the discussion on The Learning Network!
Why I’ve Stopped Doing Interviews for Yale: Because the Admissions Situation is Crazypants.
Ben Orlin is right, college admissions is crazypants. The Business Insider article that stemmed from his Twitter post is worth a read.
Rejection by a university ought to feel like getting swiped left on Tinder,” he wrote. “There’s nothing terribly personal about it. The admissions office doesn’t really know you. The university is just looking out for its own interests, and you don’t happen to fit into the picture.
Orlin’s hesitation to be a part of a process that results in near total disappointment for applicants is even more understandable when looking at Ivy League acceptance rates.
For the class of 2020 the admission rate is below 10% for almost all Ivy League schools.
He flips that number around to talk about how many rejection letters Yale doles out.
No matter how sincere their intentions, the Yale admissions team is beholden to grim statistical reality: 94% of students are getting rejection letters,” he wrote.
Orlin suggests that Ivy League admission decisions should be chosen by lottery, and have base requirements that students must meet before applying in the first place. Will it happen? No. But something needs to be done.
Best Global Universities Rankings
I do not rely much at all on “rankings” but since many families like to take a look at them, I thought I would post the latest from US News. These institutions from the U.S. and around 60 other countries have been ranked based on 12 indicators that measure their academic research performance and their global and regional reputations. Students can use these rankings to explore the higher education options that exist beyond their own countries’ borders and to compare key aspects of schools’ research missions. These are the world’s top 1,000 universities.
Early Decision Schools That Double Admission Odds
Looking for a way to enhance admission odds? College Kickstart compiled a list of schools with early decision admission rates that are at least twice as high as their regular decision admission rates.
Read more here!
Boost Your Odds 50% With These Early Action Schools
Looking for a way to boost admission odds without obligating yourself to attend? College Kickstart put together a list of colleges with early action admission rates that are at least 50% higher than their regular decision admission rates.
Read more here!