myUface Blog

According to the Open Doors report, there are approximately 623,805 international students at U.S. institutions of higher learning. That’s 3.5% of the total student body, and more than the entire population of Wyoming.  And for every student that is studying in the U.S., there are many more who want to study in the U.S.

You may have heard about the increase in students going to study in other countries, such as Britain or Australia. You may have even been contacted by a university in a country other than the U.S., and they may have told you something like this: “Yes, the U.S. used to be the top destination for international students, but they’re on the decline. The newest hotspot for international students is _______.”

Now, it is the case that other destinations have increased in popularity over the years.  But the United States remains the top destination for international students. And far from decreasing, over the past decade the number of students in the U.S. has vastly increased, from 514,723 in 1998/9 to 623,805 this past year.

So, there is no doubt about it – the U.S. is the country of choice for international students.

But it’s worth pausing for a moment and asking a simple question: why?

This is obviously an important question if you’re planning to spend four years of your life studying in a foreign country. Over the next few days, I’ll seek to answer this question as honestly as I possibly can, providing you with both the benefits and the disadvantages of a university education in the United States.

Let me say right from the outset that I am not exactly a neutral evaluator. As a product of the U.S. university system, and as someone who has spent a fair amount of time working with it, I am what you might call a partisan of the U.S. higher educational system. I happen to think that it represents the best available option for a majority of international students. But I am also aware of its shortcomings, and I promise to present them to you in as unbiased a light as possible. I hope that, by reading this series of posts, you’ll gain a fuller understanding of what would await you at a U.S. university.

For Your Consideration:

What’s your impression?  Are U.S. universities a good place to study?

SERIES:  Why study in the U.S.?

• April 20 – Introduction
• April 21 – Diversity at U.S. campuses
• April 22 – Value of U.S. degrees
• April 23 – The Facilities
  
• April 24 – Practical focus of U.S. education
• April 25 – Variety of U.S. programs
• April 26 – The supposed disadvantages of study in the U.S.: visas
  
• April 27 - The supposed disadvantages of study in the U.S.: cost
  
• April 28 - Some real disadvantages of study in the U.S.:  it might not help in your profession
• April 29 – Some real disadvantages of study in the U.S.: will you fit in “going back?”
• April 30 – Other disadvantages
• May 1 – So, should you study in the U.S.?
  

Over the course of my career I’ve had the chance to participate in a lot of online forums, blogs, etc. with international students. And I’ve noticed something disturbing: in general (and obviously there are numerous exceptions), international students don’t seem to like leaving comments or questions. They like access to information, but they seem hesitant to challenge that information or express their opinion of that information (again, with many, many individual exceptions).

This blog just has to be different.  We have lofty goals here. I’ve looked around on the internet and found a lot of information for international students, but none of it seems quite complete. I want to create a site that is complete – that addresses the total range of concerns for international students. But in order to do this I absolutely need your help. Please comment on the blog. Tell me what posts you like, what posts you don’t like, which of my opinions you think are wrong, what I could do to make the blog better, etc. Argue, debate, questions, discuss. Because a blog is so much more than its author – it’s the entire community of readers that makes a blog special.

If you don’t want to leave a comment, for whatever reason, that’s fine – but remember you can always e-mail me your comments, questions and suggestions as well, at blog@myUface.com.

Please take advantage of this blog as a resource. I will always try to answer your questions!

OK, now that we’ve said that, let’s get to work.

So this blog is about helping you, an international student, find and get into a U.S. University.

That is a big, big subject. There are literally hundreds of areas we need to cover. That’s why this is a daily blog, because we have so much to cover, and we’ll need a lot of time to do it. Don’t expect all of your questions to be answered by one post or even one months of posts. But I will promise you that, over time, we’ll get to all the important issues facing internationals students.

At the outset, I’ve identified seventeen (17!) broad categories which 99% of our posts will fall into. For those new to blogs, you can view all the articles for any one category by clicking on the links to the right of the page.

The seventeen (17!)categories are:

1. Should I Study in the U.S.? Why study in the United States? What’s unique about the higher educational system in the U.S.? What are the downsides?
2. Choosing a Program – What kind of programs are available? What distinguishes them from one another? What are the different fields available? What program / field is the best?
3. Choosing a University – How do I find the right University for me? What’s up with these rankings I keep hearing about?
4. The Application – what does an application to a U.S. university look like? What information do I need to fill one out?
5. Essay Writing – How do I write good essays?
6. Test preparation – What are the best strategies for getting good scores? Do I need to be really, really worried about tests?
7. Interviews – Do I have to have an interview to get into a U.S. university? If so, what should I expect? How can I do well?
8. Extracurriculars- How do you highlight your non-academic work on an application? Is work experience important?
9. Facing Failure – You probably won’t get in everywhere. How should you deal with failure?
10. Money Help – help understand the system and the processes for international financial aid
11. myUface – this is where I’ll cover new products and services offered by myUface to help you find and get into a U.S. university.
12. Success! – here we’ll share information about successes – both personal and institutional.
13. Welcome to the U.S. – what are the cultural differences between the US and other nations? What makes the U.S. unique?
14. Visas – information about the visa system and process
15. Higher Ed in the U.S. – what are some of the peculiarities of the U.S. higher-educational system?
16. Mailbag – each week, on Friday, I’ll answer questions from my mailbag
17. The Rest of It – although this blog is about international students and studying in the U.S., we are all open-minded, broad-souled individuals, who have other interests besides visa regulations. Anything that doesn’t “fit” into the subject of the blog, but which is nonetheless interesting, shall go here.

Month to month we’ll cover each of these categories. However, I do want to mention that certain months we’re going to spend more time on certain topics than others. For example, in December, when readers are rushing to finish their essays, you can expect more material on essay writing.

So we’ve covered what this blog is, who I am, and what this blog will be about. We’re ready to start.

In yesterday’s inaugural post I mentioned a brief background. Today I want to expand on that, giving you a more detailed picture of the author of the blog you’re reading. This material will always be available by following the “Biography” link at the right side of this page.

Again, my name is Nathan Truitt, and at myUface I am primarily responsible for Marketing and Student Outreach. In other words, it’s my job to find students interested in studying in the U.S. and to introduce them to the powerful tool that is myUface.com.

I came to this position via a long, circuitous path. I grew up in many different places in the United States. I was born in Utah, spent most of my childhood in Colorado (with brief stops in California and New York), went to high school in Boston, and college in Los Angeles (at Pomona College). In college I studied English literature and Classics and I prepared myself for what I imagined to be an eventual career as an academic. During my senior year, however, I became a little tired of the life of being a student, and so I decided to take some time off – at least a year – to experience the “real world” outside of the friendly confines of the university.

I ended up joining the Peace Corps and serving as an a Teacher of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) volunteer in Chardjou, Turkmenistan (and here let me give a shout out to School #2, where I worked). As someone whose only foreign travels up until that point had been to Europe, I was completely overwhelmed (in a good way) by my experience in Turkmenistan. The people were incredibly hospitable, and the culture, though completely different from what I was used to, was vibrant and full of age-old traditions. In Turkmenistan I had the opportunity to interact with tons of talented students, many of whom dreamt of studying in the United States. Through these students, I had my first exposure to the intimidating edifice that is the U.S. university admissions process.

After Peace Corps I stayed in Central Asia, moving next door to Uzbekistan, and working with an educational non-profit organization that provided scholarships for students to study in the U.S. In implementing the scholarship, I got to see the admissions process from the other side: our organization was responsible for recruiting talented applicants and then judging their applications. I learned how such competitions are organized and judged, and I gained an understanding of the criteria that educational institutions in the U.S. use in order to make decisions about international students.

Over the next three or four years, I stayed with the same non-profit, traveling to different countries: Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, and others. Everywhere I went I met very talented students who wanted to study in the U.S. but who were confused by the process of finding and getting into U.S. universities.

Two years ago, my wife and I moved back to the United States. I still work at the same non-profit, this time on yet another aspect of the higher educational process: the funding side. I help our organization raise money to provide scholarships to international students. This has given me yet another perspective on the system of higher education here in the States.

Although I love my work, our organization offers very limited support for undergraduate studies. Keeping in mind the thousands of students I’d met and interviewed, who wanted to get their bachelor’s degree in the United States, I was always looking for programs to help them get into U.S. universities.

That’s why I’m very happy to be working with myUface. The myUface team all have similar stories to my own, We’ve all spent time overseas, where we’ve met talented, dedicated students who want to come to the United States. myUface is our attempt to create a powerful, online, and easy-to-understand tool to help precisely those students achieve their dreams.

So, that’s how I’m here, writing this. But enough about me. This blog is about you – and more specifically, your desire to study in the U.S. Tomorrow – and every day after that – we’ll turn to helping you achieve that goal.

Welcome to the myUface.com blog, where we will strive to provide you with all the information you’ll need to identify and gain admission to educational programs in the United States.

My name is Nathan Truitt, and I’ve been working with international students from different parts of the world for about a decade. I’ve also had the chance to work with university admissions staff on a variety of interview and selection panels. I hope my varied experience will allow me to:

• display a solid understanding of what you, international students, are looking for in the U.S., and what challenges you face in coming to study in America
• help you understand the way the admissions process work at U.S. universities, and give you some advice on how to navigate the process successfully.

Starting today, April 20, 2009, I will be writing at least one post a day, every day, without exception. Over the course of the coming months and years, I hope to work together with you, the readers of this blog, to create the most comprehensive resource on the web for international students. To do this, I’ll need your help. It’s not enough for me to write my own opinions and share my own information – I need to know what you want to learn about, and what information you need. For that reason, I strongly encourage you to make comments on the blog or e-mail me your questions. You can always e-mail me at blog@myuface.com. I welcome any and all questions about the U.S. admissions process, and I will do my best to provide quality answers in a short amount of time.

You do not need to use myUface in order to read this blog. However, I would strongly encourage you to pre-register for a free myUface account, for two, simple reasons:

• it’s free.
• it’s useful.

That’s a sufficient introduction to out first post. Over the next two posts, I will more fully introduce myself and the subject matter I will be covering in this daily blog.