The time has come to reap the benefits of all these years of classes, extra curricular activities, and sacrificing TV hours for extra study time. This time next year, many of you will be in your first semester of college … but where?
October and November are the crunch months for college applications. The UC Application, which opened October 1st, is due November 30th – a mere month away. Many of you are applying to multiple schools around the country, and you are currently in the midst of answering several open-ended prompts along the lines of, “What characteristics define you?” and, “Name an event that shaped your life.” Or, maybe you’re tackling something like the infamous University of Chicago prompt: “How do you feel about Wednesday?”
How do you even start to answer a prompt like that?
The best way to start is with a brainstorm. Spend a couple days just thinking before you even open a Word document and start to type. If the prompt asks you to reflect on an event in your life, or a quality that you possess, think honestly about who you are. Ask your friends and family what they think your best characteristics are, and ask for examples of how you embody those qualities. Look through photo albums, listen to your favorite music, think of events in your life that changed you and helped to build the person that you are today.
Next, narrow down your top options. Think: Does this story portray me in a good light? Does it make me seem smart and introspective? Do my actions embody attributes that would make me a good college student?
Remember that college admissions officers read thousands of essays each day during admissions season. They are looking for potential students who will thrive at their university, excelling in courses while adding insight and individuality. They want students who will enhance the university’s community by volunteering and becoming involved. Most of all, they want to see that you are a well-rounded person who is serious about education, but also has interests that extend beyond the classroom and can enrich the lives of other students. They’re building a community, not just a class.
So, just be you. Or – even better – be the most insightful and interesting version of you. Tell the truth, but tell it in an interesting way that will stand out from the other essays. The best way to do this is to try to show the readers who you are, rather than just telling them. Try telling a story that shows your best characteristics, or an example of how a Wednesday changed your life. Be unique, be concise, and be articulate.
And if you get stuck, be at The Study Hut. We’ll help you get inspired.
Taking Advanced Placement (or “AP”) classes in high school are very important to completing lower division requirements in college, yet they move at a fast pace and try to cover dense material as quickly as possible. AP History classes, such as U.S. History (APUSH), European History (EHAP), World History (WHAP), and Art History provide a very unique set of difficulties since they are all covering such a broad and substantial amount of information. Here are some good study tips that might make your life a little easier in these classes:
Make a timeline – a list of dates or a timeline written in chronological order will help keep track of important events, the key players and the significance of the event.
Keep multiple lists – This is a great way of keeping track and studying the various leaders, governments and political movements that occur. Write a small paragraph under each word to have short and easily memorable ideas that are easy to understand for complex essay writing assignments.
Print out maps – both from the time period you are studying and the present. Coupled with your timeline, this is a great start to visually understanding connections between countries of the past and now. Everything will make more sense!
Keep a record of vocabulary, chapter by chapter – A small vocabulary list is also important for quick studying, so when test time arrives you have cumulative, yet specific, information to look over instead of a huge textbook.
Skim through the chapter first – This will give the overall sense of what the main purpose is, then you can go back to the beginning of the chapter and read it with that purpose in mind. For instance, if the main purpose of the chapter is Neolithic civilizations in Africa and their significance to archeology and present day African civilizations, then you know to read for types of Neolithic African civilizations, their region on a map, their artifacts, their religious beliefs, their language, etc.
Although history has a bunch of memorization, try not to think about it in that way. Understanding the concept is the most important thing. History is a story of the past, so when you read pretend it’s a story instead of a bunch of dates, names and facts. Furthermore, learning about history is really about understanding the significance of events to both the time period you are studying and the present day; when you read and take notes, always write the significance.
Study Hut Tutoring is happy to help and assist with every student’s college essay from start to finish. College essays, or personal statements, are weighted heavily. Students who have recently graduated from Mira Costa High School, El Segundo High School, Redondo Union High School, Palos Verdes High School, and Peninsula High school received acceptance letters into their top choices after receiving one-on-one college essay help from Study Hut Tutoring.
We are professionals in this department– not only having earned acceptance into top tiered universities around the country ourselves, but we are trained by current officers that sit on the Boards of Admissions at schools like UCLA. All of our college essay specialists have had students who have successfully met their goals. When student’s show up unannounced several weeks after their last session, with their acceptance letters in hand, it tells us we’ve done a good job executing. The proof is in the pudding!
We know what universities are looking for, to say the least. We know that admissions officers are incredibly busy around this time of year. They are the gatekeepers to their prestigious universities. They are responsible for admitting and denying tens of thousands of applicants. Many admissions officers read the essay first, and then decide if the rest of the application fits with that persons credentials.
The first step to writing a strong college essay is the discovery process. We do this to avoid trite topics such as, “The reason I want to be a veterinarian is because when I was little my dog was hit by a car.” As true as that may be, universities have seen that formula played out thousands of times. We want to avoid, at all costs, an overdone essay.
Study Hut Tutoring would strongly recommend that a student spends 2 months perfecting the essay; whipping out a decent draft and having mom proof read it a week before the essay is due is probably not the best plan!
Kids today have it rough. With all the competition to get into top ranked schools, parents are starting earlier and earlier to give their little academics a head start. But when does a parent’s involvement in their kids school work become a hindrance? Like most things, it’s all about a balance.
Studies show that children with parents who stay actively involved with their schoolwork will test better than kids with parents who don’t. So stay involved! Ask questions, congratulate success and encourage asking for help in more difficult subjects. Parents should know when their kids have a test and except to see the grade for it. This holds their student accountable for their grades. When parents do get back their kids work, reward their efforts. This doesn’t mean taking your daughter to buy a new IPod every time she brings home her Friday spelling test. But it does deserve a high five or a hug. (And remember parents, B grades are still fridge worthy!) Parents should be concerned with lower grades. When problem areas in their kid’s classes arise, steps should be taken to find extra help for their students. Begin with asking to see homework and review all problems that they have trouble with. If problems continue, check in with the teacher and see what else you can do to make sure your child keeps up with work.
When involvement becomes a hindrance rather than helpful is when parents begin to micromanage. Parents must remember that students should be expected to do their homework—and not because Mom stands over their shoulder until it’s done. Establish a set routine and stick to it. Your little study monkey should know that every day like clockwork, when he/she comes home, they makes a snack and start on homework. If your student is having trouble in school, run through their completed homework for mistakes, then help them with the questions they had trouble with. If your student normally tests well in school, ask if they completed their homework each night and trust that they have fulfilled each assignment completely. This allows your student to see that they need to be responsible for their own work and that you except them to be in charge. If they begin to slack on tests, start reviewing their homework again. Students need to learn how to be accountable for their studies. Writing down assignments, organizing papers and planning when to study are lifelong skills that they will need as a student as well as a professional.
Study Hut Tutoring and our entire team are ecstatic to announce that the Study Hut Foundation has officially opened its first office. For those of you unfamiliar with the Study Hut Foundation, it is the non-profit arm of Study Hut. Our mission is simple: to provide additional educational opportunities to underprivileged students.
We signed the lease on Friday, and we will begin getting the office ready for studying and tutoring by January 1st. This process will include everything from buying tables and chairs, to sharpening pencils and filling the candy bins….hehe….The office is located in Lomita (very close to Harbor City as well) and is located on Narbonne Avenue, right across from the public library. We will be serving students from many neighboring cities, but the convenience factor is definitely there for Narbonne High School students, so we will be working closely with counselors, teachers, and administrators. We are seeking students who need the help most, and also those who are most eager to use the assistance in a positive way.
The first goal of the Study Hut Foundation is to bring some of the same college preparatory services that we provide our current Study Hut students to less fortunate students in the local area. This will benefit the entire community, and will provide additional opportunity to local students who show the potential and desire to achieve. We will provide scholarships for subject tutoring in math (algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, precalc, etc.), science (biology, chemistry, physics, etc.), English, writing, reading comprehension, history (European history and U.S. history), government, economics, psychology, Spanish, French, and more. Additionally, we will offer SAT prep, ACT prep, and other test prep services, all free of cost.
Our team will consist of current tutors, as well as volunteers from local high schools and universities. We will specialize by subject, and we aim to provide the best service possible at the best possible price (free)!
For those of you interested, we will be adding a page for the Study Hut Foundation to our website shortly, and there will also be opportunities for donations and support in the near future. Stay tuned!
Time for our team to take off the party hats and roll up their sleeves. The Foundation is here!
As anyone who has ever attempted to write an essay knows, the hardest part is always the first sentence. However, when writing your college application essays, the difficulty often does not stop there. The essays for the common application may seem trite and cliché to many students, which makes them nearly impossible to write about. Furthermore, it is incredibly difficult to write an essay that highlights your attributes without sounding feverishly self-promoting. For some schools, the supplemental essays can be even more challenging, with prompts that seem obscure or overly complex. No matter what the topic, there are a few valuable tips for mastering the college essay that can help any struggling writer.
The most important aspect of the writing process is picking a topic. To begin with, it is important that the story be true. It is almost impossible to create genuineness out of a fabricated story. Choose a story that shows improvement or perseverance, even if you have to admit to being sub-par to begin with. It is exponentially more impressive to see upward trend than stagnation. Secondly, choose a topic that demonstrates your character; while great achievement is always impressive, great achievement in the midst of strong values and ethics is more impressive. For instance, use an example in which you were forced to make a choice and show how your decision reflected your morals and priorities. However, it is worth noting that a great deal of the value of the essay is based on writing style and ability: no one assumes that people around age seventeen have had a plethora of life-altering encounters. Thus, it is certainly possible to make up for a less than flamboyant and awesome story with your ability to artfully recount the story.
The next important consideration in drafting the college essay is length. There truly is skill in conciseness. The guidelines for the common application ask for two essays totaling no more than one thousand words between them; that means stick to approximately five hundred words per essay. If you use the majority of your word allowance on one essay, you may end up shortchanging the other. Conversely, using too many words on an essay may become redundant. Part of the limitation is about showing that you can tell a brilliant story in a small number of words. Anyone can tell a story with unlimited space; it takes much greater skill to tell it quickly by choosing your words wisely.
Lastly, it is important to meticulously edit your paper. Grammatical mistakes can take a beautiful essay and reduce it to an unsavory mess. You should pay careful attention to structure and mechanics whenever writing an essay.
The college application process can be intimidating and scary for many students. However, with some simple planning, it can prove an easy task. When you get stuck, walk away for a while and come back to it with fresh eyes. If you follow these steps, you will be on your way to a great essay!
For those of you who don’t speak math, this title translates to Study Hut Redondo Beach – located in the Riviera Village and affectionately known as Hut 2 – being much, much better than Study Hut Manhattan Beach (Hut 1). We at Hut 2 felt a recent blog post from Hut 1 warranted a quick, elegant rebuttal in the form of a blog post of our own. Of course this will come in a proper list of exactly why Hut 2 is undeniably much, much greater than Hut 1.
Hut 2 may be smaller, but our reach extends far beyond that of Hut 1! Our extensive list of schools in the south bay we serve include: Alta Vista, Jefferson, Adams, Birney, Parras, Redondo High, Beryl Heights, Riviera Hall, Riviera Lutheran, Dapplegray, Miraleste, Rolling Hills Prep, PV High, PVIS, Peninsula High, Ridgecrest, Chadwick, Bishop Montgomery, Calle Mayor, Richardson, South High, West High, North High, and San Pedro High.
With that many schools, it is natural that we tutor every subject imaginable. Whether it is math, English, science (i.e. biology, chemistry, physics, anatomy, etc.), history, reading, writing or foreign languages, we most certainly have a tutor available to suit your needs!
The claim that Hut 1 offers more attention to its students than Hut 2 hurts us deeply. Anyone who has been tutored at Hut 2 knows how flexible we are with our scheduling. We accept same day appointments and moving appointments with ease because we understand the needs of our busy students.
The manager competition is no contest, especially since we have two! Justin and Tara keep Hut 2 running smoothly regardless of the chaos caused by finals, the SAT or college applications!
The plain fact over here is that we are cool. Rather than a copycat younger brother, Hut 2 is more of an example of where the apprentice has far surpassed the master.
We will concede the point made by Hut 1 that both huts are actually great. What we should really be watching out for together are the El Segundo and Newport Study Huts that look to usurp us from our tutoring thrones!
Palos Verdes High School AVID Family! It’s time for our 5th Annual Car Wash. In this blog, I will try to address some questions you may have about the Car Wash. Here we go….
DO WE NEED EVERYONE’S HELP?
Yes. We need everyone’s help.
HOW CAN I / MY FAMILY HELP?
Your family can help in some of the following ways:
1) Attend the Car Wash and wash cars. Bring the whole family. It’s a fun day!
2) Bake some delicious treats for the bake sale end of the car wash. If you’re able, package them for sale, but if you’re not able to package them don’t worry. You can bring them game day or you can deliver them the day before to your AVID teacher’s classroom.
3). Bring liquid refreshments to the car wash. A case of water or a gatorade type beverage is fantastic. A 6-pack of water or beverage is fabulous. Bring what you like to drink and bring a couple of extra for someone else and then we’ll have plenty. Bring your drinks on game day or bring over the next couple of days to your AVID teacher’s classroom.
4) Bring food for you and a few others. Families in the past have brought: breakfast burritos, bagels, subway, pizza, Taco Bell, and more. Again, bring what you like and if you feed 2-10 other people then we’ll be able to keep all our troops fueled up for the morning and post car wash clean up.
5) Bring a cooler for the drinks. If you bring it game day, ice would be clutch. If you bring it to your AVID teacher’s classroom by Friday we will get the ice (if available down in the athletic trainer’s office).
6) Do you or someone you know play in a band? We need more performers for the concert end of our Car Wash and Concert.
7) Bring some towels home to wash and dry. If everyone takes one load home, that will “spread the wealth” on this fun job. Wash and dry at your leisure and return to your AVID teacher.
8) Wear a costume on the day of the wash!AVID CAR WASH FUN (and some not so fun) FACTS
The Car Wash started 5 years ago and almost nobody (except the AVID teachers) thought it would be successful. The highest anyone at PV High had made on a car wash was between $1,000 to $2,000. When you factor in the $50 most AVID families spend on their 5 car wash tickets and all the students at PVHS buying car wash tickets for extra credit, we have made $10,000 or more many years on the car wash.
Where does the money go? The money is deposited into our ASB account. Our biggest expense is tutoring. Our tutors do not make a ton per hour, but over the course of 10 months, it adds up. Also, we pay the teacher tutors for their good work in January and June when they man our after school finals tutorials. Other money is used to defer the cost of buses when there is an AVID trip, or to pay for the substitute teachers when an AVID teacher is chaperoning an AVID trip, to pay for the AVID t-shirt (coming soon) you receive the first semester each year, to pay for some classroom supplies, and some Fun Friday costs and more! The money cannot come out of our AVID ASB account without a receipt. So everything is documented and on the up and up.
THANK YOU for helping make the AVID Car Wash and Concert (and Bake Sale) one of the best days of the year. See you Saturday. Teachers will be at school from 6:45 am to the end of wash (hopefully around 1:30 if we have a large clean up committee 🙂
Teaching a student from home has its benefits. Homeschooling is essentially one-on-one instruction delivered from the comforts of one’s own home. Every student in the traditional classroom can testify to the myriad of distractions; other students are the often the culprit. At home, with only one instructor, and no other students, comprehension and retention rates can be recorded with hockeystick like improvements.
Installing a whiteboard at home can make the lessons fun!
At the end of the day, the material that 30 students have difficulty grasping, is readily understood and mastered by a homeschool student in a fraction of the time. Is the teaching so much better at home? Sometimes yes and sometimes no– it always depends on the instructor, in the same way that success in sports can be pinned to the coach. The real takeaway is the dramatic difference between the interaction of the instructor and the student. A classroom is often forced to move at the pace of the slower half of the class, and often times, caters to hand raising of the slowest individuals. This type of classroom tailored teaching is inevitable because everyone learns at a different rate. The unfortunate side effect of having to adjust the speed of the lesson is that regardless of the if the teacher moves a faster rate or slower rate, a group of students will ultimately be turned off by the process claiming that the teacher is moving too quickly and they dont understand, or too slowly, and the students are bored. Homeschooling directly combats with enigmatic catch-22 by tailoring one lesson at a time to one student at a time. A tailored one-on-one approach allows the student to absorb the lesson, regurgitate its elemental concepts, practice and move on. Extra attention can specifically be applied to individual points of confusion and similarly, less time can be spent when the student is quickly showing understanding at a proficient level or higher.
The richness of homeschool can be measured not only by test results, but testimonials. Students boast that they are able to surround themselves with a wider range and use of multimedia tools such as: youtube, computer programs, live experiments, and outdoor demonstrations. When all is said and done, textbooks are taught start to finish, an unheard of notion in traditional schools, students are stronger with their test scores, as a result of continual tailored instruction, and education is no longer viewed as a dreaded duty, but rather a meaningful pursuit because of a greater use of tied in outside applications.
Hey Parents! Thinking of having your son or daughter attend an independent, magnet or private school next school year? With the ISEE exam dates fast approaching, here is some information that may help you get ready!
The Independent School Entrance Exam (ISEE) is an entrance exam used by many independent and magnet schools in California, including Chadwick, Vistamar, and Rolling Hills Prep.
Has three levels of testing; the lower level for entrance in grades 5-6, the middle level for grades 7-8, and the upper level for entrance into grades 9-12.
-Consists of 5 sections: Verbal Reasoning, Quantitative Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, Mathematics, and a timed 30 minute essay.
The High School Placement Test (HSPT) is a different test for admission to schools, such as Bishop Montgomery and Notre Dame Academy.
Is given only to 8th graders for placement into a 9th grade school
Also consists of a verbal, quantitative reasoning, reading comprehension and mathematics section, but has a 25 minute language section instead of an essay.
Here at Study Hut we offer an amazing ISEE prep to help get your student prepared for this important entrance exam. On top of reviewing all of the basic curriculum from school that they will need to know to do well on the test, students will also learn effective test taking skills as they review the types of questions that will be presented to them on the exam. Our young, local tutors are experts in many different disciplines, and can help your student solidify their confidence and ace this test!
Be sure to register at least three weeks in advance of the test date to secure a spot for your student. Test dates for our South Bay schools are:
ISEE
Chadwick School, Palos Verdes Peninsula – December 1st, 2012
Vistamar School, El Segundo – December 1st, 2012
Rolling Hills Preparatory School, San Pedro – December 8th, 2012
HSPT
Bishop Montgomery, Torrance – January 19th, 2013
Notre Dame Academy, Los Angeles – January 19th or 26th, 2013
