He says he gets inundated with calls and emails the week before grad school applications are due.  Funny how we worry about our students stressing out about their applications, but never think about what it is like for the people who receive the applications.

I’m betting my early bird daughter gets accepted.

But, we’re finding out that there are some tricky requirements.  Sometimes I feel like the admissions department was writing blank checks that the finance office or the faculty don’t want to cash.

1. You must have a certain (high) undergraduate GPA.  That makes sense as it is an indicator of how well you will do in grad school.
2. You must major in certain areas for a certain Masters program.  That makes sense, too.   You can’t shorten a Masters program if you don’t have the foundational courses.
3. You must finish your undergraduate degree in 4 years.  At first blush, that makes sense, too.  If you can’t finish in 4 years, you probably dropped classes you were failing and therefore are not the caliber of student who will do well in the more difficult graduate level courses.  However, here comes the first big caveat:  you also cannot graduate in less than 4 years.  This happened to one of my daughter’s friends.  She came to college with a bunch of Advanced Placement credit and got a full semester of classes waived.  She planned to spend four full years taking undergraduate classes, but she met all the requirements for general education courses and for her first major within 3-1/2 years.   When they found out she wanted to get her fifth year free, they made her graduate in 3-1/2 years, which meant she had not met the requirement of spending 4 years in the undergraduate program, so she couldn’t get the fifth year free.   Ouch!  I could maybe understand if a college said “you chose to graduate early, therefore we didn’t get 4 full years of tuition from you, therefore you can’t get the fifth year free”, but it seems harsh to say we want to make you graduate early so we don’t have to give you the fifth year free.
4. You must take certain prerequisites for the graduate program, above and beyond the requirements for your major.  In other words, you’re starting the graduate program before you finish the undergraduate program.  This requires good planning in course selection so you can fit everything into 4 years.
5. You must have a good answer for the question, “What makes you think you can succeed in graduate level courses?”  Luckily, my daughter had been invited by one of her freshman professors to take a Ph.D. level seminar class from her and she took that class in sophomore year.  If she hadn’t taken a graduate level course by fall of her junior year, this would be a tough question to answer convincingly on the grad school application, which is due in spring of junior year, long before most graduate school applications are due.

Her advice:

• Ask “what if I…” questions about the requirements for the fifth year free program not only of the admissions department but also of the faculty in that department.
• Don’t fulfill all of your undergraduate requirements until spring of senior year.
• Take a graduate level course midway through your undergraduate program…and do well in it.

Caveat emptor.  Let the buyer beware.

Then talk about how much you hate having to rewrite resumes, search job postings, write cover letters, and go on interviews where you have to brag about yourself without seeming to brag about yourself, then wait and wait and wait for someone to decide they like you enough to hire you.   Maybe that will motivate them to stay in school.

George Betts, Professor of Special Education,

University of Northern Colorado

Most people think of used textbooks as a solution to a budget problem.  Leave it to a random learner to realize that they are a solution to a totally different problem!

If you have more than one kid in college, only sign one of them up for an Amazon Prime Student Account.  The free shipping offer only lasts one year, after which you can sign the other kids up.  Since they can ship to each other, you can extend the benefit for a year.

But, she found an easy way to catch these mistakes using Adobe Reader.

She saves her document as a .pdf file, opens it in Adobe, then click on View, Read  Out Loud.  Adobe reads the document out loud to her and those missing words become glaringly obvious.   Plus, this proofreading service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Of course, FinAid is still my favorite website for comprehensive advice on how to qualify for financial aid.

• Using the campus bookstore’s online ordering form, she managed to find out the information (title, author, and edition) needed in order her textbooks for her economics courses online through other sources over winter break. Using www.cheapesttextbooks.com, she was able to see which online store/marketplace had the cheapest price and then order from that individual seller. (Word of caution: the lowest price listed may be for the book in the worst condition. Make sure you check the seller’s description before ordering.) We were able to save $23 dollars on a used statistics books and get the macroeconomics one still in the shrink wrap for $73 cheaper than the price at the bookstore.
• When the bookstore did not have the textbooks listed for her science nor literature class before leaving for winter break, she emailed the professors directly to ask them. Her science professor promptly emailed the ISBN number back, and after a little more nudging her literature professor did the same. We were able to save $45 off the cover price for a brand new (still in the shrink wrap) science textbook online, and because we were able to order it over the break she had it in time for the first class.
• Once again, we utilized www.PaperbackSwap.com for 6 of the 7 books needed for her literature class. Because her professor took so long getting back to her she was unable to order the books until a few days before break ended and, therefore, the books slowly arrived at school. If you go this route, you need to be confident that you won’t need the books for at least ten days in order to account for processing and media mail shipping. (Her professor assured her that the novels weren’t needed until two weeks after school began.) Net cost:  $2.58/book plus an unwanted old paperback, for a total of $15.48.
• She rescued the 7th book from the garbage heap. A friend had read it for another course last semester and planned  on throwing it away. Already wanting to read it, she asked her friend if she could have it. It was merely a coincidence that the professor required it for her literature class.
• Her request to take another course wasn’t approved until the first day of classes and she was in a slight panic over how to get the two books required for this geography course in time to complete her assignments. Before forking over $176 at the bookstore for the two, she checked the campus library and found both were on reserve hold, which means students can use them in the library for a maximum of two hours. She’s been able to use those books in the mean time while waiting for her copies, which were $75 cheaper, to arrive in the mail.

Retail value of the books: $694

Financial aid office’s suggested budget for books: $500

Total cost for semester 2: $381

Savings: $313

Several of the schools we have visited – Washington University in St. Louis, Northwestern University, and CalTech/UC San Diego come to mind – offer programs for students who are sure they want to go on to medical school.  Usually these are highly competitive programs in that they only admit a handful of students.

What do they offer:

• Guaranteed admission to the university’s school of medicine (assuming grades, etc., stay up to par).  In other words, you won’t have to sweat out med school admission…assuming that’s still your med school of choice 4 years from now.
• A little extra handholding, attention, lectures, mentoring, shadowing, or other opportunities that you might or might not get if you were not in that program.
• At some schools (such as Northwestern), save an entire year of college, because they condense the curriculum.  This could save you $50,000.
• Bragging rights, which might help a student get other fellowships or scholarships or research opportunities along the way.
• The opportunity to start a longitudinal research project as an undergrad and continue work on it through med school.

Drawbacks:

• Will a student feel locked into that medical school or not explore other options that might have been a better fit or enabled exposure to a wider variety of professors, more ways of doing things, more challenges – simply because she doesn’t want to hassle with the med school application process?
• Worse, will a student feel pressure to become a doctor when that’s really not the best fit?  They won’t force a student to go to med school, but I suspect there would be some serious “convincing” going on if a student wanted to drop out of the program.

Note that those drawbacks are things the student can control, so they aren’t real big issues.  I was really reaching to come up with some drawbacks.

Northwestern’s program also offers the option of becoming an MD/PhD and, in general, the program is geared toward more gifted students than the general NU student body, with accelerated courses in the science curriculum.