School of Natural and Computational Science

PREP class working on Personal Statements

awyatt — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:51:55 +0000

Students enrolled in PREP 1105 participate in a curriculum designed to help them explore career options in medical and allied health fields as well as to hone their skills for a successful matriculation into graduate school or post-baccalaureate certification programs.

They have been working on a key part of any application process, the Personal Statement.

Students developed a personal statement over several weeks. Today, each group formed a “selection panel”, reading and scoring the statements.

Dr. Sharp handed out statements, identified only with a number, and scoring rubrics. Students were asked to study the statements and consider how well they met the following criteria:

Were the directions followed?
Was the statement well formatted and easy to read?
Did the essay “hook” the reader with interesting, personal, or unique content?
Did the essay provide depth and detail with the selected experiences used for support?
Did the essay evoke a mental image of the applicant’s personality?
Was the essay free of grammatical errors and in standard English?
Did the essay employ a formal writing style?
Did the applicant demonstrate that he or she has a realistic knowledge of the chosen profession?

Students were encouraged to generate constructive criticism (and to have a thick skin!) Essay scores will be returned soon and students will revise their statements accordingly.

A very useful exercise!

AITP Students attend Region 3 Student Conference

awyatt — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:31:14 +0000

Candice Sorley and Jon Thomas Pierce attended the AITP Region 3 Student Conference, hosted by the UT Dallas AITP Student Chapter and the AITP Dallas Chapter, Oct 22-24, 2009. They competed in two contests: “Applications Programming” and “Microsoft Office Solutions”. They also attended presentations on “Successful Interview Techniques” by the CIO of USAA, “Windows 7″ by a Microsoft Evangelist (Really, that’s what his business card says!), “The Non-Death of Mainframes” by IBM, and “Career Management” by Argo Inc. The students and faculty sponsor (Mr. Rich Brozovic) enjoyed a three-on-one lunch in the campus cafeteria on Friday with the Microsoft Evangelist. McMurry attendees also got to meet the National President of AITP, Deborah Lovell, who happens to be from Region 3 and the Dallas Chapter.

Ride the Wave!

awyatt — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:08:02 +0000

Alicia Wyatt (Computer Science), Scott Fritz (Computer Services), and Chris Andrews (English) are some of the newest users of Google Wave. After having received the coveted invites, all three of these McMurry employees are now Waving with other beta testers across the globe.

What is Google Wave? Wave is a product that aims to bring together streams of conversation, text, video, and images either real-time or asynchronously. It can be used for simple messaging, for an involved conversation, or even as a wiki-type collaborative document. Everyone who is a member of the wave can edit any part of the wave, and you can review the entire process with a “playback” feature.

http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/

Fritz envisions using it as a class note-taking tool–and it could be group notetaking, with each person capturing different parts of the lecture or adding additional resources later. Wyatt and Andrews would like to use it with students. For example, each group might work on a separate wave, adding detail from any place at any time from any browser enabled device (think smart phone). When the material is gathered, then the group sits down (physically or virutally) and edits it into a unit of knowledge.

Developers are already building robots, gadgets, and extensions that you can use to enhance your wave.

Currently, each person invited to use Wave can, in turn, invite 8 more. Keep an eye on your inbox!