Pragmatic as well as inspiring road map to maximizing college ROI.
A debut advice guide by a student adviser/consultant outlining an action plan to get the most out of college.
For college life coach Williams, “the biggest problem in completing college and getting a job within your field of study is not having a specific plan of action.” She seeks to remedy that in this book by offering a pyramid-structure strategy for setting specific academic objectives for each school year that can serve as building blocks to maximize the college experience. “The first year of college is about creating the solid foundation for your academic success,” so Williams focuses freshmen on their studies, insisting they visit professors during office hours and judiciously choose classmates for study groups. Sophomores should step up to become leaders in a student organization to develop networking and other nonacademic skills also critical to success. Williams recommends studying abroad, if feasible, in Year 2’s summer as preparation for her recommended focus on being “a global student” in Year 3, which should include participating in or creating campus events that expand one’s cultural horizons, since such heightened awareness is also a competitive advantage. Students should snag that career-focused internship in Year 4, she says, since such positions often lead to post-college jobs. Debut nonfiction author Williams has mapped out a clear, engaging strategy by which students can better leverage their college experiences. She offers an array of practical tools, including a college finance budget spreadsheet. She relates her advice in a warm, noncondescending manner and supports her points by sharing her own experiences as an engineering undergrad, including how she dealt with her fear of physics by forming a study group and how her study abroad experience in the Caribbean “changed my life forever.” Indeed, Williams is to be commended for including cultural/diversity awareness as an important element in her success mix. The chronological organization gets a bit confusing at the end, with a “year five” discussion that includes completing a senior project as well as early postgrad living. Overall, however, Williams offers exceedingly helpful advice for students in navigating their college experiences.
Pragmatic as well as inspiring road map to maximizing college ROI.Pub Date: July 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4960-1473-3
Page Count: 106
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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