myUface Blog

In the “Academic Questions” section of the myUface application, question #4 asks, “Please describe your professional or career plans (300 words or less).”  Many students struggle to answer this question.  Here are a few hints about completing this section of the application:

1. You do not have to know 100% what your career will be. Most students aren’t certain what they want to do as a career, and that’s fine.  Tell us what you’re interested in as of now.
2. Your career plans should fit with the field of study in which you’re interested. If you listed “Physics” as the field you’d like to study, and then you write “I’d like to be a poet” under you career plans, it will seem a little odd.  So make sure that the fields of study you’ve chosen link to your career plans.  Or, if they don’t explain why they don’t.
3. Be concise. 300 words isn’t a lot.  This isn’t the place to tell a story.  Use simple language to tell us what you’d like to do.
4. It’s OK to dream. If you hope to be the president of your country one day, tell us!  Don’t be afraid to share your ambitions.  On the other hand, if you have modest goals, that’s fine too.  With this question we want an honest idea of where you see yourself ten or twenty years from now.

GO BACK TO FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Today I want to talk about the importance of completing your myUface.com profile as soon as you can.  You want to get your myUface.com profile finished quickly for three main reasons:

1. First, and most importantly, the quicker you finish your myUface.com profile, the quicker we can evaluate your strengths and weaknesses, and share your profile with the appropriate universities.  U.S. universities will soon be inundated with thousands of applications from students all over the world.  If you can get your information to them before the rush, you’ve got an advantage.
2. Second, if you get your profile done quickly, you have time to get feedback from myUface and from U.S. universities.  Let’s say, for example, that you have a poor essay, but that everything else about your application is great.  If you are able to get us your profile now, there’s a good chance we’ll hear that from a few universities – and we can share that with you in time for you to make changes and resubmit your profile.  If you wait too long, you won’t have the chance to have that feedback.
3. Third, if you finish your profile early, you can relax, cross it off your list, and do fun things elsewhere!!!

Please, work on those profiles!  It helps you, and it helps us.

As always, if you need help with your profile or if you have any questions, e-mail us.

Let’s conclude our series on essay writing by reiterating a main point:

If you remember one thing, remember this: every college application essay is essentially asking you the same thing.   They may ask the question in different ways, but what they really want to know is this:

“Hello International Student, can you please tell us about yourself?”

So when you’re preparing to write your essay, writing your essay, or editing your essay, ask yourself, “Am I telling these people about myself?”

• If you’re worried about what you “should” say, your’e not telling them about yourself.
• If you’re spending hours in a thesaurus or a dictionary, looking for “impressive” words, you’re not telling them about yourself.
• If you’re listening to a “professional” essay writer, you’re not telling them about yourself.

Ask yourself, “What is unique about me?”  And then ask yourself, “How do I answer this essay question in a way that shows them how I’m unique?”

And that will almost certainly lead to a great essay.

Good Luck!

Posts in this Series

1. Tell Us About Yourself: Final Advice for Essay Writing (This post)
2. Should You Pay To Have Your Essay Edited? - 01 Oct
3. The Greatest Editing Trick For College Application Essays - 29 Sep
4. How To Edit Your Essay - 28 Sep
5. The "What They Want to Hear" Mistake - 17 Sep
6. Know Your Reader, Part Four - 16 Sep
7. Know Your Reader, Part Three - 15 Sep
8. Know Your Reader, Part Two - 14 Sep
9. Know Your Reader, Part One - 13 Sep
10. Listen to an Admissions Officer Discuss Essays - 11 Sep
11. How to Write an Essay for University Applications - 09 Sep

Sponsored Programs Offer Students the Chance to Study in the U.S. – For Free!

If it’s Fall, it must be time to apply for a sponsored program!

Fall is a season of change. The carefree days of Summer give way to more serious thoughts about preparing for the future (both short and long term). Fall brings with it fantastic opportunities around the world for students interested in studying the U.S. or elsewhere. In many countries, recruitment has begun for programs that provide 100% funding to study on short or long term programs in high school, community colleges, undergraduate programs and graduate schools.

Some of our favorites include:

1. The FLEX program for high school students (funded by the U.S. State Department and administered by American Councils for International Education) -
2. The Youth Exchange and Study (YES) program for high school students
3. The Eurasia Undergraduate Program (funded by the U.S. State Department) for non-degree programs in U.S. two and four year colleges
4. The Kosovo – America Education Fund supporting graduate study in the US for Kosova’s next generation of leaders.

Besides these opportunities to study in the US, a little research uncovers many scholarships that fund study in your home region. Some of our favorites include:

1. The US-Central Asia Education Foundation (supports business study in Central Asia at KIMEP and AUCA).
2. The Bolashak Scholarships for young leaders in Kazakhstan to study in numerous countries overseas (including the US).
3. The “Light” Foundation scholarships in Armenia
4. Chevening Scholarships to study in the U.K. (that’s right! myUface will even discuss scholarships to “competitor” countries! Why? Because they may be the right fit for you and that’s our goal…to find the BEST education opportunity for our network).

The list above is by no means exhaustive. However, it does give a glimpse in to the numerous types of sponsored programs that exist for motivated students. myUface is here to help in this process, but it does begin with you! An now that Fall is here, it’s time to get started!

I wanted to share this utterly unique, very interesting article on preparing for standardized tests in general, and the SAT in particular.  I’m not sure I agree with everything the author says, but some of her points ring true.  It’s written for parents, but I bet it’d be useful for students as well.

Here’s a no-nonsense piece of advice that everyone should listen to:

If there’s a consensus on anything, it’s that your child doesn’t want to spend valuable time reading the instructions for the first time on the day of the test. Before you pay for sample tests in a room at a prep center, or proctored by a tutor, consider a few free sample tests at home. If a student’s reading comprehension isn’t strong enough to make sense of the instructions, test-prep is probably not going to turn him into a star.

In other words, before you even think about preparing for tests with books or classes, go ahead and take a few practice exams, and see how you do.  Knowing how the test works is incredibly important, and the more you practice, the better you’ll do.  What’s more, you can usually find a number of practice tests for free.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karen-stabiner/the-college-insider-admis_b_301352.html

You may have noticed that there are a number of services on the internet that will edit – or even write – your essay for you.  For a hefty fee of course.

So, should you ever pay to have your essay edited?

The good essay editing services can help you improve your essay by helping you check for mistakes and offering suggestions about what words to use.  However, you should not expect an essay editing service to be able to make a fair essay into a great one.  Why not?  Because, as we’ve been saying over the course of this series, a great essay is all about you. No editor is going to know you as well as you know yourself.

When you pay someone to edit your essay, the best case scenario is that they’ll clean up your work a little bit – helpful, certainly, but not vital.  The worst case scenario is that they’ll rewrite your essay completely, with the idea of telling a story that admissions officers “want” to hear.  As we know by now, that’s a mistake.

So, although it’s tempting to hire someone to do the hard work of writing and / or editing your essay, the chance that they’re going to help you say something that’s unique and positive about you is very, very small.

All things considered, there are better ways to spend your money.

Posts in this Series

1. Tell Us About Yourself: Final Advice for Essay Writing - 08 Oct
2. Should You Pay To Have Your Essay Edited? (This post)
3. The Greatest Editing Trick For College Application Essays - 29 Sep
4. How To Edit Your Essay - 28 Sep
5. The "What They Want to Hear" Mistake - 17 Sep
6. Know Your Reader, Part Four - 16 Sep
7. Know Your Reader, Part Three - 15 Sep
8. Know Your Reader, Part Two - 14 Sep
9. Know Your Reader, Part One - 13 Sep
10. Listen to an Admissions Officer Discuss Essays - 11 Sep
11. How to Write an Essay for University Applications - 09 Sep