myUface Blog

One thing that bears repeating:  don’t procrastinate.  No, really.  Don’t.

Many international students fall into the trap of thinking, Well, I have soooooo much time before applications to U.S. universities are due, I really don’t need to worry about them now. As our Summer timeline showed, however, there are things you should be doing right now in order to get ready for the application process.  The more you put those things off, the more you procrastinate, the more difficult it’s going to be to prepare a competitive application.

We know, however, that it’s not an easy thing to “just stop procrastinating.”  Procrastination is a psychological condition that “can be a persistent and debilitating disorder in some people, causing significant psychological disability and dysfunction.” Overcoming procrastination takes effort and willpower.

To help those of you who have a disposition towards procrastination, I’ve found what I consider to be five excellent anti-procrastination resources on the web.  These sites may  not solve your procrastination, but they’ll at least  increase your awareness of the problem.

1. The procrastination research group offers a ton of resources about procrastination.  Highlights include an online comic about procrastination, a collection of academic research that’s been done on procrastination, and a quick self-help guide.
2. Freedomain radio offers a unique and somewhat inspirational lecture about the root causes of procrastination on You Tube.  Although this is not a medical or psychological opinion, it makes sense in a weird kind of way, and the “solution” it offers to procrastination is worth hearing.
3. If you want a one-page, no-nonsense “how to” guide to overcoming procrastination, you can’t do much better than this, from getmoredone.com.
4. Want a solution to a pressing life problem?  Chances are, you should talk to Oprah.  In this piece from Oprah’s magazine, Martha Beck extracts several Dos and Donts from a book, “The Knowing-Doing Gap.”  As you might imagine, these tips focus on how to get from knowing we need to do something to actually doing something about it.
5. This article focuses on how the internet fuels our ability to procrastinate, and gives us 25 specific actions we can take to reduce the internet’s negative influence in this regard.

If you feel that you really have a procrastination problem, and need more information than is available on the web, you might think about buying a book.  I mentioned “The Knowing-Doing Gap” above.  It’s not specifically about procrastination, it should be noted.  A book that is about procrastination, and which is popular enough to have gone through a number of editions, is “Do it Now.”

One important note here:  although you should look into these and other resources if you have a problem with procrastination, realize that spending a lot of time reading about procrastination can in itself be a form of procrastination!!! So don’t overdo it.

Now . . . get to work!

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.