Posts tagged “graduation-guide”

Showing 1 to 9 of 9 results.

How Should You Spend Your Gap Year?

The Gap Year. No, it’s not the period of your life when you restrict your wardrobe to pieces purchased at the same-named store at the local mall in a failed effort to be more hip.

The gap year is a break that some students choose to take between high school and college, or before transitioning from school to a career or a job. If you think about it, a gap year is almost like a prolonged bachelor party, minus all the debauchery—because you’re in transition between commitments.

Posted May 17, 2010 at 06:30 PM

Picking a College Major: Things to Consider

By: Kathryn_Williams

In high school, you don’t have a lot of control over what you get to study. You can choose between Spanish, Chinese, or French, peut-être, or theater or art (if you’re lucky), but for the most part, your fate is out of your hands. When you get to college, you belly-up to an educational smorgasbord, and you get to stuff yourself for awhile—until you have to choose just one dish: your major. And you better like pancakes, because you’re going to be eating A LOT of pancakes, and you’re going to be a pancake farmer one day. (OK, somewhere this metaphor went awry, but you get the idea.)

Your college major is supposed to prepare you for a specific career. Unfortunately, many students pick a major without thinking about what that career will actually entail. Before you pick a major, consider whether the career it leads to is right for you:

Posted May 11, 2010 at 04:48 PM

Categories: graduation guide

Registering 101: Classes to Sign up for Freshman Year of College

By: Ashley Spencer

Signing up for college courses can be daunting—there are just so many options! It’s worse then being at Subway and not knowing which footlong you desire. Do you want it toasted? How about cheese? What kind of chips do you want? Maybe you want a cookie instead? This is hard, right?

Posted May 7, 2010 at 04:33 PM

Categories: graduation guide

Graduation: As We Go On, Ways to Remember....

By: Ashley Spencer

Sometimes it’s hard to remember the most important moments of your life because your brain is too overwhelmed by the awesome thing occurring to you. Your cerebellum turns to your medulla oblongata, raises one eyebrow, and says, “For real?” The Hypothalamus shakes his little pea-sized head and shouts, “Are we trippin’?” The pituitary gland refuses to do whatever it does. The cerebrum is so perplexed so he decides go to his safe place and opens the mental files of your favorite movies and thumbs through the “Gladiator” records. Doing his best Russell Crowe, which isn’t very good at all, he keeps repeating “Are you not entertained!?” until everything is over.

Those of you graduating any day now, be warned: your brain is likely to experience a memory meltdown and fail to record everything.

Posted May 6, 2010 at 05:02 PM

Categories: graduation guide

To Defer or Not to Defer: The Pros and Cons of the Gap Year

By: Kathryn_Williams

In some European countries, it’s common to take a “gap year” between high school and college. The idea is to travel the world, broaden your horizons, and figure out what the heck you want to do with your life (astronaut fireman llama trainer accountant). The concept of a gap year started in the 1960s with young British hippies heading off to India before returning to study at Cambridge and Oxford.

Today, kids devote their gap years to travel, military service, internships, extracurricular interests, and volunteering. Many American colleges encourage students to defer a year for real-life experience before continuing their academic careers. Still, for some reason, taking a gap year raises eyebrows Stateside. We examine the pros and cons:

Posted May 5, 2010 at 04:09 PM

Categories: graduation guide

5 Things to Do Before Your Future Arrives

By: kat_rosenfield

If you're gearing up to graduate this year, you may have already begun to look ahead to your future. Not your future future, in which you arrive at college and embark on the final leg of your journey to independent adulthood, but your immediate future—you know, where you come home from the graduation ceremony, flop down on the couch, cast a bleary-eyed look at the diploma clutched in your sweaty hand, and think, "Now what?"

Posted May 4, 2010 at 11:05 AM

Categories: graduation guide

No More School, No More Books: 10 Jobs You Don't Need a Degree For

By: kat_rosenfield

Here at SparkNotes, we spend a lot of time talking about college—from applying, to dealing with rejections, to sleeping on a couch in the common area after discovering that your freshman roomie is certifiably insane. But despite its many fine qualities, college actually isn't a foregone conclusion for every graduating senior. A good education is invaluable, but not everyone needs a four-year degree in order to have a successful career. And for people with particular passions, skill sets, or strengths, four more years of formal schooling might not be the best option.

So today, your SparkNotes editors have put together a list of 10 careers that don't require a college degree, for everyone from the mechanically-minded tinkerer, to the social butterfly, to the wannabe world traveler. Could you be destined for something other than dorm rooms, lecture halls, and campus life? Take a look below.

Posted May 3, 2010 at 12:11 PM

Categories: graduation guide

Considering the Army (sponsored)

By: SparkLife

Here at SparkNotes, we get mail every single day from teens who (a) can't afford college and (b) have no idea what to do with their lives.

We always wish we had one magic answer to these problems, but the truth is that all Sparklers are unique—and that means there's a different answer for everyone. On SparkLife and in our college advisor blog, we've talked about community college, scholarships, and taking time off to find your passion, but we've never discussed another option: the Army.

Posted Apr 30, 2010 at 05:03 PM

Categories: graduation guide

The Top Five Lies in Graduation Speeches

By: kat_rosenfield

Hey, seniors! June is just a couple of months away, and you'd better start steeling yourself, because graduation is coming, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Pretty soon, you'll be attending your own ceremony, marching to the strains of Pomp and Circumstance, sporting a highly unflattering polyester gown and a funny-looking hat, and listening to the deluded rambling of your graduation speaker as he or she utters one bald-faced falsehood after another.

There. We said it.

Posted Apr 30, 2010 at 11:59 AM

Categories: graduation guide