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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

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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.

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:

• Not knowing how to do it. Does it help to know that every grad student feels that way? A dissertation is not just another research paper, but it’s a completely new level of writing that few of us have ever encountered before. It’s comparable to writing a book, with no one watching over us setting deadlines or evaluating how we’re coming along. This is our first significant independent project, and the thought of it can be overwhelming.
• Procrastination. Probably the hugest reason why we procrastinate is because we’re not sure how to move forward, we don’t know what to expect or what’s expected of us, and so we push our start date back further and further. Resisting the dissertation marathon that lies ahead only creates stress. It’s important to do something to start the process. By taking one baby step in the direction of starting the dissertation, we can get the ball rolling in our favor and the steps after that become easier.
• Not having enough time. I guess another way to think about this would be to say that we have not organized our schedules in a way that would allow us enough time to do the dissertation work. All grad school students are busy, some have jobs and families and for everyone it’s hard to find the time, but it is possible. It takes reorganizing our priorities so that we’re able to consistently work on this project rather to completion.
• Doubt. Writing and presenting our dissertations is a huge mountain to climb, and on the way up that mountain we’re bound to get tired and think “What am I doing up here? I wanna go home.” There is nothing wrong with having some doubt creep up–in fact it’s completely normal. It’s an opportunity for us to re-examine what our goals are, why we wanted them in the first place and what we’re willing to do to achieve them.

I’ve heard it said that writing the dissertation marks the transition from student to scholar. It helps to know that whatever anguish you’re going through as you run the dissertation marathon, that it is serving the purpose of transforming you into the academic that you want to be.

Photo Dissertation

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:

1. Spread out work on an assignment over several days. Coming at it fresh increases its quality.
2. During these days, get up early. Probably earlier than you are used to. Say, around 7 or 8 am. (This means these days will be weekdays, probably early in the week so you can avoid temptations to party the night before).
3. Have a mini-ritual to jump start the day. It should probably involve coffee. Breakfast. Maybe the morning paper. Don’t take too long.
4. Go to the most isolated place possible.
5. To get your mind ready to think, review the last pages you wrote.
6. Work for two or three hours. Then stop.
7. Follow this habit regularly. Don’t write during other times. Don’t write in public places. Don’t start writing the day before.

Truly, as someone who writes for a living I found the Study Hacks post very helpful, and I encourage you to read over the whole thing. For myself I find that early morning writing with a little ritual like tea, breakfast, mediation or exercise, creates an atmosphere of optimum concentration and creativity. I could definitely benefit by taking their other tips to heart though .

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:

Don’t let it bother you that you suck at first.

“When you start out in a brand new field with no experience, you’re going to suck… most likely really suck. If you’re lucky your results will just be bad instead of painfully bad. But screwing up is perfectly OK. That’s supposed to happen. Screwing up is how you learn. Every mistake helps you make new distinctions and increase your skill.”

Commit to mastery.

“Pulling away from the pack in any field is largely a matter of choice. That choice is a commitment to mastery. But very few will make this choice because it requires hard work, resolve, patience, self-discipline, and a long time perspective.”

Stay with it for the long term.

“If you want to succeed in a new field where you lack experience, you should be thinking of at least a 3-5 year commitment. If that scares you away, then save yourself the time you would have spent dabbling, and don’t bother.”

Don’t be discouraged by reports of people who fail.

“You’ll find a small percentage of people who are really committed to mastery, but the rest have virtually no hope of notable success. As you build skill, which normally takes years to achieve competency in any worthwhile field, you move out of the 99% and into the 1%. Dabblers will enter the field, try it for six months, and give up after concluding it’s too hard. A challenging field is good though because it means your long-term investment in skill-building will mean something, like a black belt. It wouldn’t be much of an accomplishment if it was too easy.”

Yeah, it wouldn’t be that big a deal to get your master’s degree if it was easy–remember that! It’s encouraging to remember that every expert started out as a complete novice.

Photo Bruce Lee

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

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?