Most families (being human, of course) wait until absolutely the last minute to do everything.That's why very few people end up financially prepared to pay for weddings, homes, retirement, and college educations for their children.

Our focus today is college funding - so let's discuss the little-known reasons why you'd be much better off planning your child's college education in his or her JUNIOR year of high school (if not earlier!).

Reason #1: Money Saved In The Wrong Places Could Cost You A Fortune In Lost Financial Aid.

Did you know that money saved in the wrong places could count as much as 7 times more heavily than money saved in the right places? If it counts "more," you will receive LESS aid.

It is important that you determine which assets you have accumulated in the "wrong" places so you can either gift, transfer or reposition them before you have to apply for financial aid.

If you wait until the last minute to do this (your child's senior year), it will be too late to change the mix of your financial picture, and you will end up losing thousands of dollars in financial aid that you would have been eligible for.

Reason #2: You Must Know How Much Your Family Will Be Expected To Contribute Towards College Costs.

No matter which schools your child ends up applying to, the government will expect you to pay your fair share towards the cost of college. They call this your "Expected Family Contribution" and this is the minimum amount of money any school will expect you to pay towards your child's education.

The sooner you know what this number is, the sooner you can start saving to accumulate at least enough to cover this minimum amount.

If you wait until your child's senior year of high school to find out what your family contribution is, you will have no time to do any saving - and this means borrowing more money to cover the costs of your child's college education!

Reason #3: You Want Your Child To Pick Schools Based On The Schools Ability To Give You Money.

Most students and parents pick schools whimsically without giving any consideration to which schools have the best ability to meet their financial needs.

What happens is that most students start picking schools towards the end of their junior year, visit them during the summer, and then start applying to them in their senior year of high school.

The entire process is very costly between travel and application expenses, and most students and parents are stunned at the end of their senior year when they find out there is no way they can afford most of the schools they applied to!

This scenario can easily be avoided by finding out which schools have the best histories of giving good financial aid packages - more FREE money, fewer loans!

By finding out this information in your child's JUNIOR year of high school, you can avoid spending time and money traveling and applying to schools that will never be able to give you the money you need.

Reason #4: You Must Start, At Least, One Year In Advance If You Want To Apply For Private Scholarships.

Although private scholarships only make up 1% of all the money that exists for college funding, it still can be worth looking for some of these funding sources.

Private Scholarships are sources of FREE money that never have to be re-paid.

Private foundations and organizations offer them to students based on their ethnic background, religious affiliation, talents, hobbies, skills, interests, athletic abilities, etc.

You can only get these sources of funding if you apply for them, and you can only locate and apply for them if you start looking in your child's JUNIOR year of high school. Since most parents procrastinate, you will be competing for these dollars against a smaller playing field!

These four little-known reasons could mean the difference between your obtaining thousands of dollars in college funding or not being able to afford to send your child to the college or university of his/her choice. It's that simple!



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tom_Chrobak

Do you ever have any of these problems?

Have you ever started to write an essay and found that you were staring at a blank screen and a flashing cursor? Did you feel like you were starting from scratch?

Have you ever started writing an essay and found that you could not remember some of the information you read? Or tried to put a reference in and could not find the page number of the quotation you were using?

Is your research usually scattered all over the place, in the form of books, photocopied pages, bookmarked websites and some notes? Do you find it hard to create an essay out of disorganised research?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then learning how to create and use a research document can help! If you organise and record your research properly, you should never have any of these problems again.

How can you organise your research?

Your research should be organised so that the transition from doing your research to writing your essay is simple. The best way to do this is to organise your research so that it matches the organisation of the essay. In Step 2 of writing an academic essay, you would have written a rough essay plan before you began your research. This essay plan is the guide you need to use to organise your research.

Copy and paste this essay plan into a Word document. All your research for this essay will be recorded in this one document. Use each of the dot points from your essay plan (topics you are planning to discuss) as a heading in your research document. When you do your research, you will organise it in the order that the information will appear in your essay. Doing this means you will be organising your research by theme or topic, not by source.

This means that you will not simply record all the information from one source together and then go on to type up the information from your next source underneath it. If you do things that way, you would need to go back and re-organise your research later, into the correct order for your essay. That would be a waste of your time.

Why should you record your research (instead of just reading or taking a few notes)?

If you do not record your research properly, you can spend hours, days or weeks doing research, and then when you start to write your essay you will find that you have to go back and re-do things, like search for page numbers or correct quotations. You must record your research in a way that makes essay writing easier for you. It should be accurate, include all the information you need, and give you a chance to record your own ideas and thoughts on the material you are reading as you go along. Do not leave this until the end.

Instead of just taking notes when researching, a better and more efficient way to research is to critically arrange and organise material by typing out all the important information you find. You do not need to type out everything, just the critical, relevant and important information for your essay. Then you can add your own notes. (Make sure you use punctuation marks so you can see what is a quotation and what are your own words.)

There are a few important reasons for why it is better to type out sources word for word in your research rather than only take notes.

1. You do not have to remember everything you have written, all the important material is written down.
2. When you begin writing your essay you will have all information you need to make accurate direct quotations.
3. You will not make the mistake of writing something in your essay that you think you have thought of yourself, but is in fact something you are remembering from a book word-for-word.
4. You still have the opportunity to write your own notes about the sources as you go along, and develop your own ideas. But you will do this in a way that makes it clear what is from the book, and what are your own ideas.

How should you record your research?

You must record the following information from your sources:

1. Reference information about the source you are using
2. The subject or topic of each paragraph you type out (to help organise your ideas)
3. The exact wording of the source (using punctuation marks to show you are quoting)
4. The page number of the information you are typing up
5. Your own ideas and thoughts about the material you are reading

While you are doing all this, you can be working on your reference list at the same time. Each time you begin reading a source, type up all reference information into your reference list straight away. One good way of setting out your research is as follows:

The topic/subject of the paragraph
'The exact wording of the source/paragraph that you are typing up goes here, using punctuation marks so you can see that you are quoting' (Put the reference information here, the way you would in an in-text reference: Surname, Year, Page number).
[Your notes and ideas go here. Your own words go in square brackets and do not have punctuation marks, so you can easily see what are your own words and what words come from the source.]

So for example:

The number of people killed during the Spanish Civil War
'The number of people killed during the Spanish Civil War is very difficult to ascertain. It was probably over one million people. Many people went "missing" and were never found' (Nash, 1989, p. 61).
[This is very interesting information since it shows that the number of people killed could be much higher than was originally thought.]

How can you develop your essay plan while you are researching?

All the decisions about what will go into your essay and in what order are made at the research stage, not at the essay writing stage. This is a common mistake made by students who do not establish enough of a connection between the two stages.

At the beginning of your research, you started out with your rough essay plan as a basis for the headings in your research document. As you go along, you may add more headings or sub-headings to your research document. For example, you might find that there are three sub-topics under the first main topic that you wish to discuss, and so you will create sub-headings for them. The information under these sub-headings will eventually become paragraphs in your essay.

As you conduct your research, you must critically analyse the information that you find. Change your sections around in order of importance. Decide what information should be included and what should not. All these decisions should be made at the research stage, so that by the time you come to do your writing you know exactly what you will be writing about and in what order, down to each paragraph. You will have in front of you exactly what information needs to be used in each section and paragraph of your essay. This also means that you will never feel like you are starting from scratch or have nothing to go on when you begin writing your first draft.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lisa_Lines

When I first played the Business Strategy Game, I was intimidated by the amount of numbers and I didn't feel I would ever be able to master the game. I talked to a lot of my friends who expressed the same sentiment, but in different ways. Ultimately as I rose the ranks of BSG by winning the business strategy game, I began to realize a trend of the "typical" individual who would usually win the business strategy game.

The individual may have an academic background, hard working, analytical, skills such as creativity are a plus, but being an individual who deeply analyzes and is very motivated to win the game acts as one of the most common recurrent themes in top BSG players.

The second characteristic that is typical of a high ranking BSG player is a competitive or gaming component. Those who play lots of video games (usually RTSs or Real time Strategy) have the background understanding of how games work and what to look for to win it. Someone who is labeled as a "gamer" in a business class, but not someone extremely academic, is someone who can potentially do very well in BSG.

And as unfair or prejudice as the last component is, is that someone who does very well in BSG is a male. Very, very rarely are there high ranking female BSG players, one only has to look at the Hall of Fame and find feminine names as Grand Champions. And the very few who are, are they in groups, potentially with a guy? It is extremely rare to find a lone female as a Grand Champion of BSG, although there are several male counterparts.

It is good to look at your class and see "is that someone who fits the profile of a good BSG player, they may be academic, but do they understand "games" or if they play lots of games are they smart enough to lend that skill to something academic like the business strategy game. And of course it is important to realize where you fit in the typical profile of the business strategy game. For those of you who are female and probably don't play games, you need to really utilize your high academic motivation to win you the game.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bryan_Lance_Lee

So, do you really want to know how hard is it to get into Harvard? Well, I'd like to say nothing is impossible! But getting into Harvard is definitely not going to be easy. While Harvard is one of the most coveted universities that all parents want to send their kids to, they do have a variety of criterion for selecting absolutely the best ones, not only academically but with co-curricular activities as well. As already said they want intelligent and smart people who know how to excel in life. Harvard wants the creme. It wants individuals who are intelligent and realistic, confident yet modest, sociable and reclusive, sporty and creative, literary and technical with President Obama being a perfect example.

Yes, grades do play an important role, and you do need to have a very strong GPA to be eligible for consideration. When we talk of grades, we are talking about the grades for your entire school life. But, there have been cases where students with much lower GPAs but with certain other notable achievements to their credit made it into Harvard too.

So, what matters here is not academic altitude rather your attitude. It is your attitude that will decide your fate into Harvard. Harvard wants people -who can be bold leaders and still follow others; who can enjoy a formal dinner and a pajama party with equal ease; who can spend countless hours researching in the library and can volunteer a social cause the next moment. You need a breadth of skills, drive and initiative to prove your worth and most importantly you must enjoy whatever you do. Yes, it does sound a bit too much, but all is worth its cause. Harvard undoubtedly produces leaders and wants people who believe in themselves and who want to achieve something in life. How hard is it to get into Harvard is not the question, it's how hard you make it for yourself to get into Harvard. You will need to begin with an early ambition in life and see it through, believe in everything you do, devise a plan, work towards a goal and miss nothing. Most importantly be honest with yourself and whatever you associate yourself with, then let it be your job or a club. People who are honest will always get noticed and only those who think big and believe in their abilities stand a chance here.

Harvard basically focuses on three aspects - grades, extracurricular achievements, individual strengths and an essay. Yes, Harvard gives a lot of importance of essays for selecting its freshmen. The essays should focus on distinct topics and be very very well-written. An essay that best conveys your personal thoughts guarantees an admission. And yes, last but not the least, recommendations. If you have had great student-teacher relations, you might as well have some real nice and uplifting recommendations written by some of the teachers who loved you as a student. Now how hard is it to get into Harvard? You answer!



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ronni_Rebsdorf