Dennis Fahringer's blog http://fotofah.posterous.com Most recent posts at Dennis Fahringer's blog posterous.com Sun, 07 Oct 2012 01:27:00 -0700 Gap Year Programs Like City Year Provide Alternative to Immediate College Enrollment http://fotofah.posterous.com/gap-year-programs-like-city-year-provide-alte http://fotofah.posterous.com/gap-year-programs-like-city-year-provide-alte
Image Source / Getty Images
Image Source / Getty Images
Graduates throwing mortarboards

In September Amy Huynh, a recent high school graduate who was accepted to Colby College in Maine, visited some of her childhood friends during move-in weekend at UCLA. They’re newly minted freshmen, ready to embark on an exciting college career. But Huynh is beginning a different adventure—instead of attending Colby, she’s mentoring middle schoolers in southern Los Angeles for a year.

“A lot of people did not agree with what I was doing,” Huynh says of her decision to defer college enrollment. “College is getting so expensive now, so I said why not. College isn’t going anywhere.”

Huynh is a corps member in City Year, a service organization that places young people between the ages of 17 and 24 in urban schools to work with teachers and mentor students. She’s also one of the thousands of members of the high school class of 2012 who chose to take a break from school — a so-called gap year — instead of immediately enrolling in college.

(MORE: Free Textbooks Shaking Up Higher Education)

About 1.2% of first-time college freshmen choose to defer enrollment for a year, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. What these students choose to do with their time varies widely, from expensive study abroad programs, to volunteer programs like City Year, to staying at home and saving up for college.

“In 1980, no one was talking gap year,” says Holly Bull, the president of The Center for Interim Programs, a company that offers parents and students consulting in choosing the appropriate gap year program. “I’ve watched this whole concept go basically from its inception to present day. I wouldn’t call it mainstream, but there’s way more awareness and support and colleges are now beginning to endorse it as a really positive thing.”

With over 20 years of experience researching gap years, Bull has seen students work everywhere from outdoor education centers to Scottish castles to elephant sanctuaries. She says the students that come to her are often looking for a break from the academic grind. The gap year can provide young people an opportunity to learn what type of adult they want to be. It can also help them gain more focus so they don’t have to spend extra years—and tuition dollars—figuring out the answer to that question on a college campus. “I’m definitely hearing from families that it’s harder to consider these colleges tuitions with a student who seem so uncertain,” she says.

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For Huynh, the decision was about both personal development and economics. While some gap year programs can cost tens of thousands of dollars, City Year is free and provides a living stipend. She’ll get a $5,000 scholarship for participating in City Year that she can apply to her Colby expenses. She also plans to write the school and ask them to join the Give-a-Year partnership program, through which schools provide scholarships to City Year corp members. “That would be awesome,” Huynh says.

Melanie Brennard Mueller, vice president of City Year’s recruitment and admissions, says about 10% of the corps members are high school graduates taking gap years, and they hope to recruit more in the future. “They’re idealistic, they’re highly talented, and they’re excited to do something meaningful before college,” she says. Other volunteer programs, like the Student Conservation Association and World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, also offer students a way to experience different parts of the country or the world on the cheap.

Bob Clagett, the former director of admissions at Middlebury College, says taking a gap year can help students gain a renewed focus on academics. “By stepping off the treadmill, they frequently remind themselves of what their education is all about,” he says. “They kind of reinvent themselves.”

He’s done research to back up the claim. At Middlebury, students who took gap years were found to have higher GPA’s than those who didn’t, even when controlling for things like wealth and high school achievement. A study at the University of North Carolina yielded similar results.

Hyunh, for one, thinks the experience will help her when she finally arrives on campus. She wakes up at 6 a.m. each day to deal with rambunctious preteens— and at times during the school day is the only adult in the classroom. “I’ve personally become more driven,” she says. “Being in a high-stress environment especially, I think that it forces people to grow up really fast.”

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Selective schools typically allow accepted students to defer their enrollment for a year or two, so it makes sense for high schoolers to explore college and gap year opportunities concurrently. Some schools are now even offering formalized versions of gap year programs. Princeton’s Bridge Year Program, for instance, allows selected students to participate in a 9-month community service program abroad. Other schools are partnering with service organizations like City Year and offering scholarships to students who participate.

Some students also use the gap year as a way to bolster their resume, reapplying to colleges with some post-high school experience under their belt. “It’s not a guarantee in terms of getting into college, but it has certainly helped a number of schools in the past,” Bull says. She mentioned one student who was initially wait-listed from Brown University, but then was accepted during her gap year teaching in Costa Rica and Argentina.

The idea that formal education has to be a sprint from age 5 to 21 seems to be changing. Says Clagett, “Getting a job for a year, even if it’s flipping hamburgers, still can be a productive experience and can help students just do something other than think about what they have to do to get into college.”

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Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:35:00 -0700 Preschool tools: finger paint, picture books, and...iPads http://fotofah.posterous.com/preschool-tools-finger-paint-picture-books-an http://fotofah.posterous.com/preschool-tools-finger-paint-picture-books-an

Preschool_tools_finger_paint_picture_books_and_

 

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Fri, 08 Jul 2011 20:18:00 -0700 Excellent infographic on: The state of education http://fotofah.posterous.com/excellent-infographic-on-the-state-of-educati http://fotofah.posterous.com/excellent-infographic-on-the-state-of-educati
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Tue, 21 Jun 2011 18:00:00 -0700 On life-long learning http://fotofah.posterous.com/on-life-long-learning http://fotofah.posterous.com/on-life-long-learning

Over at the Bridging the Nerd Gap, Brett Kelly wrote about being real. and it made me think. He writes about never feeling like a “real” programmer,

He writes,

“I bought books, annoyed smart people with questions and generally fumbled my way into a passable set of programming skills. Truth be told, I’ve never felt much like a “real” programmer.”

Additionally, he recently wrote Evernote Essentials which I own a copy of and can attest to its thoroughness and quality. Even through he doesn’t feel like a real author. I’d say 20,000 words about a software program in convenient book form makes you as real an author as anyone.

This resonated with me because that’s how I’ve lived all my life. I am a huge believe in self-teaching and if you want to learn something, go learn it. Don’t wait to be taught it or find a teacher. The knowledge is out there, go find it.

From an early age I taught myself most of what I wanted to know. I wanted to make magazines so I learned PageMaker and Photoshop. I wanted to learn more about computers so I tinkered. I dismantled and I repaired. I learned how they tick and what made them work. I wanted to learn the web so I taught myself HTML and CSS.

I’ve done a great many things and have random and varying passions. I’ve never really been a real anything. I was always the self-taught hack. I didn’t go to school to learn about computers. I played and experimented until I learned.

I was speaking to one of the Human Resources people at work as I helped them with a computer issue and was asked what my degree is school was. He assumed it was Computer Science or something technical.

Much to his surprise, I responded with, Creative Advertising.1

I believe I got my sense of hard work, experimentation and self-teaching from my parents. I had the privilege growing up to learn about the printing world from my parents.

Both parents at one time owned and ran their own businesses. I learned a lot about hard work from them. When you are the company there is no letting up. If you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done.

Learning is a life-long pursuit. There is no end to it when we leave the doors of the schoolhouse. I’ve been in the working world long enough to know many of the people doing jobs are not doing anything they have formal training to do.

  1. My running joke is I have a B.S. in Communications. Which is an asset to handling the politics of technical work. []

 

I can identify with much of what's shared in this post. :-)

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Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:39:00 -0700 Blended Learning: A Disruptive Innovation In Education (infographic) http://fotofah.posterous.com/blended-learning-a-disruptive-innovation-in-e http://fotofah.posterous.com/blended-learning-a-disruptive-innovation-in-e
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Mon, 13 Jun 2011 14:16:00 -0700 Top Ten Photography Schools (interesting list and comments) http://fotofah.posterous.com/top-ten-photography-schools-interesting-list http://fotofah.posterous.com/top-ten-photography-schools-interesting-list
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Wed, 01 Jun 2011 12:29:32 -0700 big discounts tomorrow, June 2 (12 hrs. only) on photo training items (DVDs) from http://ShopShootSmarter.com http://fotofah.posterous.com/big-discounts-tomorrow-june-2-12-hrs-only-on http://fotofah.posterous.com/big-discounts-tomorrow-june-2-12-hrs-only-on I've learned a lot through their webcasts and DVDs, especially on lighting.

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Tue, 31 May 2011 18:04:00 -0700 Can Educating Girls Alone Curb China's Mistress Epidemic? - TIME http://fotofah.posterous.com/can-educating-girls-alone-curb-chinas-mistres http://fotofah.posterous.com/can-educating-girls-alone-curb-chinas-mistres
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on websites, they can’t search by common interests or hobbies?! :-(

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Fri, 13 May 2011 12:25:00 -0700 The “Kelby Training Online” App is finally out :-) http://fotofah.posterous.com/the-kelby-training-online-app-is-finally-out http://fotofah.posterous.com/the-kelby-training-online-app-is-finally-out

The wait it over! (Yay!) Nobody is more surprised (or happy) than I, but yes—it’s finally here—the Kelby Training Online app, for iPad AND iPhone, is now available for FREE in the App Store. Oh happy freakin’ day!!! Here’s the link.

Here’s the full screen view with Matty K on screen. I purposely chose a capture where his mouth was frozen open like that. He gets a kick out of it when I capture him at precise moments like this. :)

Here’s a look at the Portrait orientation view. That’s Joe McNally gesturing to what he would call a “Luminous Light Source.”

I am so excited (relieved) that’s it’s finally here. It actually came out late last night, I was already getting emails from people who are already using and totally loving it! My thanks to iPad developer (and App book author) Shawn Welch for his fantastic work on the App, along with our own in-house team who worked so hard to get this App up and running, including Kleber Stephenson, Erik Kuna, Paul Wilder, Dave Moser, Matt Kloskowski, RC Concepcion, Brad Moore, and Tommy Maloney.

Did I mention the Kelby Training Online iPad app is here now? I did? Well…whoo hoo!!! :)

And free, too. :-)

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