Meet your advisor

From time-to-time, I thought it would be nice to include profiles of our academic advisors in the College. They work tirelessly to ensure that you have every opportunity for success as you work toward earning your degree.

Here is Kacee Robertson.

Kacee would love for life to be like a musical. A student needs something extra? Time or credits perhaps? In Kacee’s world, people randomly break out into song to express their point of view, plead their case or just simply for the fun of it.

In reality, Kacee helps College of Liberal Studies students the more predictable way in achieving their goal of earning a bachelor’s degree. Online and on the phone, she has been guiding CLS students from her third floor McCarter Hall office for more than a year-and-half. She provides the graduation plans, instructions and information they need to be successful.

A 2004 graduate of the University of Oklahoma, Kacee herself did not take the traditional same-school, four-year route to earn her bachelor’s degree. Kacee first attended Carl Albert State College (CASC) in her far east Oklahoma hometown of Poteau where she earned an associate’s degree in English. Then, she headed to Northeastern State College in Tahlequah before coming to OU to study journalism and public relations.

Kacee has experience working with Upward Bound, the federally funded program for first generation high school students who plan to go to college. She also worked as an ACT residual supervisor, general education academic advisor and was an adjunct instructor of Composition I and Business Communications at her alma mater, CASC.

After three years in Poteau, Kacee moved back to Norman in September 2008. In December of that year, she completed a Master of Arts in Leadership Education.
She loves live music, no matter what kind and attends nearly 30 concerts a year to hear it. Among her favorites – Miranda Lambert, Bonnie Raitt, Ben Folds, and old school country guys like Roger Miller.

Kacee played percussion in her high school marching band and more recently decided to take up a string instrument. She chose to learn to play the banjo because really, what’s cooler than a banjo?

Along with music and musicals, she enjoys independent films, comedies and foreign movies. The best part of her day is when she is greeted by Bark Robertson, her Corgi.

What is your Motivation for Learning?

About 50 years ago, roughly the same time the College of Liberal Studies was being created, a guy named Cyril Houle conducted a famous adult learning research project. The results of the project were published in a book, The Inquiring Mind, by the University of Oklahoma Press in the early 60s. The book had a big impact on adult learning theory, as well as my own thinking when I read it several years ago.

Houle wanted to know what it is that motivates adult students to seek learning opportunities. What makes an adult learner decide to actively seek out a class, a book, or a teacher? Why do they do it, and what is the payoff?

To answer these questions, Houle conducted in-depth interviews with 22 adults who were “conspicuously engaged in various forms of continuing learning” (p. 13). His interviews led him to identify three basic motivations for adult learners:

• Goal-oriented learners – who use education as a means of achieving some other goal(s);
• Activity-oriented learners – who participate in education for the sake of the activity itself and social interaction;
• Learning-oriented learners – who seek knowledge for its own sake.

Houle’s findings have been debated, challenged, disputed, affirmed and expanded upon for years. Some say the typology of learners he creates is too simplistic. Others say the number of students it is based upon was too small to have any validity. My personal experience after working with adult learners for 18 years is that Houle’s broad categories are very accurate.

By far, the majority of the students I deal with in CLS seem to be goal-oriented learners. They want, even need, a degree to help them advance in their professions and careers. These students are focused on moving through their degree program with the greatest efficiency and speed possible. We have designed our programs and student services to help them do just that.

Our hope, however, is that while we are helping goal-oriented learners to achieve their goal(s), we are at the same time serving – and even creating – students who are learning-oriented. We try to offer courses and curriculum that will entice, engage, interest and bait our students into a life-long, passionate pursuit of knowledge just for the sake of learning. It is my observation that most of us administrators and faculty members are learning-oriented ourselves. We enjoy learning and thinking about new things, whether or not they have a practical or pragmatic value to our lives or careers. We enjoy being engaged in what has been called “the life of mind.”

For our students reading this blog entry, I would ask you to pause for a moment and think about your own motivation for learning. Why are you pursuing your degree? Have you noticed yourself becoming more confident, more passionate, more interested in your studies and the world around you? If so, you may be discovering that you are, or have become, a learning-oriented adult learner.

Scholarships 2010

I believe I can safely say that one of the first things students think about is how to pay for their education, no matter what their age. Students in the College of Liberal Studies are certainly no exception. Finances might be even more of a question for you with your many responsibilities as an adult student.

Good news! Here are some scholarship opportunities for you to consider.

1. The Undergraduate or Graduate Start-up Scholarship.
As the name implies, this scholarship is for students who are beginning their first semester in our bachelor’s or master’s program. The amount available is $500.

2. The Osher Reentry Scholarship.
The Bernard Osher Foundation, headquartered in San Francisco, provides scholarship funds to colleges and universities across the country intended especially for students who are returning to school. Specifically, these funds are available by application for:

a. Students who have been out of school and are returning to complete their first undergraduate degree, or;
b. Students who are enrolled or were previously enrolled in on-site/hybrid classes at any University of Oklahoma site such as Oklahoma City Community College, Rose State College, OU-Tulsa, OU-Norman, Ponca City, and Lawton/Ft. Sill.
Up to $1400 is available via tuition waiver.

The deadline for summer is soon – June 4 –and for the fall the deadline is Aug. 3.

In the fall two other scholarship opportunities are available:
The Undergraduate or Graduate Alumni Scholarship and the Ruth Coble Scholarship.

I encourage you to apply. You can contact our scholarship coordinator Christine Yeo at christineyeo@ou.edu.

Are you ready for graduate school?

Congratulations. You’ve got your bachelor’s degree in hand along with a sudden bonanza of free time. Perhaps, though, since you are still in the zone, you are considering a graduate degree. You want to keep going along the higher education trail. Great idea and I am all for it. But before you dive in, there are some questions you should probably ask of yourself. This is a bigger decision than you may realize.

Much like your first year of college is not like the 13th grade of high school graduate study is not two more years of undergraduate work. It’s entirely different. As a graduate student, you learn to become a scholar, a deep thinker and a researcher.

Not to be discouraging in any way, I just want you to have clear eyes about what will be required of you if decide to go higher. So, here is a short, completely unscientific quiz to see if you have the right mindset to continue. Ready?

1. Are you prepared to be an independent scholar and figure things out on your own?
2. Do you have a clear sense of the area of concentration you would like to study?
3. If so, do you absolutely love it enough to spend two years dedicated to it?
4. How about: Do you have as much, if not more, time to devote to your studies as you did for undergraduate work?)
5. This implies the undergrad didn’t do this. How about “Are you ready to challenge your personal thought paradigms even further than you did in undergraduate studies?”)
6. Are you prepared to justify your work to your professors?
7. Is your writing sound, free of grammatical errors and flawed arguments?
8. Are you familiar with, and able to use, the standard citation systems of the American Psychological Association and the Multiple Language Association?
9. Are you going to graduate school as a refuge from real life or to elevate yourself to the next level of personal development or in your career?
10. Is there a plan in place to pay for it?

Scoring: I’ll make this easy. If you answered “no” to at least two of these questions, you should give serious thought to whether you are ready. A little time away from higher education is not always a bad thing. If you miss it, that is a good sign. Either way, call me. I am happy to help you decide.

Interdisciplinary education

Inter: between
Disciplinary: study of an academic field.
Interdisciplinary: study between two or more academic fields.

I am often asked what it means to be a “liberal studies” student. I generally respond that it means to be broadly read, widely knowledgeable, and classically educated. But when I start talking about interdisciplinary study, that’s where I lose them.

Sometimes we use words without giving them much thought. I know what interdisciplinary means. Use it several times a day. What I forget is that while this word is a part of my work life, it probably doesn’t roll off the tongues of most people. (Try saying interdisciplinary three times fast.)

At colleges and universities, we have disciplines, areas where faculty members and students concentrate their time and effort. The word discipline has meaning. It indicates the mental discipline necessary to think in a particular, scholarly way. A novice student must discipline their thinking to the most current knowledge in their elected area of study. That includes becoming familiar with the vocabulary, the discoveries and the particular research methods within the discipline. And most students spend most of their time focusing on one specific disciplinary area. It could be electrical engineering, or meteorology or elementary education. These are single, focused disciplines with a specific outcome. Graduates become engineers, meteorologists or teachers.

Interdisciplinary study implies a broader range of focus, if you will. It is a generalist education where students take a wide variety of courses that may at first seem unrelated but in reality are teaching critical thinking skills. By studying across disciplines, students become knowledgeable in the research methods, the vocabularies and the current knowledge in a variety of academic areas. Students with an interdisciplinary background are able to access and evaluate information from a wider range of intellectual perspectives.

In the College of Liberal Studies, we recognize three broad areas of academic knowledge: humanities, natural sciences and social sciences. Courses in our programs generally fall within one of the three broad areas, and then draw upon knowledge available from several disciplines within the knowledge area. For example, looking at the course list for the College of Liberal Studies, you will see topics such as Evil Acts, Religious Reasons, Humanities of the Ancient World and Mathematics in Liberal Studies. The first course straddles the humanities and social science areas of knowledge. The word “humanities” in the second course is self explanatory. And mathematics is, of course, a foundation for many endeavors within the natural sciences. Although the courses fall in different knowledge areas, they are all woven together by the thread of critical thinking informed by learning across disciplines. This is the foundation for interdisciplinary studies and for the type of degrees that are conferred on our graduates.

By learning to read closely and attentively, as a student you become a more reflective writer. By learning how to gain knowledge from broad academic perspectives, you become a better thinker and scholar. You learn to form solid arguments and then support your position with sound reasoning. Plus, you discover many things about yourself along the way.

How does this help you in the “real” world? That is a topic for another day.

The contradiction of for-profit education

I recently saw an episode of Frontline on PBS called “College, Inc.”, that truly alarmed me. Frontline, in case you are not familiar, is an excellent weekly program that features good, solid reporting on timely subjects. And yes, I know as students, TV watching is not high on the list of things you have time to do right now.

However, you might find this interesting as a student at the University of Oklahoma, a nonprofit, state institution because “College, Inc.” delves into the, for lack of a better word, underbelly of for-profit colleges and universities.

There is a huge difference between nonprofits and for-profits, as their very names imply. Traditional brick and mortar institutions such as OU are funded partly by the state legislature, through tuition and fees and raise money from donations by wealthy donors and alumni.

Conversely, for-profit institutions, like the University of Phoenix, sell shares to investors. That’s right. These colleges and universities are commodities, part of Wall Street. They are in the business of selling education and make millions, no, make that billions, of dollars.

What was particularly disturbing to me were comments made by former employees of the for-profit institutions. It seems like, from what was said, that many students who least can afford it are sold on earning a degree from one of these colleges. The loans they take out to pay for their educations are huge and often they cannot get the kinds of high paying jobs when they graduate that will help them pay back their loans.

One young woman earned a doctorate in psychology but cannot practice because the degree is not accredited. In other words, she now has more than $100,000 in loans with compounding interest that she cannot pay back because she cannot practice. Technically, she is not a psychologist at all. But she has a very expensive piece of paper with her name on it. Heartbreaking.

Of course, of the thousands of students that attend these schools, there are success stories.

The reality is career-oriented students are coming to school in droves, particularly due to the slow economy. A college education is fundamental and there is a huge demand that traditional two and four-year colleges and universities are trying to meet. As a business, for-profits are rising to the occasion and filling this need.

If a degree plan sounds too good to be true, or too easy, it most likely is. For-profit tuition costs up to seven times that of tuition at nonprofit institutions. All I can say is, buyer beware. Earning a quality degree from a traditional institution takes time and effort. You are becoming educated. I am not sure the same can be said of some of our business-based competitors.