Tag Archives: college students

10 Interview Blunders to Avoid

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Hiring managers advise job seekers to avoid the following slip-ups when interviewing.

  1. Treating receptionist or other lower-level staff poorly. Consider the moments before meeting with the hiring staff as a pre-interview. Many hiring managers consult with staff about your behavior before and after the interview.
  1. Arriving poorly groomed. Make sure you look squeaky clean from head to toe. Go easy on the perfume and neatly manicure your nails.shutterstock_12264709_March2016
  1. Choosing inappropriate attire. Dress for success. Knowing what to wear shows you understand workplace expectations.
  1. Delivering long, rambling answers. Employers want to see that you are articulate. Practice answers before an interview so you can give concise responses.
  1. Lacking authenticity. While everyone understands an interviewee needs to be upbeat, hiring managers want to see the real you. Do not be slick or sound hackneyed.
  1. Underselling accomplishments. First-time job seekers often undersell their strength as a candidate. Be ready to talk about how you will make a contribution to the organization.
  1. Failing to give credit to collaborators. Show the hiring manager how you contributed to a team project by explaining your role without taking too much credit from other team members.
  1. Demonstrating poor understanding of the organization. Once you’ve landed an interview, the organization will expect you to have performed research about it and its products. Not doing so is the consummate no-no.
  1. Lacking energy. Body language such as slumping in the chair or a monotone voice translates to disinterest. Make sure you make eye contact and are actively engaged.
  1. Failing to ask relevant questions. Prepare questions that illustrate your understanding of the job and the industry so you appear interested. If you do not, the hiring manager could easily interpret it as a lack of interest in the position.

Discussion Questions

  • Why is it important to be respectful and kind to staff of any level?
  • What are ways you can “be authentic” without appearing overeager or giving yourself too much credit for work you collaborated on?
  • What kinds of specific questions could you prepare that would illustrate your interest in a given industry?

 

 

 

College Students Addicted to Cell Phones

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shutterstock_182518145bAny college teacher knows that students are attached to their cell phones. A new study measures just how attached they are.

“The Invisible Addiction: Cell Phone Activities and Addiction Among Male and Female College Students,” published in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, found that college women spend an average of ten hours daily on their cell phones; college men spend nearly eight. Students’ attachments to their phones was so great, in fact, that both male and female students admitted to feeling “agitated” when their devices were not within sight.

Technical addictions have been explained as a type of behavioral addiction—a compulsion to continue a behavior in spite of its negative impact on the user’s well-being. Addiction to cell phones occurs over time, the researchers explain, usually beginning with benign use that eventually causes negative consequences and increases dependence. For example, a phone originally purchased primarily for safety reasons becomes used entirely to send text messages and check social media sites. The cell phone user eventually reaches a tipping point where use of the device becomes uncontrollable—being unable to stop texting while driving, for example—and causing negative consequences.

Interestingly, the ways in which students rely on their phones are somewhat counterintuitive. Traditionally addictive activities—such as gaming—were not the causes of cell phone reliance. Rather, students spent the greatest majority of time texting (94.6 minutes daily), followed by e-mailing (48.5 minutes), checking Facebook (38.6 minutes), surfing the Internet (34.4 minutes), and listening to their iPods (26.9 minutes).

The study’s authors surmised that female students spent more time on their cell phones to build relationships or have conversations by texting and e-mailing. The men, while sending the same number of e-mails, spent less time on each message, suggesting their messages were more utilitarian in nature. Men also spent time checking Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter primarily to follow sports or news or simply to kill time.

Excessive or addictive cell phone use by students carries negative implications. The devices cause students to lose focus in the classroom and in some cases provide opportunities to cheat. Compulsive cell phone use can also cause conflict in and out of the classroom, the study found. Cell phones, when used to dodge uncomfortable situations, can also lead to negative outcomes.

The study’s authors conclude by suggesting that researchers continue to look for the “tipping point” as to when cell phone use becomes cell phone addiction.

Discussion

  1. The researchers call cell phone use a “paradox of technology” because it can be both freeing and enslaving. How are cell phones “freeing and enslaving”?
  1. How might excessive cell phone use create negative consequences in the workplace?
  1. Addictions are often caused when an individual wants to escape painful or negative feelings. How does cell phone addiction fit this explanation?

 

 

Failing Tests Is Good for Learning

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shutterstock_148662203We’ve all heard some variation of the adage “It will get worse before it gets better.” It turns out to be true with flunking a pretest. Research at UCLA has shown that students perform better on finals when they are given comprehensive pretests on material about which they know virtually nothing on the first day of class … and predictably fail.

The merits of pretesting, a new outcrop of learning science, are linked to how we approach the acquisition of knowledge. The theory posits that if we take a pretest and do poorly but we know the final will include the same material, we look at the course differently—so differently that it can improve overall performance in the class by an average of 10 percent.

Professor Elizabeth Bjork of UCLA used her own psychology students as guinea pigs to test her theory on pretesting. Instead of overwhelming students on the first day with a comprehensive pretest of the entire quarter’s worth of materials, she gave a series of unannounced shorter tests during a few class sessions. Predictably, students performed poorly on the pretests.

However, Bjork delivered the answers to the questions during the next lecture, and this quick feedback is what seemed to lead to better learning. On the final, students scored about 10 percent higher on material they originally did poorly on in pretests but that was covered in the next lecture.

The experiment has several implications. First is that pretesting seems to prime the brain to absorb new information. This may result because students get a taste of what’s to come and that gives them hints about what to focus on as the course progresses. Second is the concept of fluency, or the false impression that we understand or have learned more than we have. Pretesting acts as a wake-up call to show students they are not as fluent as they thought.

Biology may also be at play. Retrieving information from the memory is different than cramming in information the first time. Retrieval requires a network of associations that affect how the information is re-stored. Pretesting—and guessing answers—also reshapes the brain’s networks, which may be linked to the improved performance.

So far it appears that pretesting is not a panacea; it only works in humanities and social science courses that delve into information in the same language we speak. But now, it seems, researchers have found that testing itself may be a key to studying, not the other way around. Tests don’t simply measure; they enrich and alter memory, and therefore, promote learning.