noosphere : syllabus architecture

Chit chat with a professor I used to be on a committee with. 

"I found a useful word today - it talks about the sum of human knowledge in the context of environmental epochs.

My concern as an undergraduate was that some syllabi ( my school in particular ) didn't have an authoritative view on how a student was to traverse the sum of it. That's how I ended up on the edu committee ... as I was spending all my free time figuring that out."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere 

the relevance of Business School, to Education in General : a brief introduction

/ the relevance of Business School, to Education in General : a brief introduction /

"Business" schools treat management as the question, "what should we do?" (tEQ). This, as Drucker and Deming noted, depends on "what can we count?" (tOQ), about things in an environment defined by "property rights".

"Philosophy" traditionally is just a superset of that : where the ontological question (tOQ), and the ethical question (tEQ), are applied to all human activities, regardless of concerns about property rights.

"What do we teach people at each stage of life?" is basically (tEQ:E), the  question of educational ethics. And the answers to this are largely dependent on, (tOQ:C) the question, "what is a citizen?", and (tEQ:C) "what do we expect from citizens?".

You may notice that we jumped from education, to citizenship, so what about non-citizens? Valid question - and a quick tie around that is to say, we simply define for the purpose of this discussion, CITIZEN, as any entity in our environment, regardless of classification under labels which denote different rights and obligations. So now (tOQ,tEQ:C) can apply to rocks, trees, chickens, humans, bots, corporations, and nationstates.

This is trivia, but maybe it'll help someone understand how to link together 

• 1. STEM, 
• 2. commerce 
• 3. the humanities, and 
• 4. the overarching architecture of how education ( syllabi, public policy, etc. ) is governed

:) 

How to Advise : Folks Applying for College

 Currently chatting with organisers at a college fair I volunteered for. I was assigned to talk about "life after college", but I requested a review, because I wasn't sure that my experiences of life after college would be relevant to most pre-college students.

First, 

I established that I would follow orders from the organisers on where they thought I should be deployed, if at all.

Second, 

I listed the subjects I would be most interested to provide counsel on : 

• 1. it may be a poor strategy to "figure out what to do after college, during college" as colleges are generally not designed to help with that
• 2. it may be an optimal strategy to "do work/research first, then apply to college with financial aid in your mid-20s" instead of "immediately after high-school/pre-u"
• 3. it may be a poor strategy to "pick courses, and/or majors, and/or schools" without first "acquiring a survey of career paths with max/min compensation stats, both in MY & US" 

Third,

I elaborated on why my account of "life after college" might not be relevant to the audience. Here's what I said ( lightly edited ) :

"""

Roughly the nature of ethics ("what should one do about XYZ") a.k.a. strategic management, roughly follows the dependency :

Values ⬅️ goals ⬅️ strategy ⬅️ tactics

So if the [ left side ] is different, the [ middle and right sides ] are different. Someone with [ rare left sides X ] may not have relevant experience for people whose [ left sides are Y ], etc. 

In my case my career has been constructed with some [ unusual assumptions and hence operations ], for example :

• - i am ok with minimum wage employment, in Malaysia, till the day i die
• - i do not purchase health insurance, relying on public health, and am ok with personal expiry at any time
• - i do not seek to be viewed as a moral person
• - i did not find that college was the best use of resources for the purposes of ( points 1, 2, 3, above ): despite getting a basically free ride, I ended up doing most of my own study in the library and on the internet, outside of classes, which continue to this day

All of this will contrast starkly with a large chunk of your expected audience :

• - students who want to be viewed as respectable / interesting / admirable people
• - students who want to be viewed as employable / investible / middleclass people
• - students with strong aversions to being unloved, being poor, being sick, and being short of life in general
• - students who seek to work within institutional pathways for academia, research, and development 
• - parents who are of the same mindset ( less important but present )
• - employers who depend on such students to fill their labour supply chains

My experience and values are mainly from the point of view of someone who trivialises many of the things others value. So it may not be appropriate for me to be seen giving advice to folks who have normal expectations about what the right values and goals are, for an ordinary ladderclimber. 😂

"""

How Volunteer-driven Organisations Should Select Technology Solutions

Disclaimer: this is a record of comments posted on a thread elsewhere; comments have not been fact-checked.

Initial comment:

Why would you introduce complexity by custom building the site? Is there something stock Wordpress won't accomplish? Who takes over in the future? How?

Extended argument:

(Having read more comments outside this thread, I'll extend this argument slightly.)

First I will discuss the recommended Baseline for action. Then I will backtrack to list two extremes of Approach, some feasible Contingencies, and general Economic observations. Finally there is also a Tangential recommendation for the content/technology direction for the group.

BASELINE

So broadly, in any organisation, you can go between two extremes, in engineering/technology development, and this applies in selecting a website backend also.

Approach (A) provides a low-risk, low-cost, commonly understood approach to building and maintaining technology infrastructure for this organisation. Most costs of machinery over their lifetime come from maintenance, not initial acquisition. Given the voluntary nature of the business, resources cannot be assumed to be permanently available, nor can they be assumed to be in great abundance.

Should there be a demand for user experiences that cannot be met by approach (A), a discussion should follow beginning with the usability requirements for the system (UI/UX, business functionality), proceeding to discuss how the requirements can be achieved through various implementations, and finally only then choosing the implementation layer with consideration for all of the above.

APPROACHES

(A) Use lowest common denominator standard solutions like MediaWiki (what Wikipedia runs on, therefore what many people already know how to use), and WordPress (13 year history, broad ecosystem, literally an entire app-store of drag and drop plugin, which can be further customised).

(B) Reinvent the wheel. This is trivial if target functionality is trivial, like a static website. This is non-trivial if target functionality is non-trivial, like a CMS with access-controls, data validation, and modularised features. (Not going to even consider discussing a multiple-feature-non-modularised scenario, as that's a worst-practice. ;))

Right... so these are the approaches, what are the contingencies?

CONTINGENCIES

(1) The tech founder stays for eternity and maintains the chosen approach.

(2.1) A sequence of tech people runs the chosen approach, with appropriate handover, clear documentation, etc. between each epoch of staffing.

(2.2) A sequence of techies does not continue previous approaches perpetually, but instead starts from scratch with every new tech leader. Under approach (A), most of the workload of documentation has been done before you begin; the opposite is true with approach (B).

Given two broad approaches, and three broad contingencies above, we have a universe for discussion, and can start to ponder economics. Observations below are in no particular order.

ECONOMICS

(i) Event 2.2 is cheap only if your content base is small. Otherwise it is expensive. If your content base is large, opportunity costs can pile up as migrations are expensive. Discarding content instead of migrating it... well, that may or may not suck depending on how valuable the content is. How much content do we have? [Insert Tangent X]

(ii) Event 2.1 is predictable only if documentation is pristine. I don't mean kinda, sorta neat... I mean MECE-pristine. Otherwise costs will vary.

(iii) Costs discussed here are not financial costs, necessarily, but opportunity costs.

(iv) Decisions made now are betting the agility of the future team on current guesstimates about the availability of tech staffing to the organisation. Will there always be an excess of supply? Will it always be cheap? Will there always be few demands for their time? Between migrating systems, and building new features into an existing system, what's a better use of time?

TANGENT X

As far as I've seen (which is not much, as I'm usually not deeply involved in the organisation), there is a lot of content generated every year. However this all goes into a folder like Gdrive which is not published. I previously suggested moving some content to a crowd-editable platform, i.e. wiki. e.g. MediaWiki, as this would greatly flatten the workload of listing subject-specific how-tos and what-ifs for noob applicants.

(END)

Introducing the Philosophy Major at a Fair

Some talking points we used today:

Syllabus

- If you have to, it is useful to substitute the word "philosophy" with "critical thinking" to provide a non-academic appreciation of what the major involves.

- Broadly, the nature of the skill set pursued in the Philosophy major relates to the determination, D, of truthful sentences. The reason this is broadly applicable is, because all other fields are discussed in terms of sentences. (We don't need to introduce the distinction between propositions and sentences to pre-students of the major).

We can separate a philosophy program syllabus into:

1. "critical thinking tools," which typically include at least one course in logic (predicate calculus / the algebraic treatment of natural language) [tools, T for pursuing D]
2. - the "application of critical thinking tools to specific subjects," which for example, could be courses in "philosophy of science," "philosophy of mathematics," "philosophy of eating meat," etc. [the applications, A, of T to various domains]
3. - the "history of the development of the tools, and the history of the application of the tools," which we can generally refer to as courses in the history of philosophy [the histories, H of T, and H of A]

Context of the major

- The Philosophy is a liberal arts major, in the same way that the Mathematics major is a liberal arts major: there are no/few commercial jobs in pure mathematics, but many commercial jobs employ the skills used by mathematicians, and many commercial jobs employ the skills used by philosophers despite there being no/few commercial jobs in philosophy. [Optional definition of a liberal art in the Greek sense.] For the purpose of this discussion, "commercial," refers to the "non-academic domain," whereas it is a fact that academia itself is in certain ways commercialised.

- Research opportunities in philosophy per se are largely academic, whereas certain commercial bodies, such as hospitals, may explicitly employ ethicists. Skills of philosophy may be applied to research in other less abstract fields, just like skills of mathematics. Likewise, the incentives to pursue graduate study in philosophy are mainly academic fulfilment, whereas commercial bodies will have a high variance in valuing a graduate degree in the liberal arts for the purpose of determining employee compensation in a commercial setting.

- In the USA, certain individuals will study philosophy as a precursor to law, whereas law is a precursor to government service, given given the model of three branches of government requires an understanding of how laws interact with each other across each branch. The skills from the Philosophy major therefore set scholars up for statesmanship, in a similar fashion that the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics major does in the UK. This may come as a surprise to people who are used to living in countries without rule of law, as the dominant function of lawyers there is litigation between private parties. But in most countries, it is well understood that the study of law is also a precursor to commercial tactics. (We can leave out discussions of philosophy as a precursor to STEM, because that requires the audience to brain STEM (lol), and that can't be imposed upon a general audience. Maybe this avoidance is too conservative, and should be developed.)

- Philosophy programs in top-100 US undergraduate programs (including colleges and universities) may be judged along an axis of quantitative rigour. The schools which treat language with more quantitative analysis are in what is called the Analytical tradition, whereas the schools which treat language with less quantitative analysis are in what is called the Continental tradition. (Let's leave out Eastern philosophy, and American pragmatism out of it for now.) Therefore when picking a program, it is advantageous to examine the degree of analyticity applied by the faculty of the program - this can be done roughly via reputational assessment. A more technical student might prefer a more Analytical approach, a more soulful student might appreciate a more Continental approach.

College Application Essays

This year, I was rather out of touch with the event's organisation - and I ended up being reminded about the event the day before, on Facebook. I joined a facilitator's group, and from that group got the itinerary which I could not find online. Then, since I had free time and needed a break from work, I turned up during "essay," and "major," advisory sessions for applicants. For the essay section, I asked where they needed help, and got sent to the "Brainstorm/Outline" stage, ended up in Room 8, was advised to advise individuals during the breakout, parked at the back of class, and waited for further instructions. Lel.

I ended up in a group with two participants and one student helper, so it was quick. Points covered:

- College admissions is a competition.

- Admissions readers are judges. You are writing your own recommendation letter. Without being too trite about it.

- Essays are structural: the judge is looking to evaluate the writer's ability to build models. Model building capacities are not evident from report-cards and other parts of the application documentation.

- What your model (essay) about is not important, which is why the essay is fundamentally open-ended in topicality. What the judge is looking for is systematic structure, for example if the model is of a house, there must be a front door, window, rooms that connect to each other, etc.

- Brainstorming: begin with a topic that makes yourself excited, so that there is some basal motivation to explore the topic. Analysing the origins of exciting feels may be informative. In one example, the student helper was led to realise that her interests in horror movies and outdoor sports are related, because these two different activities have a similar effect on her psyche. Teasing out relationships like this provides raw content for listing.

- Outlines: building a list of interests is a good start. Arranging the list in a bulleted tree structure is the next step. Rearranging the leafs and branches changes what an essay is about, as it groups ideas together. After all, the entire essay should be bound together under a single idea.

- Editing: after 2-4 private drafts, it is helpful to seek peer review. Reviewers should be people who have experience in: admissions programs, hiring for businesses, or managing teams - these could even be juniors in the writer's school, who have played a role in team selection for committees, projects, camps, etc.. Giving a reviewer the essay, the writer wants their feedback on only one question: would you hire this person?

- End of process: the more revisions and cycles of peer review conducted, the better. Feedback however should be collected in bulk, then judged as a whole. A lot of the feedback will not matter. The writer must decide on what matters, and push the essay in a specific direction, with specific opportunity costs. That is the form of essays.

General feedback: organisers had a great idea with the separation of essay-stages into rooms... with the idea that participants would move through the rooms; but participants were not aware that they were supposed to move around. My participants thought they had been randomly assigned to one room for one hour.😯😯

America Becomes Relevant Again

I don't mean that America ceased to be relevant to the rest of the world, at any point in recent history. I do mean that the relevance of this superpower to my small existence has ebbed and flowed over my past 34 years. By the time I was born in 1983 Malaysia, nearly all of my mother's siblings had already emigrated with their families to the United States, and my father's brothers had returned from their respective studies in that country.

We spoke English at home, as my parents had attended British schools in Penang. Mother's father was a businessman, and it may have been class aspirations that led to the decision that his children should learn English, though we can only hypothesise this, until I schedule an interview with my aunts in Atlanta and Houston. Father and his siblings had been sent to English speaking schools by their father, who was involved in anti-Communist activities with the British intelligence unit that would become the Special Branch of the Royal Malaysian Police, in post World War II Malaysia. Grandfather intended to keep his children away from Communist sympathies which were more likely to be present in Chinese speaking schools, or so that is how the story goes.

My parents met in church networks, where they were both highly educated, fairly successful, albeit bookish leader-types. Father eventually became a Methodist minister by profession, and taught other ministers in seminary. In 1991 he pursued a Doctor of Missiology degree at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. Missiology, for the uninitiated, refers to "mission studies," the history and technology of proselytising a religious message... which corresponds in spirit with the word "evangelical," in the form of Evangelical Christianity which is now commonly spoken of in the United States.

So at the age of seven, I attended Mrs. Johnson's third grade class at Wilmore Elementary School, and socialised with peers up to the age of ten in my class (I was often singled out for being the littlest kid in class). It was also this institution which allowed me, a few times a week, to attend a fifth grade science class, since that was one of my special interests at that time. Learning to speak and socialise with American children was a novel and illuminating experience - which I would recall and reflect on at various points in future life.

We stayed in Kentucky for twelve months, then we returned to Malaysia. Father continued in his ministry, variously teaching, completing his doctorate, and administering the Seminari Theoloji Malaysia, a joint effort by Methodist, Anglican, and Lutherans in Malaysia. He helped to raise a few million Ringgit in funds over a few years, for a new campus purchased from the Catholic church, and in 1999 the family joined him there, in Seremban, away from Kuala Lumpur, where I had been based since my birth.

I completed the two years of Malaysian junior high school in Seremban, sitting for the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia exam in 2000. My experiences in that town led me to an interest in cultural anthropology, which become the contents of my application essays to US liberal arts colleges that same year. In fall of 2001, for the second time in my life, I flew to the United States in early September, and passed through the green lane of LAX immigration with a toolbox in my check-in luggage. We now know that this probably wouldn't have happened so easily just two weeks later.

Upon arriving at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, I judged from early conversations with peers that most students were here to move through the motions of life, either as (i) economically aspirational careerists moving up into the 5%, often international students, or (ii) intellectually content young people, looking forward to a few years of sensational access, often locals. Within just a few days, I had decided that I would not allow myself to be discouraged by the absence of peers with a strong focus on comprehensively delineating the bounds of human knowledge, consciousness, and our approaches to it - I would have to make extra efforts to explore such studies given available resources, which were not too few.

A good library, fully equipped with inter-library loan facilities, and the congeniality of a few dozen faculty members were my main resources in the years to come. Nevertheless, independent studies over this period did take their toll on my sense of initiative, and various decisions were made on my part to withdraw from general society - perhaps more than I should have. Who is to say whether I gained or lost more during this period of life?

I returned to Malaysia after about three years and nine months, having fulfilled the core mission to simply obtain a degree, and to have studied this small society of Americans for a few years. The task I had set for myself to fulfill next, was to study and comprehend the political and commercial landscape of Malaysia, before making any hasty decisions to abandon that country. To-date, I remain complacent, yet unpatriotic.

---

I've spent most of the past week in bed, struggling with bacterial meningitis and sinusitis, having tinnitus and pus oozing out of my eyes as I sleep, getting up twice a day to enforce eating, physical exercise, and errands at my office across the street from where I reside. It has perhaps... coalesced this short reflection.

Malaysia, throughout my life, has been ruled by borderline-dictators, divisive racial and religious rhetoricians, and well-heeled grifters... so much so that by the age of 14, in 1998, I had already decided that it would be more efficient to avoid non-violent protests, and to simply aim to amass enough resources to go toe-to-toe with the gangsters in government. I am the pariah who registers to vote, but refuses to turn up at the voting booth, just to illustrate my position on local politics. In chess, the pawns go first. I am not averse to working with evil men, if that is the keenest way to defeat evil in general. You may fault me as having failed to become part of the obligatory 3.5% of a population's non-violent protesters who are required to topple a dictatorship, and I've generally been fine with that.

On the other side of Earth, my classmates recoil in horror at the invasion of their moral grounds by the Trump administration. I've been making a point to stay on top of current affairs, in my role as the leader of a consumer lifestyle company - so it has been an interesting time for me, to read up on the structure of the US government, the Charters of Freedom, and the geo-political movements of players from Moscow to Mosul. What is furthermore interesting is that the White House is now in the hands of radical WASP extremists, which my earlier religious and societal upbringing has equipped me to fathom to a non-trivial degree.

Der Spiegel has a great cover this week - Trump chopping off the head of the Statue of Liberty. Do his executive orders and general nation-building strategy constitute acts of terrorism against the Charters of Freedom? Possibly. Have his cultural opponents and stakeholders (both domestic and international) been caught unawares, and off-script? Definitely. I have always viewed many of my colleagues in liberal democracies as being particularly naive when it comes to politics of the street-fighting variety. Well, they're getting it now, the darkness I was born into.

I am looking forward to a time where liberals are better equipped to fight fascism. Where every call to arms against "radical Islamic terrorists," is met with a call to arms against "radical WASP terrorists." It is not that hard, really, tit for tat, you know. After Berkeley (2017), with the expectation that any political event can become violent, amidst mudslinging commentary, bipartisan dollars could be better invested in providing security, to ensure civility and protected speech, regardless of the degree of hate in such speech. That's the onus of demanding rule of law - it'll cost you dearly, but in theory it is worth it, otherwise there is only a mewing sentimentalism. The party that seeks to win on account of truth must allow lies to be spoken in their plainest form - that is the liar's demise: a clarity of semantics that allows for lies to be seen for what they are. Learn up, already.

---

Meanwhile my younger friends deal with the beginnings of new semesters in college. It was only 15 years ago when I was beginning my second semester in college, and subject also to add/drop drama and an exploration of available resources at the university I attended. I had strategised in my first year to boost my GPA with easy courses, and to gorge on strange subjects unavailable at my previous institutions in Malaysia. GPA booster: Chinese 301, strange subjects: Rhetoric 20x - Gay and Lesbian Images in Film, FYS 10x - Experimental Music, Music 2xx - Computers the Arts and Music, etc. Computer Science was a god-awful experience, and it turned out to be wise not to study it at that school. I miss the ivory tower, and I miss my friends here and there, both young and old. I cannot write of them individually, without going into full memoir mode, so this reflection shall pause here.

I See Robots

"Haha. I like that you're like "I like robots!"."
"I didn't say, "I like robots," I said, "I build robots," I mean, when I look at people, all I see are robots."

And when I look at programs, all I see are little people. Sorry, kids, you may be a snowflake, but that doesn't make you special. Humanity, is so, predictable...

Not sure if people I talk to don't really get me... or are just trying to convince themselves that I'm not as weird as I say I am.

Major Search: 2015

Since I'm doing an earlier session, I can hang around and do the Philosophy booth.

The academic discipline of Philosophy exists to train students in the skill of recognising that all propositions (beliefs/ answers to questions) are subject to assumptions.

So if anyone appears to be either undecided or too sure about their major preference, feel free to send them over to the DOP. I would probably be busy trying to convince people that they haven't properly thought about whether they should be going to college in the first place.

:P

Meanwhile, fund-raising for the cafe project has been fun. I don't think I've had that much fun networking since I had to run a Christian Fellowship in middle school.

US College Rankings by Graduating Earnings Achieved

Whee... just figured out how to approach the damn "how much do rankings matter" question at future USAPPS workshops :P I'm just going to present salary data from PayScale.

No more arguments *sic* on whether a brand is 10x better or 100x better. If you're in the x-percentile, given the data that we have, the brand is exactly 2.7562565x better, that is all. If you're median, you're a moron, fuck you, quit worrying about it. *also sic*

Sigh. :)

(THIS IS NOT ADVICE. This is just a reminder to myself to drag up the relevant data before delivering actual advice in the future. I'm thinking aloud, intuitively about some numbers. Help me out here, those of you who are/were in US colleges...)

Re-explaining US college rankings, in terms of nominal annual salary achieved by graduates, in the year following senior year (if both schools and students are ordered by such):
the 99th-percentile student from a 0.3th-percentile school may make 2-3 times more than the 99th-percentile student from a 3rd-percentile school;

but the 99th-percentile student from a 3rd-percentile school may make more than the 75th-percentile student from a 0.3th-percentile school

Lots more data would be nice to have. Above is based only my limited data/experience + intuition about this. My gross assumption is, 2005: Bates 99th-percentile $60k, vs Harvard 99th-percentile $120-180k; Harvard 75th-percentile $ 59.999k.

:P

Seriously, I should go do a degree in this or something - if only I cared much about degrees.

(Of interest: PayScale.com's 2013 top-ten private colleges by 'salary potential'.

So this is enough data to get the point across... but finer data would be nice. It's worth someone's BS or MS thesis to go find the whole dataset.

Main thought I had in mind was the the top 1% at a top 3% school probably make more than the bottom 74% at a top 0.3% school, so that got me started.)

College Admissions Interviews

I swear, college alumni admissions interviews are a legacy from the pre-Skype/Hangouts era.

Updated: 2014-08-10

Sell

TLDR: the admissions interview is a sales pitch. (Even if you're on the academic track, you'll have to sell to get grants, to into gradschool, etc.) So if you're sure that you don't like selling, then don't ask for an interview. If you think that you need help with sales skills, perhaps look here.

Do Your Homework

How to use search engines to your advantage: here is a sample query about admissions interview questions - it filters in everything under bates.edu.

1. You can replace "bates.edu" with the school website of your choice.
2. If there are too many results for graduate admissions interviews, then try adding "undergraduate" at the beginning of the search term.
3. Improvise further.

Baiting

(Quote via a friend's Facebook post.)

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I agree. I want kids to go to college, so I tell them that if they want to make money, they should go to college. But I don't really care if they make money or not. Snicker.

Too Much Help, or Too Little?

So I've initiated a conversation with some of the folks who are currently involved in an annual workshop on US college / university applications. I'm querying them on whether it would be helpful or harmful to have a continuous forum on say, Facebook, to facilitate this. (There used to be such an independent forum called Recom, which died.) Some are concerned that this is spoon-feeding, and that it encourages applicants to ask trivial questions. Here are my thoughts on that:

Your question - my short answer is "yes, they should be encouraged to ask the right questions," if you agree that whole point of this education-counseling stuff is to improve the ease of access to educational opportunities, at an aggregate level (perhaps with a focus on Malaysia).

What I'm NOT proposing: that we give them easy answers to any and all questions.

Colleges are the gatekeepers here - we're not helping anyone by adding friction, we can only help students (etc.) by reducing their waste of energy in applying. If you're worried about us spoon-feeding Malaysian applicants, then consider this analogy: top Singaporean applicants are receiving intravenous college-application-steroids from the age of two. :P

The purpose of a "marketplace/exchange," in the economic sense is to reduce logistical costs for everyone, so that people have less guess-work to do when looking to buy/sell/trade something - in this case, it would be 'commodity-grade information' about applying to college. There are more important 'boutiquey' things that applicants should be grappling with (i.e. spending their energy on) - like improving their writing technique, and application strategy.

I think we're further contributing to the process of education, by also encouraging applicants to practice "Internet literacy," - teaching them to use search engines, Wikis (also contributing to them), self-organizing their meetups (a forum provides a place for them to maximize reach discovering others who share their interests), etc.

Improving Composition in Speech and Writing

[In response to questions about interview technique - expressing technically complex ideas, beating around the bush, speaking more concretely versus abstractly, etc.]

Another speaker was correct to highly "show more, tell less," and this is true in both speech and writing. Choosing what words go into a sentence, affects both the written (e.g. essay) and spoken (e.g. interview) components of a candidate's application. Malaysian students typically need a lot of practice in composition. If you find that you are concerned about how you are choosing which words go into a sentence:

Number 1. Please get a writing coach.

Number 2. Practice the hell out of it. You need to get a journal, or blog, or equivalent, and practice as often as you can. You need to get into the habit of writing, then revisiting what you have written at a later point in time, daily, weekly, whatever. In this sort of training, they say you have to "murder your darlings," you need to write a draft, delete it, rewrite, delete, write, delete, write delete... until it's perfect.

Number 3. If you're not sure how useful a word is: draw a long line, label it "very concrete," on one end, and "very abstract," on the other, then ask yourself where that word falls on the line. If it's anywhere near "very abstract," throw the word away. If you do this more, you'll find that you end up chucking out a lot of adjectives and adverbs, and keeping a lot of nouns and verbs.

It takes some practice, but you will get better at this "composition," thing.

Economics of the Admissions Essay

This is a slightly cynical / sociopathic / Machiavellian / business-oriented view.

The admissions officer (or "reader") is your client; they are your potential customer; there is a transaction at stake; you are making the opening offer; you are trying to persuade them to accept with an acceptance letter i.e. "counter-offer."

This is a sales problem; you need to know what your customer really wants; "uniqueness," "self actualization," "analytical approach," "depth of reflection," "honesty" - these are not ultimately what the reader is looking for; the reader is looking to build a team of 400-4000 people who will learn well together; this team, or class, is the short term goal; there is another long-term goal... the team needs to look good to people outside the college for the next 50 years or so. The reader is trying to maximize value for these two short/long term goals; so in your essay (and in all other parts of the application, or pitch), you must show how you are helping your customer, the reader, to achieve those goals.

Key message: (your application is an "opening bid") how are you offering to add value, to the college (short term value), and to the world beyond college (long term value)? SHORT: a team that learns well together: functional is more important than unique; more important than either is the willingness to communicate. LONG: students and alumni that look good to outsiders... must be making a positive difference (or adding value) to some one else's life... single-moms /hedge fund managers / Malaysian farmers / artists and art dealers / etc.

You can write about anything, as long as you tie it back to one of these goals. The form and style of the essay can be any, as long as you succeed in communicating that you are ready, able, and willing to achieve both these goals, for the admissions officer.

College Applications and the Long Tail

["Initimidated that they have nothing to show to readers of their college application."]

Yeah, I got that sort of feedback from at least one participant at today's [USAPPS] college workshop/fair/tour.

While it's important to demonstrate what the ideal candidate looks like based on academics, past achievements, "passion", etc. (which should be easy for many facilitators who have gone that route)... the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. :p

It's a fact that if you score all Cs throughout school, there's still a college that will admit you. Students who have been consistent C/D/E etc. scorers, without organisational achievement, clearly developed passions, or other "marks" of "outstanding/admirable" history, need to be shown how to best position themselves to the admissions offices, in order to get this college thing "done." In fact they're the ones who benefit most from workshops like USAPPS.

I'm sure this is already being addressed, but the focus-groups tomorrow may provide additional leeway for this sort of tutorial. I hope at least some [people] agree with this.

Ps- still sorry for sleeping through the teachers session. Ugh.