Think Like A Grad

Think like a graduate

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Think like a graduate

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Many view Grad School as the end of their education

Hence, they end up in programs that end their education

Don’t get me wrong. Not all get to even that stage!

But a very few See Grad School as the beginning The beginning of an adventure A new phase of life that is financially, intellectually, and emotionally rewarding.

They reach the top No matter where they start

This program Helps you join those few Even without your realizing it

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This book is not meant for free distribution. It is a part of the comprehensive MS-PhD course created by Placementor.com It is licensed for a single user or a group of users as explained in the sale deed.

The complete copyrights of this work belong to Placementor.com, a division of Globarena. No part of this book may be distributed, copied, or sold without prior approval.

The authors and the management of Placementor have taken great care to ensure that the material presented is accurate, precise, and helpful. However, they do not make any guarantee of the completeness of the content. They accept no liability for any kind of losses or damages caused or alleged to be caused.

All rights reserved worldwide by Placementor.com http://www.placementor.com (A division of Globarena) 2000-2003

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INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................. 5 How to read this book ............................................................................... 8 A2Z OF GRAD-SCHOOL ............................................................................... 11 WHAT IS SO EXCITING ABOUT GRAD SCHOOL? ..........................................................12 WHY SHOULD YOU GO TO GRAD SCHOOL IN THE US? ..................................................15 WHAT ARE THEY LOOKING FOR? ..........................................................................17 WHY DOES GRAD SCHOOL HAVE DIFFERENT EXPECTATIONS ...........................................19 LIFE SKILLS FOR GRAD SCHOOL................................................................. 23 QUALITIES THAT HELP YOU MEET EXPECTATIONS ...............ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. Envision your future....................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Set goals...................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Self-development........................................ Error! Bookmark not defined. Stay motivated ............................................. Error! Bookmark not defined. Anti-Motivators........................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Persevere ..................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Plan............................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined. A primer on Time management..................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Advantages of Planning ............................... Error! Bookmark not defined. A workshop on SWOT Analysis ...................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Personal SWOT analysis ............................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Project SWOT Analysis................................. Error! Bookmark not defined. Approach logically.......................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Reason, reason and reason ............................. Error! Bookmark not defined. Think divergently........................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Make decisions rationally ................................ Error! Bookmark not defined. SHARPEN YOUR EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE ....................ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. THE FOREIGN ZONE.......................................ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. FOR THE NON-AMERICANS .......................................ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. Know more about America .............................. Error! Bookmark not defined. More on being polite and positive..................... Error! Bookmark not defined. TAKE THESE HOME ........................................ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. LOGIC TEMPLATE ..................................................ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. USE THEM NOW ....................................................ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED.

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Introduction A college degree is not a sign that one is a finished product, but an indication that a person is prepared for life. Reverend Edward A. Malloy, Monk's Reflections

Welcome to the MS-PhD comprehensive program, and congratulations!

You just took the first step toward a great Grad School.

If you followed the instructions in the “Read-me-first.txt” this must be the first book that you have opened in the comprehensive package.

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There is a good reason to ask you to make this the first book you read. This short unique book will help kindle excitement and passion in you about joining Grad school. If there is one quality that will ensure your admission in Grad School, it is passion.

If you are excited and passionate, it shows!

I mean, even if you try hard to hide it, It will show in Your application form, cover letters, resumes, admission essay, and every other document you submit. This, in fact, does half the job for you. So, the advice is straight and simple. From now onward, for the next year or two, just think, sleep, eat and dream “Grad School”. For the rest, we are there to help you. Let me repeat what I said in “Read-me-first.txt”: This is the most important book that you can lay hands on at this point as it gives you everything you need to get excited about Grad School It also gives you a lot more.

It gives you a rollicking start!

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You will acquire several crucial emotional and intellectual skills that you need from now until you leave Grad School. By then you will anyway have internalized these skills!

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How to read this book Different people have different styles of working that suit them. follow these general guidelines.

However, try to

Read this book twice (I mean at least). During the first reading, don’t try to practice the concepts or study the material seriously. Just read it like you read a novel. Enjoy it. But don’t skim over it too fast either. Read it seriously enough that you get the big picture. Right after you complete the first reading, read the “application strategies” book. The first reading of both should not take any more than three to four hours. All the Placementor programs are designed for a delightful online read. However, if you feel like it, take a printoutAnd settle down in an easy chair and read. (The Digilox security enables you to take 2 prints.) The books will give you the right perspective. Both books also have so much of useful information in them that you will find yourself constantly coming back to them to refer and learn. Just read the exercises and activities. Their purpose is to drill all the concepts that are covered. Don’t do them in the first reading. Give yourself a gap of at least two to three weeks between the first reading and serious studying. The “read-me-first” gives a couple of options on how you could fill these two or three weeks. For the second reading, give yourself at least a complete week of attentive reading time (approximately 3 hours a day and 6 days a week). You need two notebooks along with this workbook, or, if you are working on a system, two Word documents.

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The first notebook is for Activities and Exercises notebook (A&E). In this, you will do all the exercises and activities given in this book. Try to keep it legible for future reference. More important, do all the activities and exercises with all seriousness and concentration. You may not find similar activities in the GRE exam, but don’t underestimate the importance of these exercises. They help you do well in many aspects of securing admission. The second book is even more important than the first one. It is your ‘The Grad Student in Me’ notebook (GSM). By the time you complete the current e-book, you will have filled the GSM with really valuable information. The information is going to be so powerful that it will build your application package by itself. If you choose the hard copy option, keep the book extremely neat. In fact, type it out and save it on a computer if you have access to one. Keep a backup. This will be an invaluable resource that you will be building for yourself.

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A few portions of this guide are taken from the ‘Gradmentor’ program of Placementor. Regarded as the most effective personality development program for college students on the net, GradMentor coaches you in all the must-have emotional, personality, and career skills. For more details, please visit http://gradmentor.placementor.com/

Let us start without further delay.

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A2Z of Grad School

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What is so exciting about Grad School?

Truly great madness, cannot be achieved without significant intelligence. Henrik Tikkanen

Human beings tend to get really enthusiastic and excited about only five things. These may have different levels of influence on different people. Most people may have been inspired by more than one of these causes. They are •

Money and power,

•

Service,

•

Intellectual challenge,

•

Spiritual attainment, and, of course,

•

Love

This sort of explains why grad school is such a worthy pursuit. If you are an average Joe, it helps you acquire three of the five (financial, intellectual and ability to serve) in a positive and almost guaranteed way!

Well, many were blissfully engaged in the pursuit of the fifth activity too during Grad School.

What can you reasonably expect after Grad School?

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In today’s parlance, with your Grad School degree, you will become a thought leader in your field. A Grad School degree is a must or will be of great help if you are interested in •

Teaching

•

Research and Development

•

Professionally-run service organizations

•

Managerial and leadership positions in corporates and the public sector

The degree helps you rise fast in your career. It gives you the confidence to tackle substantial problems in your field and solve them independently or form teams that can solve them methodically. Most important, it connects you to people who are motivated, intellectual, sincere, and passionate, and share the same academic interests as yours. While in college, you may have been fortunate to attend lectures by one or more exceptional professors. But in Grad School, you get to rub shoulders with them. You work with them closely and that, let us assure you, is the experience that you will cherish lifelong. You can learn more by watching these people at work than spending hours and hours in libraries. If you are an average or above average, passionate student, Grad School teaches you, trains you, and inspires you.

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Did you notice, I said teaching and training? What is the difference anyway? Teaching is coaching without any specific objective. Its aim is to prepare you for a whole range of pursuits without any specialized coaching for a particular pursuit. Training, however, has a definite pursuit in mind. The trainee is coached to solve that specific pursuit.

If you are a genius, Grad School channels your creative energies.

Grad School is rigorous and exciting at once!

No matter who you are, grad school can help you do better in life and that is a good enough reason to give it a try.

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Why should you go to grad school in the US? The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance. Socrates (469 BC - 399 BC)

Placementor.com has strong academic interactions with a number of educational institutions across the globe. With our experience with various educational systems, we can say the following things with certainty:

•

US graduate schools offers a most comprehensive, well-rounded education that is bound to enhance the prospects of success in all your future activities

•

More important, US graduate schools follow perhaps the most fair and rational procedures to identify candidates for graduate studies and hence virtually anyone interested in joining has a fair chance

The US offers greater choices in higher education than other countries in terms of number of schools, variety of programs, and cultural diversity of the classroom.

To put it simply,

If you are an academic at heart, US graduate education is the biggest asset you can acquire in your life.

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If you want to move up the corporate ladder, a graduate degree is the best possible investment that you can make.

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What are they looking for? Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi (1893 - 1986), in Irving Good, The Scientist Speculates (1962)

Any graduate department has certain expectations of its prospective students like you. They want to know how much you can learn while you are with them, how much you can contribute in return intellectually, and how worthwhile it is going to be for them to associate with you. The department expects to learn from you as much as you expect to learn from the department.

These objectives sort of define almost everything the school evaluates you for. To assess you, they look at •

Your ability to take any point and analyze and investigate it scientifically using the proven methods of logic, deduction, and intuition;

•

Your ability to read and understand the existing bank of information, which can be very complex;

•

Your ability to present the ideas in a logical and coherent fashion to the academic and scientific community;

•

Your attitude toward certain crucial issues;

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•

Your knowledge of fundamental concepts in your chosen area; and most important,

•

Your passion for further study and research in the field

Remember, not every graduate student is expected to become an Einstein. But, he/she is expected to become an authority in his/her small and specialized chosen field. Your potential for fulfilling these expectations is what they evaluate you for. In other words,

How good an authority you can become in a small field in a short span!

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Why does grad school have different expectations Achievement is largely the product of steadily raising one's levels of aspiration and expectation. Jack Nicklaus (1940 - ), 'My Story'

You may ask, “I was a college student for four years. So, I did study serious stuff at a high degree of complexity. Then why should grad school be difficult for me?” To understand this, you must first know the difference between graduate or higher education and ‘non-higher education’. If you went to a good college, you probably know the difference, as good universities consider college education also as higher education. But even in the best colleges, the graduate classes are generally much more serious and adhere to certain stringent standards as compared to the undergraduate classes. However, in 90% of colleges, college education is treated as an extension to high school. They do not differentiate higher education as they should. Hence, students find themselves in a state of confusion when they get in to grad school where the approach is different. Webster’s dictionary defines Higher Education as

“Education beyond the secondary level; especially education provided by a college or university”

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This definition does not tell us much.

What you must understand are the philosophical differences between the higher and non-higher education, which are very effectively included in graduate educational programs. For that purpose, let us define “higher education” and “non-higher education” from what they expect from you.

‘Non-Higher Education’ is that period of education where average students learn by questioning.

Most questions that come to your mind up to a certain level of education have already been answered by scientists and savants of previous generations. That education where you learned these answers by questioning is ‘non-higher education’. So, high school or college expected you to

Ask lots of questions,

Be attentive (to capture solutions presented in non-formal mode), and

Hard-working (to find answers from various sources).

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If you already possess these qualities, congratulations!,. You will find them handy even in graduate school. However, higher education is very different in certain other aspects.

‘Higher education’ is that period of education where students question by learning and solve by exploring.

At this point you will be ready to question and tackle the unexplored using methods of reasoning, logic, and experimentation that you have learned till now. So, you should be •

Well conversant with nature, society, and industry (to identify the sources of questions);

•

Dynamic and vibrant (to boldly question);

•

Critical, divergent, and scholarly (to pursue the answers);

•

Logical (to present it in a manner that helps the future generations); and

•

Focused, to provide a significant contribution

This is really important. Read this again and again until you fully understand. Graduate studies are not merely an extension of your high school or in most cases, your college. You have to approach them very differently.

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You have to balance the qualities that you acquired for years as a student with these new expectations.

The universities want to see how many of these qualities you have while they are evaluating you.

Note Don’t worry if you think these qualities are esoteric. You will find that it is delightfully easy to pick them up. All you need is planned work and proven guidance. You will get the guidance from us. The fact that you are at this point in this book shows that you are planning to put in systematic work. So, much sooner than you realize, you will be invited by a good university for graduate education!

Graduate education is going to demand a lot more from you and shape you into a much more competent person.

It is going to be really, really exciting.

Let us now look at all the personality aspects that you need to know to start preparing for graduate life. These are the skills that you require to convince the department that you will be able to pursue high-end research. We call them the skills required to think like a grad student. contribute to any discipline of study in a systematic way. Graduate schools expect them from you.

They help you

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Life Skills for Grad School You will get the full “Think like a grad” 103 page ebook along with the GradMentor product.

Place an order for GradMentor and get the eBook FREE http://gradmentor.placementor.com If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask at [email protected]