Effectiveness in Winning Scholarships January 18, 2009
Posted by jimintriglia in Career Development, Education, Winning Scholarship Strategies.Tags: academics scholarships
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Process, Planning, Strategy and Knowing Oneself Key to Winning Scholarship Dollars
As a life-long learner, I have met college graduates over the course of my academic career that scoffed at the notion of using student loans as a principal means of financing a college education.
These grads would often ask me why I would choose to go into debt through a student loan when there was an abundance of free money available in the form of scholarships and grants?
I had always considered the prospect of winning scholarship as being reserved for a small percentage of students that were either geniuses, athletes, minorities or unique in some other special way that would serve to opt me out.
When I returned to college a few years ago however, I learned during the college admissions process that I automatically qualified for a $500 Pell Grant. It suddenly occurred to me that there was money available to help students finance their education.
Could I really finance most of my college education through winning scholarships and pursuing educational grants? I decided to dedicate some time and find out if what I had been told over the years was indeed true.
In researching the topic of winning scholarships, I came across several good books that addressed the subject of applying for scholarships. While these books addressed certain parts of the scholarship winning process, none of them presented any kind of a strategy, plan or process that addressed how to go about winning scholarships.
In reading about students that had won scholarships over the years, it was apparent that they had both a defined strategy and process that they used to win college scholarships. Simply applying for scholarships willy-nilly did not appear to be the strategy that these students used to win scholarships of any financial significance. There was growing evidence that a “shoot-from-the-hip” approach to winning scholarships was an excellent investment in frustration, as well as a waste of valuable time and energy for students and parents alike.
Along the lines of having a proven systematic process and strategic plan to
effectively winning scholarships, one series of books stood alone from the rest. The author, Benjamin Kaplan, financed most of his Harvard education at age 21, by winning two dozen merit-based scholarships totaling $90,000. His national acclaim and testimonials by parents and students that had used his winning scholarship approach supported his claim that many more students could finance their college education through winning scholarships.
In reviewing Kaplan’s “10 Day Scholarship Success” plan present in audio book format, his book “How to Go To College for Almost Free” and accompanying website Scholarshipcoach.com, several key requirements essential for winning scholarships were apparent. Some of the key areas that addressed an effective winning scholarship strategy include:
- Investing a significant amount of time to discover one’s career interests, unique talents and skills, before beginning the process of researching and applying for scholarships.
- Investing time to learn how to organize information needed to launch an effective winning scholarship campaign.
- Realizing that being effective in winning scholarships is a process that requires advance planning, organizational skills and a good deal of patience.
In applying Kaplan’s approach to winning scholarships, I discovered that his approach provides a systematic means for students to discover their true career interests, strengths and unique talents. The benefits alone gained by embarking on his winning scholarship journey can be greater than the actual winning of a scholarship itself, as the so much self-knowledge and career planning clarity is gained by a student during the course of using his process.
Kaplan’s personal style and his approach to winning scholarships resonates well with high school students. His strategy translates equally well for adult learners and even middle school students and parents that want to get an early start funding their college education.
For college-bound students that endeavor to minimize their college education debt by employing a winning scholarship strategy, Ben Kaplan’s winning scholarship books are a must-read.
Land that Dream Job: It’s a Matter of Time (Part 1) January 17, 2009
Posted by jimintriglia in Career Development, Career Management, Job Search Strategies.add a comment
One of the interesting statistics that makes headlines periodically is the high percentage of people that are unhappy with their job. I’ve read some sources that claim upwards of ninety percent of people dislike their job, the people that they work with, or both.
Over the course of my career, I’ve kept company with the ten percent who love what they do to earn a living. In a series of articles, I”d like to share an approach I and many others use to land that “dream job” that you may be seeking. Wouldn’t it be great to join the ten percent of us who love what they do and look forward to going to work each and every morning?
The secret to landing that dream job is to first invest some time in understanding who you are, what your needs are, and what basically makes you happy. There are excellent resources available to assist careerists and job seekers with the task of self-analysis. Many of these tools are free or low cost; I’ll highlight some of these resources in future posts.
The first step, however, is to free-up some of your available time to begin a self-assessment.
You say, however, that you have no free time? The key to solving the time challenge is to learn how you are choosing to spend what time you have available each day of the week. What you find respective of how you invest your time will likely surprise you.
When I returned to school full-time to complete my undergraduate degree, most of my classmates were very busy managing careers, jobs, families and the like. How would we all find the twenty or so hours per week that we would need over the next two years to complete our academic studies?
My first professor challenged that we could all free-up at least 20 hours per week if we considered what was important to us meeting our goals vs. activities that were trivial respective of our life pursuits. To prove his point, our first class assignment was to keep an hourly log of how we spent our time for the next seven days.
At the end of the week we reviewed our time logs. Most of us were amazed to find that we in fact were hardly making the best use of our available time. Many daily activities were outright wasteful, indulging in habits that provided little or no support to changing our life for the better. It was time for a change.
Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results. –Rita Mae Brown
So, rather than spend a Saturday afternoon watching a favorite sports team,
the sports fans in our class decided to dedicate that time to study. Some balked, to which my professor asked whether they were choosing to be spectators in life rather than be on the field as managers, coaches and players. Food for thought.
Other classmates decided to begin their workday at 5:30am rather than sleeping-in until 7:30am every morning. The extra awake time gained each week (2 hours per day x 5 days a work week = 10 hours per work week gained) would by itself contribute half to the total amount of time needed to complete our undergraduate course of study (2o hours per seven day calendar week).
Changing your habits to free-up additional time needed to make changes in your life is the first hurdle that many job-seekers have a tough time clearing.
Those who are truly serious about making significant changes in their life will find the time that they need to take the next step in the process. You can start now by keeping a log of how you spend your time during the course of the next seven days. Give it a shot– what do you have to lose (maybe that job that you hate)?
Challenge yourself to change self-indulging habits that may be satisfying in the short term and also stealing from you valuable time that you can use to make significant changes in your life.
Start an activity time log now and take the first step to joining the ranks of the ten percent that love their jobs and the people that they work with.
The Practice of Combining Job Roles in Tough Times January 11, 2009
Posted by jimintriglia in Career Management, Management Strategies.Tags: management employment job roles
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When I began my career as a business analyst, a mentor cautioned me to carefully consider the nature of my resources before making changes to a business process flow or the people that manage it.
Specifically, he was talking about the people behind the processes. Adding a resource like a color copier to a business process tends to have a linear impact on the workflow capacity. The same is not necessarily true of adding or subtracting people from a workflow.
“It takes a women nine months time to deliver a baby; two women assigned to the same task cannot have a baby in four and half months time. Remember that.”
I did.
Some things just take time. It doesn’t matter the number of resources that are assigned to some activities and tasks. A certain amount of time is required for successful completion.
While this concept may be obvious to most business owners and managers, tough economic times often give birth to staff reductions.
What sometimes follows on the heels of a staff reduction are Frankenstein-like redesigned job descriptions that combine multiple job roles. These job descriptions often defy common sense respective of the nature of professions and the actual time needed to fulfill multiple job duties.
Such job opportunities often go unfilled as professionals 1) cannot qualify in all of the knowledge and skill areas, or 2) realize there is not enough time in the day to accomplish all of the listed responsibilities.
So what’s an alternative to creating the unachievable and unfillable job description? I’ll post some alternatives strategies in a future update of this post. Stay tuned.
Manager Tools: Learn to Be a Better Manager January 8, 2009
Posted by jimintriglia in Career Development, Education, Job Search Management, Job Search Strategies, Management Strategies, News & FYI.Tags: business, Education, Management
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Like many busy professionals, I carry an inexpensive MP3 player loaded with audio books and podcasts to stay abreast of business management and career best practices. Much of this kind of content is freely available and aggregated by content management platforms such as iTunes.
One of the best sources of free self-improvement podcasts is the award-winning Manager Tools podcasts, produced by Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne. Mike and Mark have produced an awesome collection of podcasts for management professionals covering a broad range of topics.
The Manager Tools podcasts are not just for management professionals. The Career Tools podcasts are an excellent source of career management best practices. Career professionals can benefit significantly from career management strategies, tactics and tips provide by Mike and Mark.
Stop by the Manager Tools website and share in the wealth of information that Mike and Mark have assembled. Check out the Community Forums and Recommended Books section of the website for additional resources that will improve your management skills and professional career.
JIRA: A Robust and Capable Workflow Management Tool January 7, 2009
Posted by jimintriglia in Business Process Improvement, Internet/Web Services, Management Strategies, Workflow Management.Tags: BPM, busines process management, JIRA, workflow
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One aspect of managing the development of a software application is tracking and reporting of customer issues related to the use of the software. While some organizations accomplish the task of software issue management using nothing more than a simple sprea
dsheet, there may come a time when a spreadsheet proves to be an ineffective and inefficient tool for issue management.
Atlassian’s JIRA is a robust and capable issue management system that provides managers with a powerful issue management platform. One of the key benefits of JIRA is the extent that the default workflow can be customized.
In working with the Enterprise edition, I’ve been able to customize JIRA to satisfy an organization’s need for a mission-critical software defect, software development, work request, change request, system deployment, help desk request and project management systems. JIRA’s fully customizable workflow enables me to custom-fit JIRA to any business process involving manual or automated systems.
Atlassian provides a 30 Day free trial of JIRA and also offers free use of JIRA for nonprofit organizations through it’s Community and Open Source Licensing.
The package may be installed on an organizations servers and managed in-house; smaller organizations can take advantage of JIRA’s hosted solution.
To see JIRA in action, visit Atlassian’s online JIRA development and issue management systems. You can also visit one of many customer JIRA issue management systems that are live on the Web.
