myUface Blog

We want to update our current users and welcome our new users, and this short podcast seems like the perfect way to do it!

When international students learn about what we’re doing at myUface, and learn that it’s free, they often ask a simple question:  “Do universities pay myUface?”

The answer is no, they do not.  In fact, as of now, myUface is free for EVERYBODY – free for students, free for universities, free for people who simply want to learn.  There’s not a single service we charge for.

We don’t charge universities for one simple reason:  we want as many universities as possible to come to myUface and learn about our great students.  If we charged them fees, that would keep some of them away, which would lessen the chances of you finding a great university.

Everything at myUface is free.  We like to think of it as a community of students and universities, more than a service or a product.

SEE MORE FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Dear blog readers and myUface users,

A quick note today:  we’re opening a new page on the blog, entitled “Frequently Asked Questions.”  This will be the place where you can visit to learn the answers to common questions about myUface.  Over time, this page will grow to include every possible bit of information about myUface.com.

If you have a question of your own, don’t be shy!  Submit it here, and we’ll answer it on the Frequently Asked Questions page.

Hello, most loyal blog readers.  I am back from a trip to the Pacific Northwest (a very, very cool place to live or study) and am re-energized.    I’m ready to fire out a long string of daily blog posts here, so I hope you’re ready for some advice.

A few quick notes:

• You may notice the new, sleek look of the blog.  This is the first part of a general redesign of the website, which will culminate in the official opening of the myUface application this Thursday at 09:00 A.M. Eastern Time.  We are really, really sorry it took so long, but we wanted to make sure we have all the technical capacities in place before we opened it up.  Actually, it’s open right now at www.myuface.com, but there are some kinks that are still being ironed out, so if you use it expect some rough patches.  Official opening this Thursday.
• Over the next three months, this blog will concentrate on the following five topics:  first, questions about how to use the myUface application. Second, advice for writing essays to universities. Third, advice about preparing your application – not only on myUface, but to universities.  Fourth, continued information on US states. And finally, advice about preparing for and taking standardized tests.
• It is that time of year – time to get serious about applying to universities.  We are going to be ready with our online application, and also with TONS of advice.  Our advice will NOT be only about myUface.  It will also be about preparing your applications for individual universities.  Why?  Because our main goal is to get students into U.S. universities. myUface is one powerful tool for students, but we want to help all students, regardless of whether or not they end up using myUface.  So please, visit us often.  Start taking the application process seriously.  Don’t put off for tomorrow what you could do today.  AND ASK US QUESTIONS.

Alright?  It’s time to get working, people! Ready, Set, GO!

Great question today about myUface.  A student wrote to ask when the site would be fully operational.  He notes that we had mentioned before that it might be ready by the middle of July.  So, he wonders, what’s going on?

Great question.  Right now at myUface we are focused on two things:

1)  Completing the site so that it’s useful for students and easy to use.

2)  Reaching out to universities to partner with us.

I’ll be totally honest:  both are taking longer than we’d planned.  But not so much longer than we planned.  I would say you can expect to see a fully functional site sometime in the next few weeks.  And sometime soon after than you can expect universities to begin using myUface to meet international students.

In the meantime, please, keep reading the blog, keep researching universities, and keep thinking about your career goals.

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.