One of the high school kids that I've been working with since the summer of 2009 got rejected from UW and since he was putting together his appeal statement, he asked me for a letter of recommendation.
I could write about him all right, but the feeling and the weight that the effect that the letter could have really got to me yesterday. I really hope that his appeal is strong enough and that the letter I wrote helps him out, even if just a little bit.
In any case, I'll be taking him to see some other schools pretty soon, and hopefully he can fall in love with another school like he did UW.
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http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v129/ukealii50/kylo.jpg - Thanks uke!
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/829/07kyloforce.png - Thanks Diyosa!
You can appeal rejection from a college? This is news to me.
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"Monads are easy. Think of them as burritos."
UW allows people to appeal their rejection, but the odds of it going through successfully are pretty low. I haven't had the heart to tell the student this.
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http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v129/ukealii50/kylo.jpg - Thanks uke!
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/829/07kyloforce.png - Thanks Diyosa!
That seems like a terribly time-consuming process for ultimately little benefit (for the university).
But yeah, I wrote a rec letter for a buddy of mine for a Jesuit High School Teaching fellowship thing, and it was pretty weird. Like the sense that something you're doing will directly impact the path of somebody's life, and having no idea what the conventions of writing a rec letter are (since they're often sealed and such).
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
Oddly enough, the first letter of recommendation I wrote was while I was a senior in high school. My sophomore English instructor was applying for some grant or award at the time, and she requested that I write her a letter of recommendation. It was truly a surreal experience, as weeks prior she had written my letter of recommendation to the college I eventually decided to attend.
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Everything I have would be enough for someone else, but I want more.
Days Left: 268
Apparently writing letters of rec has become something that people think that I'm good at. I wrote another one for one of the students that I mentor for a scholarship, and now a different student that I mentor hit me up for one for a position that he's applying for. And a different friend was hitting me up for interview skills practice, which is actually more up my alley, since I got all that human resources/interviewing experience last year.
I'm a bastion of professionalism skills.
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http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v129/ukealii50/kylo.jpg - Thanks uke!
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/829/07kyloforce.png - Thanks Diyosa!
That's pretty cool Kylo. Shame on me if you've already told us... but what are you going into? Career-wise?
Right now I work for a state- and federally-funded outreach program that targeted kids in 7th grade in rural and/or low-income communities in order to get them ready for college. All of of the students currently in the program are all seniors in high school and getting ready for that last step. For my actual work, I go out to the schools that these students attend and teach workshops on college readiness. In the fall and early winter, I taught mostly about writing good personal statements and essays for scholarships; more recently, I've been doing presentations on the actual transition from life in high school to being a college student, and also the effects it can have on the student's family. Despite the potentially very long drive times (I've twice now driven 5 hours to get to the school where I was teaching), I really enjoy the work and it's really rewarding.
On weekends I volunteer for a group that does similar work, except this group mainly targets Asians living in Seattle and the surrounding communities. I think I connect with the students better in this program due to similar cultural background, and I see the students much more regularly face to face, so I'm pretty emotionally invested with them.
In the long term, I think that high school and student outreach is something I could do, but my real goal is to get into student development and/or academic advising at the college level, particularly for freshly admitted or "new on campus" college students. I actually did a lot of work with this in the later years of my college career, and it's something that I really could see myself doing for a long time. But you typically need advanced degrees for that kind of work, and I'm not really sure if I'm ready to go 'back to school' (even though I've been working on a university campus since graduating back in June.)
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http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v129/ukealii50/kylo.jpg - Thanks uke!
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/829/07kyloforce.png - Thanks Diyosa!