Category — Grad School Resources

We browsed the web looking to build a solid list of lists. Here’s what we found when it comes to the best free online tools and software for graduate students. Not all the tools are directly related to research or grad school. Many of them are. Nonetheless, we found that all of these lists are extremely useful.

• The Best Online Research Apps
• Free College Software Guide
• Top 10 Research Tools
• Free alternatives to proprietary software
• Top Web Tools for College Students
• 69 Free or Open Source Tools For Students
• Top Online & Research Tools
• Wikipedia’s List of Open Source Software
• 15 Open Source Tools For Art & Design Students
• 12 Tools For Researchers
• Lifehacker’s Guide to Free Software and Webapps
• 60+ Free Programming Tools
• Run Your Life With Your Cell Phones SMS

Producitivy is something I struggle with at times. Calculating your church will determine if you are busy and unproductive or busy and productive.

By calculating your own churn rate, you can determine, precisely, how effective you are and how this effectiveness changes over time and different types of projects. The details of this calculation are as follows:

1. Make a list of active projects that are important to you to complete. These should not be projects that have deadlines. Instead, make them the optional work that would really help you get ahead if completed. Each should require around 1 – 2 weeks of fairly regular attention to complete. If it requires more, break it up into smaller chunks. If it requires less, don’t include it — it’s a task, not a project. Overall, you should have between 4 – 8 projects on this list.

2. Over the next 3 -6 weeks, try to work only on the active projects on your list. You’ll still have to complete deadline-driven work, of course, but don’t get seduced by a new idea and add it to your list until you’ve completed what is already there.

3. After around 3 weeks you can start calculating your churn rate as often as you like. The formula is as follows:

CR = [(number of completed projects from list)/(days elapsed since start of list)] * 100

Source

If you are looking to find cheap books dont worry there are a handful of sites you can navigate to help curb your reading and research dollar issues.

BookSwim.com
BookSwim remedies the high cost of purchasing books with a Book Rental Service that allows unlimited rentals each month on a monthly subscription plan. Like a revolving door of books, subscribers send back a few at a time and are promptly mailed more from their online Rental Pool .

Amazon.com
Amazon has a huge collection of used books that will curb your monthly Barnes and Noble spending habits.

Half.com
Half.com an ebay affiliate often has a bundle of cheap books just waiting to get snatched up.

One of the hardest things for me about my grad school application was rounding up all of those recommendation letters. Tara Kuther at About.com offers a few tips on how to go about getting them:

Learn about letters of recommendation – what they are, who writes them, and how to prepare – early in your college career, well before it is time to apply to graduate school.

Seek experiences that will help you develop relationships with faculty that will get you excellent letters.

Understand that admissions committees seek letters from specific types of professionals

You can read the rest of her article here, on the About.com Grad School Guide.

The thought of writing your dissertation can send a shiver of fear into the most seasoned grad student. Breathe easy–feeling worried about writing the biggest paper of your life is completely normal!

For practical step-by-step tips on how to overcome dissertation inertia and a great guide for taking those initial steps in the writing and research process you will want to check out this wonderful resource on dissertations, which I’ve found very helpful.

There’s so much useful info in that article, but one of the thing I learned is there are a few roadblocks that commonly pop-up with dissertation writing that prevent us from getting the deed done:

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Is there any other skill more necessary in Grad School or College than writing? Nadda. Writing papers, essays, and your dissertation are all inescapable aspects of academia, and there’s a heck of a lot more to serious writing than just knowing correct grammar and punctuation.

Professional writers will tell you, organizing your writing time is paramount to a successful writing project. Especially if you’re working on a huge project like your dissertation, you need to get serious about scheduling your writing time.

There’s an excellent article at Study Hacks called How to Schedule Your Writing Like a Professional Writer, and they’ve done an amazing job of collecting advice from several masters of long form non-fiction.

Apply the professional writing tips to your college or grad school writing (or any writing at all) by following these steps:

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If you are like me, you may want to go to grad school, but live in a place where your local colleges do no offer a program that has to do with your field. I have recently been looking at online programs that would minimize both cost and not interupt my work schedule. I found Distance Grad Schools to be quite helpful. You can choose the subject you are looking to work in, and the site lists prospective schools you could apply for.

I was reading this great article by Steve Pavlina called What Are The Odds Of Becoming A Blackbelt?, and I was totally inspired.

Think about it–when you start your graduate studies you’re basically trying to become a black belt in your field. When you start out, you may totally feel like a white belt (a beginner), and the road ahead seems long and hard, especially if you’ve heard stories of people who tried to get their grad degrees but then dropped out.

But that is why it’s such a worthy endeavor–for any field where it’s a huge accomplishment there will be a good number of people who have tried and failed, but that doesn’t mean that your chances of succeeding are lowered.

Your mindset and your ability to think like a black belt in training can have a significant impact on your ability to do well in graduate school.

Here are Steve’s helpful tips:

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Imgaine it–studying in Paris, Costa Rica, Geneva or Hong Kong. The thought of getting an MBA overseas is exhilarating, scary, adventurous, and possibly a smart career decision depending on what your intended area of business is.

If you’re interested in doing business internationally or just getting some diversified cultural experience, getting your MBA in a foreign land may be exactly the right thing to do.

Erin O’Conner has an excellent article at Jungle that covers the whole shebang about international MBAs, so you’ll want to check out.

As business becomes more and more global, so does business education. Graduate education in business administration was once a primarily American and Western European phenomenon, but programs are now springing up all over the world. And as more top U.S. schools open international campuses and partner with international firms, foreign business schools are responding to the competition by improving the quality and breadth of their programs. Today you can get an MBA just about anywhere…

Studying Abroad: Getting an MBA Overseas

Photo Eiffel Tower

Whoever said that nothing in life is free was obviously not familiar with the internet. The other day I told you about 4 Universities that offer OpenCourseWare, a program where educators and students and self-learners from around the world have the opportunity to take classes for free at some prestigious institutions.

But there’s more! The Education Portal lists the 10 Universities with the best free online courses. If you’re short on cash (and what student isn’t?) and you have a hungry mind, you’ll love that resource. Isn’t the web great?