Adalberto

Applying to Oxbridge is not similar to applying to other universities in the UK for a number of reasons. These reasons have been discussed at various phases below:

Phase One: Making Your First Decisions

You might have a thousand dreams about doing your dream course in the college of your liking. But this alone wont help you get through. Application to Oxbridge needs a little bit of additional effort when compared to the other universities in the UK. In the first place, you need to perform a meticulous planning and a perfect mapping of your objectives and destination.

Now that you have started planning, you now need to decide on two factors: the exact course that you would like to apply for and your preferred college where you would like to take up this course. You must be aware of the fact that both the Oxford and the Cambridge universities operate on the collegiate system. Though you still belong to the university, your academic life will be revolving around the college to which you belong.

If you have all this, you can be sure that you are all set to apply to one of the two greatest universities in the world. Remember that you will not be able to apply to both the Oxford and the Cambridge universities in the same year. It is a tough decision to make at this point.

Phase Two: The Form Filling Process

There is a chance that you can afford to forget your birthday, but you should not forget the 15th of October, which apparently happens to be the last date of submission of your application forms.

• UCAS Forms: The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service forms need to be filled up and submitted to the university office by the 15th of October. The UCAS form that you fill up for Oxbridge is pretty similar to those forms that you use to apply to other universities in the UK. However, you may have to fill up an additional column for your college of preference for the Oxbridge UCAS forms. You need to do this because Oxbridge follows a collegiate system whereas most of the other universities in the UK do not.

You also need to check and fill up forms for external tests that you might need to undertake such as the Biomedical Admissions Test [BMAT] or the National Admissions Test for Law [LNAT], in case you decide to take up one of these courses. The application forms for these tests need to be submitted along with your UCAS forms on or before the 15th of October.

• Oxbridge Forms: Both the Oxford and the Cambridge universities have their own set of application forms that you need to fill up. The deadline for filling up of these forms is again the 15th of October. While the Oxford application forms are referred to as the OAF, the Cambridge forms are referred to as the CAF.

The filling up of the CAF is usually considered more tedious and daunting than the OAF. Both the CAF and the OAF will ask for the same information as that which had been asked for in your UCAS form. Both these forms will have additional sections where you can provide more information about yourself. Though not known to many, you can use these sections to state your selling points.

Phase Three: Get Ready For the Interviews

Interviews at Oxbridge are an integral part of the selection process for the various courses. The purpose of these interviews is to adjudge the ability of a student and to test on his intentions of taking up the course seriously. The idea is to give a fair chance to all the applicants.

Your personal statements play a very vital role in these interviews. The personal statements can be used as a basis for all the questions put forward in the interview. At times, the interviewer screens the personal statement during the interview process to see if you own every word in it. Sometimes, personal statements are scrutinised after the interview. Hence, it is essential that your personal statement is your very own and is highly focussed.

Phase Four: The Celebration

If you really deserve to be there, you will receive your offer letters around Christmas. Consider it as Santas gift to you. Good luck!

James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. If you are a UK or Overseas student applying for a place in a UK University, to stand out from the thousands of others, it is essential to have striking Personal Statement for more information and professional guidance, see http://www.personal-statement.co.uk

posted by jamalvmn  # 9:55 PM 0 comments

Preparing for a move? You better make a checklist.

The traditional checklist, a long, handwritten list of tasks, has evolved along with new technologies. In the past, we would relish in the act of crossing off each task as it's completed. But in today's technology-driven world, the checklist takes on a new form. Today's checklist is probably typed into a computer or a Day Planner, and the emotional "cross off" has been transformed to the harsh tapping of the delete key. Despite technology, regardless of where you are moving, a checklist will be needed to help you get there.

Your new checklist will include traditional tasks ranging from canceling utilities and forwarding mail to returning library books, updating magazine subscriptions and placing important items such as passports, medications and plane tickets in your carry-on luggage.

But the checklist has evolved. You'll still have to cancel your gas and electric service at your current address, but in today's world, you may also have to update your satellite radio service and cable TV package. You may stop using these services but until they are canceled, you may still be charged for them. When you forward your snail mail, you will likely do it online. And don't forget your e-mail. What about returning books to the library? Chances are, you bought your books online. No need for a trip to the library.

What about the list of items you place in your carry-on? It's very likely that your plane ticket is now an e-Ticket, but you still may need to print a hard copy with a "bar code," that is if you want to check in quickly and avoid those long check-in lines at the airport (which don't seem to be progressing with technology). And you better add a few items to your carry-on list. You'll need your mobile phone, Blackberry and PC chargers and don't forget your Day Planner and your iPod.

Forwarding Your E-mail
You'll need to find out if your email account can be serviced from your new location. If not, you will need to establish a new e-mail account as soon as possible and alert all of your business contacts, online magazine and newsletter subscriptions as well as friends and family. You may want to set a forwarding option up with your current email provider so your current contacts can reach you automatically.

Virtual Banking
Research your online banking service provider. If you need to open a new bank account, you may have to re-establish your online banking program. If you move more than once in a short period of time, your bank may require address changes to be made in writing. So much for high technology.

Get Shredding
As you prepare for your move, you may have piles of documents ready for the trash, but who knows who might go through it and what they might find. Identify theft is a serious and growing issue. Shred and destroy old paperwork with personal information on it.

Dial it Up
In addition to arranging for a home phone, you may need to arrange for a new mobile phone number from a provider in your new location. While your home phone probably does not have a contract in place, your mobile phone might. Canceling or suspending your service may be inevitable.

The new virtual checklist may not provide the thrill of the "cross off," but it will provide a real-time, organized approach to managing the "modern move." No matter how you organize your checklist, either on your digital day planner or with a pen and pad, it is the planning phase that will help to ensure a less-stressful, more-enjoyable relocation.

Chris Draeger, Group Vice President, Crown Relocations

Crown Relocations has been providing international moving and relocation services since 1965. With 200 offices in 50 countries, Crown has "people on the ground" in all the major Expat communities around the world. Crown provides a range of services to help Expats and their families move and settle into their new home ranging from Orientation Tours, Home finding, School Search and more.

Crown also organizes Expat Clubs with regular events to help people meet and socialize with other Expats.

We also serve corporate clients as they develop and manage the relocation policies and employee benefit programs for the staff moving overseas. Services include expense management, program development, policy counseling, customized online reporting and full departure and destination services for the employees.

Crown is a private organization headquartered in Hong Kong, with European HQ in London and Americas HQ in Los Angeles California.

Crown provides free moving quotations on its website at http://www.crownrelo.com

posted by jamalvmn  # 3:25 PM 0 comments

1.What is colon cancer?

Cancer is a disease which can affect cells from all organs. The colon cancer affects the cells of the colon, determining them to proliferate in an uncontrollable way. This mass of abnormal cells will form a tumor inside the colon. The cancer of the intestine is quite frequent and two thirds of this type of cancer is situated in the colon.

2.Who can develop colon cancer?

You are at risk of developing colon cancer if you drink a lot of alcohol and you are obese. Also if other members of your family had colon cancer or breast cancer you could inherit some genes that make you more sensible to cancer. If you have polyps on your intestine and you leave them untreated for a long time, they can transform into malign polyps, meaning that cancer had occurred.

3.Is my diet involved in cancer development?

Following a diet which is rich in fats and proteins could expose you to cancer. If you eat a lot of fruit, vegetables and high fiber foods you can prevent colon cancer from occurring.

4.Does colon cancer come with any symptoms?

There are some symptoms which could announce that cancer is installing, but they also appear in other diseases. Some of the symptoms are: seeing blood in your bowels, alternation of diarrhea with constipation, and low abdominal pains.

5.How does the doctor know that I have cancer?

The doctor will perform a sigmoidoscopy or a colonoscopy to examine the insides of the colon. Also x-rays of the colon will be performed. These methods will see if tumors are present inside the colon. In order to stage colon cancer CT and ultrasound will be used.

6.Can colon cancer be treated?

Generally the most indicated procedure in trying to treat colon cancer is surgery. By surgery the doctors will remove the tumor from the colon. If the cancer spread, giving metastasis, the doctors will recommend you chemotherapy and radiotherapy. These are hard bearable due to their side effects like nausea, vomiting, loss of hair, fever, and tiredness.

7.Is the treatment effective or not?

If the colon cancer was diagnosed in its early stages and it has not spread to other organs the treatment will be 90% effective and patients will survive even five years after. If the cancer has given metastasis the treatment will not be so effective any more and half of the diagnosed patients will live less that five years.

For greater resources on colon cancer or especially about colon cancer symptoms please visit this link http://www.colon-cancer-center.com/colon-cancer-symptoms.htm

posted by jamalvmn  # 8:56 AM 0 comments

There are gender differences in learning styles specific to science, math, engineering and technology (STEM) that teachers of these subjects should keep in mind when developing lesson plans and teaching in the classroom. First, overall, girls have much less experience in the hands-on application of learning principles in lab settings than boys. This could occur in the computer lab, the science lab, or the auto lab the principle is the same for all of these settings it requires an overall technology problem-solving schema, accompanied by use and manipulation of tools, and spatial relation skills that very few girls bring with them to the classroom on day one in comparison to boys.

Lets look at some of the reasons why girls come to the STEM classroom with less of the core skills needed for success in this subject area. Overall, girls and boys play with different kinds of games in early childhood that provide different types of learning experiences. Most girls play games that emphasize relationships (i.e., playing house, playing with dolls) or creativity (i.e., drawing, painting). In contrast, boys play computer and video games or games that emphasize building (i.e., LEGO), both of which develop problem-solving, spatial-relationship and hands-on skills.

A study of gender differences in spatial relations skills of engineering students in the U.S. and Brazil found that there was a large disparity between the skills of female and male students. These studies attributed female students lesser skills set to two statistically significant factors: 1) less experience playing with building toys and 2) having taken less drafting courses prior to the engineering program. Spatial relations skills are critical to engineering. A gender study of computer science majors at Carnegie-Mellon University (one of the preeminent computer science programs in the country) found that, overall, male students come equipped with much better computer skills than female students. This equips male students with a considerable advantage in the classroom and could impact the confidence of female students.

Are these gender differences nature or nurture? There is considerable evidence that they are nurture. Studies show that most leading computer and video games appeal to male interests and have predominantly male characters and themes, thus it is not surprising that girls are much less interested in playing them. A study of computer games by Children Now found that 17% of the games have female characters and of these, 50% are either props, they tend to faint, have high-pitched voices, and are highly sexualized.

There are a number of studies that suggest that when girls and women are provided with the building blocks they need to succeed in STEM they will do as well if not better than their male counterparts. An Introductory Engineering Robotics class found that while males did somewhat better on the pre-test than females, females did as well as the males on the post-test following the classs completion.

Another critical area of gender difference that teachers of STEM should keep in mind has less to do with actual skills and experience and more to do with perceptions and confidence. For females, confidence is a predictor of success in the STEM classroom. They are much less likely to retain interest if they feel they are incapable of mastering the material. Unfortunately, two factors work against female confidence level: 1) most girls will actually have less experience with STEM course content than their male counterparts and 2) males tend to overplay their accomplishments while females minimize their own. A study done of Carnegie Mellon Computer Science PhD students found that even when male and female students were doing equally well grade wise, female students reported feeling less comfortable. Fifty-three percent of males rated themselves as highly prepared in contrast to 0% of females.

It is important to note that many of the learning style differences described above are not strictly gender-based. They are instead based on differences of students with a background in STEM, problem-solving, and hands-on skills learned from childhood play and life experience and those who havent had the same type of exposure. A review of the literature on minority students and STEM finds that students of color are less likely to have the STEM background experiences and thus are missing many of the same STEM building blocks as girls and have the same lack of confidence. Many of the STEM curriculum and pedagogy solutions that work for female students will also work for students of color for this reason.

Bridge Classes/Modules to Ensure Core Skills

Teachers will likely see a gap in the core STEM skills of female and minority students for the reasons described above. Below are some solutions applied elsewhere to ensure that girls and women (and students of color) will get the building block STEM skills that many will be missing.

Teachers in the Cisco Academy Gender Initiative study assessed the skill levels of each of their students and then provided them with individualized lesson plans to ensure their success that ran parallel to the class assignments. Other teachers taught key skills not included in the curriculum at the beginning of the course, such as calculating math integers and tool identification and use. Students were provided with additional lab time, staffed by a female teaching assistant, knowing that the female students would disproportionately benefit from additional hands-on experience.

Carnegie-Mellon University came to view their curriculum as a continuum, with students entering at different points based on their background and experience. Carnegie-Mellons new frame of a continuum is purposefully different than the traditional negative model in which classes start with a high bar that necessitates remedial tutoring for students with less experience, stigmatizing them and undermining their confidence. Below is a list of ideas and suggestions that will help ALL students to succeed in the STEM classroom.

1. Building Confidence

How do teachers build confidence in female students who often have less experience than their male counterparts and perceive they are behind even when they are not?

1) Practice-based experience and research has shown that ensuring female students have the opportunity to gain experience with STEM, in a supportive environment, will increase their confidence level.

2) Bringing in female role models that have been successful in the STEM field is another important parallel strategy that should be used to assist your female students in seeing themselves as capable of mastering STEM classes: if she could do it, then I can too!

3) Consistent positive reinforcement by STEM teachers of their female students, with a positive expectation of outcome, will assist them in hanging in there during those difficult beginning weeks when they have not yet developed a technology schema or hands-on proficiency and everything they undertake seems like a huge challenge.

2. Appealing to Female Interests

Many of the typical STEM activities for the classroom appeal to male interests and turn off girls. For example, curriculum in robots often involves monsters that explode or cars that go fast. Roboeducators observed that robots involved in performance art or are characterized as animals are more appealing to girls. Engineering activities can be about how a hair dryer works or designing a playground for those with disabilities as well as about building bridges. Teachers should consider using all types of examples when they are teaching and incorporating activities in efforts to appeal female and male interests. Teachers can also direct students to come up with their own projects as a way of ensuring girls can work in an area of significance to them.

Research also shows that there are Mars/Venus differences between the genders and how each engages in technology. Overall, girls and women are excited by how the technology will be used its application and context. Men will discuss how big the hard drive or engine is, how fast the processor runs, and debate the merits of one motherboard or engine versus another. These are topics that are, overall, of less interest to most females.

The Carnegie-Mellon Study took into account the differences of what engages female students and modified the Computer Science programs curriculum so that the context for the program was taught much earlier on in the semester and moved some of the more technical aspects of the curriculum (such as coding) to later in the semester. Authors observed that the female students were much more positive about getting through the tedious coding classes when they understood the purpose of it. Teachers should ensure that the context for the technology they are teaching is addressed early on in the semester by using real world stories and case studies to capture the interest of all of their students.

3. Group Dynamics in the Classroom

Research studies by American Association of University Women and Children Now have found that most females prefer collaboration and not competition in the classroom. Conversely, most males greatly enjoy competition as a method of learning and play. Many hands-on activities in technology classes are set up as competitions. Robotics for example, regularly uses competitiveness as a methodology of teaching. Teachers should be cognizant of the preference of many girls for collaborative work and should add-in these types of exercises to their classes. Some ways to do this are by having students work in assigned pairs or teams and having a team grade as well as an individual grade. (See Reading 2 on Cooperative Learning.)

Another Mars/Venus dynamic that STEM teachers should be aware of occurs in the lab there male students will usually dominate the equipment and females will take notes or simply watch. Overall, male students have more experience and thus confidence with hands-on lab equipment than their female counterparts. Teachers should create situations to ensure that their female students are spending an equal amount of time in hands-on activities. Some approaches have been: 1) to pair the female students only with each other during labs in the beginning of the class semester so that they get the hands-on time and their confidence increases, putting them in a better position to work effectively with the male students later on, 2) allot a specific time for each student in pair to use the lab equipment and announce when its time to switch and monitor this, and 3) provide feedback to male students who are taking over by letting them know that their partner needs to do the activity as well.

4. Moving Female Students from Passive Learners to Proactive Problem Solvers

The main skill in STEM is problem solving in hands-on lab situations. For reasons already discussed regarding a lack of experience, most girls dont come to STEM classes with these problem-solving skills. Instead, girls often want to be shown how to do things, repeatedly, rather than experimenting in a lab setting to get to the answer. Adding to this issue, many girls fear that they will break the equipment. In contrast, male students will often jump in and manipulate the equipment before being given any instructions by their teacher. Teachers can address this by such activities as: 1) having them take apart old equipment and put it together again, 2) creating scavenger hunt exercises that force them to navigate through menus, and 3) emphasizing that they are learning the problem solving process and that this is equally important to learning the content of the lesson and insisting that they figure out hands-on exercises on their own.

Research has also shown that females tend to engage in STEM activities in a rote, smaller picture way while males use higher order thinking skills to understand the bigger picture and the relationship between the parts. Again, moving female students (and the non-techsavvy student in general) to become problem solvers (versus just understanding the content piece of the STEM puzzle) will move them to use higher order thinking skills in STEM.

Finally, many teachers have reported that many female students will often want to understand how everything relates to each other before they move into action in the lab or move through a lesson plan to complete a specific activity. The female students try to avoid making mistakes along the way and will not only want to read the documentation needed for the lesson, they will often want to read the entire manual before taking any action. In contrast, the male student often needs to be convinced to look at the documentation at all. Boys are not as concerned with making a mistake a long the way as long as what they do ultimately works. The disadvantage for female students is that they often are so worried about understanding the whole picture that they dont move onto the hands-on activity or they dont do it in a timely fashion, so that they are consistently the last ones in the class to finish. Teachers can assist female (and non-tech-savvy) students to move through class material more quickly by providing instruction on how to quickly scan for only the necessary information needed to complete an assignment.

5. Role Models

Since the numbers of women in STEM are still small, girls have very few opportunities to see female role models solving science, technology, engineering or math problems. Teachers should bring female role models into the classroom as guest speakers or teachers, or visit them on industry tours, to send the message to girls that they can succeed in the STEM classroom and careers.

Bibliography

Medina, Afonso, Celso, Helena B.P. Gerson, and Sheryl A. Sorby. Identifying Gender Differences in the 3-D Visualization Skills of Engineering Students in Brazil and in the United States. International Network for Engineering Eucation and Research page. 2 August 2004: http://www.ineer.org/Events/ICEE/papers/193.pdf.

Milto, Elissa, Chris Rogers, and Merredith Portsmore. Gender Differences in Confidence Levels, Group Interactions, and Feelings about Competition in an Introductory Robotics Course. American Society for Engineering Education page. 8 July 2004: http://fie.engrng.pitt.edu/fie2002/papers/1597.pdf.

Fair Play: Violence, Gender and Race in Video Games 2001. Children Now page. 19 August 2004: http://www.childrennow.org/media/video-games/2001/.

Girls and Gaming: Gender and Video Game Marketing, 2000. Children Now page. 17 June 2004: http://www.childrennow.org/media/medianow/mnwinter2001.html.

Tech-Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age. District of Columbia: American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, 2000.

Margolis, Jane and Allan Fisher. Unlocking the Computer Clubhouse: Women in Computer. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.

Taglia, Dan and Kenneth Berry. Girls in Robotics. Online Posting. 16 September 2004: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/roboeducators/.

Cisco Gender Initiative. Cisco Learning Institute. 30 July 2004: http://gender.ciscolearning.org/Strategies/Strategies_by_Type/Index.html.

Donna Milgram is founder and Executive Director of the National Institute for Women in Trades, Technology & Science (IWITTS). She is currently the Principal Investigator of the CalWomenTech Project, a $2 million National Science Foundation grant awarded in April 2006. She was also the Principal Investigator of the WomenTech Project, funded by the National Science Foundation, which had a goal of increasing the number of women enrolled and retained in technology education in three national community college demonstration sites. She led IWITTS's partnership with the Cisco Learning Institute (CLI)/Cisco Gender Initiative. Ms. Milgram produced the interactive teacher training video "School-to-Work: Preparing Young Women for High Skill, High Wage Careers."

Ms. Milgram's recent conference presentations include: the NSF ATE Conference "Recruiting Women to Science, Technology, Engineering & Math" (2004) and California Educating for Careers Conference in 2003.

Additional Resources:

http://www.iwitts.com/

http://www.womentechworld.org/

http://www.womentechstore.com/

posted by jamalvmn  # 2:46 AM 0 comments