What Does it Take to Become a Neurosurgeon?

The general path to becoming a neurosurgeon looks like this: school > test > school > residency > specialization.

The first educational step in becoming a neurosurgeon is getting an undergraduate degree. Technically, any undergraduate degree would be sufficient, but the less science you have, the harder you’ll find it is to get into med school and do well there. Therefore, most undergraduates who are planning to become doctors major in pre-med, biology, chemistry, biochemistry, or some combination thereof. Since doctors need communication skills, you’ll need English and humanities as well.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a solid base of math and physics in there. Actually, that’s an understatement: some medical schools require calculus to get in, and some schools spell out how much of each science/area you need to take (two semesters minimum of organic chemistry, two of inorganic, two of biology, two of English, one of calculus).

After undergraduate school, of course, comes medical school. The best medical schools are both difficult and competitive in entry, so you’ll want to make sure your undergraduate grades are very high. How high? Don’t be surprised if the medical school is choosing among candidates who all have A averages.

In addition to your grades, there’s the test: the MCAT, a standardized admission test for medical school (MCAT = Medical College Admissions Test). The MCAT has three multiple choice sections covering physical sciences, verbal reasoning, and biological sciences, and a fourth section where students provide a writing sample.

Finally, since medical school entrance is so competitive, you may need something beyond great grades and test scores to get in, like extracurricular activities.

Once you’re in medical school, you get several more years of medical training. Four years is the standard length, but some schools vary that a little bit. The format of medical school also varies a little, but the most common distribution of courses requires two years of classroom studies, followed by two years in clinical settings. The classes involve more science, but are more specialized and applied. You’d study things like histology, in which you look at living tissues on a microscopic level, in your first year. (Some schools start their clinical education earlier, so you can start developing skills and applying your studies earlier.)

After medical school come residencies for another three to five years. That’s when you would really finally get a chance to become a neurosurgeon. You’d move through a number of specialties, assisting experienced doctors and treating real patients under supervision. During this time you’d try to match your desires with your skills. Surgeons must have fine motor control and be able to handle considerable stress. The supervising physicians would make suggestions about which areas fit you best, and you’d try different specialties. You’d start in general surgery, then move on to neurosurgery.

How Do I Find Out if a School is Regionally Accredited?

Good question, and actually, a pretty rare one. A lot of students just push on, based on the ads or word of mouth about the schools they are interested in, so it is good to see folks thinking ahead like this.

First, a small reminder: regional accreditation is binary, meaning you either have it or you don't. There are not degrees of regional accreditation, but there are degrees of quality. This means that in order to find a great school for you (as opposed to one that simply meets basic standards) you must look beyond accreditation to other indications of quality.

Second, if a school is new, it might be in the accreditation process, and not yet be accredited. To be frank, students who attend at this stage are gambling with their degrees.

Third, the U. S. Department of Education doesn’t accredit schools or individual programs, but they do keep lists of the agencies which do accredit programs. You can find more on this at the ed.gov website.

As part of that list, they provide a searchable database. Just type in the name of the institution, and you’ll be told which agency or agencies accredits it.

If you want to review information on a number of schools at once, visit this portion of the site.

That should get you started.

What Does it Take to Become a Chemical Engineer?

Chemical engineering is a very broad field. It intersects with physics on one side and the more mechanical sides of engineering on the other. For example, imagine you’re running a project to design a better boat hull. You might use chemical engineers to invent a new coating to reduce friction on the hull, while metallurgists work on the metal itself and mechanical engineers on rudder mechanisms.

 

If you start looking for chemical engineering jobs, you’ll find that an incredibly wide range of companies hire them. One chemical engineer might work on computer chips, another on water filtration systems, and a third on developing crunchier chocolate for candy bars.

This means three things. First, it means that as you move through the process of becoming a chemical engineer, you might have to master a number of industry-specific processes and technologies.

Second, because the field is so wide, you might find a number of jobs that are chemical engineering, or training programs that train you in chemical engineering, that are called other things. For example, one major journal in the field is called the Journal of Chemical Engineering and Process Technology.

The term “process technology” is so vague that you probably wouldn’t have any sense of what it meant just by reading it. (I know I didn’t.) However, read a description of a process technology program and you’ll find that it focuses on the processes involved in refining oil, treating paper products, cleaning waste water … much of which is, as you guessed, applied chemistry.

Third, because the field varies so much, you can get a general sense of how to become a chemical engineer, but beyond that, you’ll have to develop your own focus. 

The most common route to becoming a chemical engineer is through going to a college with a chemical engineering program. These programs are designed to be four year bachelor’s degree programs. To get in to a good chemical engineering program, you’d want to take all of the chemistry, physics, biology, and math your high school offers. To do well in chemical engineering, you will want to be at home in these disciplines, and in methodical problem solving that is also creative.

Once you get into this program, you’ll take chemical engineering classes, more physics, and more math. These classes involve lab work, and may include things like computer modeling plant design. You may get a chance to emphasize one area or another as an undergraduate. For example, some programs offer an emphasis in biochemistry, the environment, and/or materials.

This is a complex field, though, so you even with a bachelor’s in it you’ll want to look for more ways to get experience. Internships are a major way of doing this, and a common way of getting jobs in the field: the American Institute of Chemical Engineers keeps a list of companies offering internships.

Some chemical engineering jobs require a master’s degree in chemical engineering. These programs tend to run about two years long. In them you would take more advanced and more specialized science and technology classes, often focusing in a specific area. Finally, some jobs require a PhD in chemical engineering, which would continue the scientific study and move into research.

Once you’ve been a chemical engineer for a while, you can pursue professional licensure. Some jobs require this; some do not. To get a license, you need a bachelor’s in engineering, four years of experience, and to pass two exams.  This license is independent of a master’s or doctoral degree.

Home School VS. Public School

"Each day, more than 1,200 young men and women give up on their high school education, and, in many cases, on themselves" - so says the AdCouncil. Each day, 1,200 young men and women are becoming a burden to society. In a report done in March of 2006 for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it was found that one third of all Public High School students failed to graduate with less then 2 years to go. Nearly one half of those were blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Many students gave personal reasons for leaving school. A third (32 percent) said they had to get a job and make money; 26 percent said they became a parent; and 22 percent said they had to care for a family member. At the end of this article I will show you where to get the rest of this disturbing report.

I am not a fan of the public school system. Not with numbers like... the nationwide grand mean in reading for home schoolers was at the 79th percentile, and the 73rd percentile for language and math. This ranking means home school students performed better than approximately 77% of the sample population on whom the test was normed. Nearly 80% of home schooled children achieve individual scores above the national average and 54.7% of the 16,000 home schoolers achieved individual scores in the top quarter of the population, more than double the number of conventional school students who score in the top quarter.

Facts are facts, but commons sense dictates that the public schools just do not work. They keep throughing money at the problem, working on self esteem and incentives while passing out condoms. They took out morals and replaced it with acceptance. They took out accountability and replaced it with food stamps. That's what the government gives in return for your tax dollars. Not to mention the NEA. They are a force in Washington that would rival the IRS. Just mention the word 'school vouchers' and red flags go up while the race cards come down.

Point being that this great country does allow us a means to avoid the peer pressure filled, barb wire lined, police patrolling institutions we call public education. The number of home schools is rising every year, and with that are SAT test scores. The fact that nearly all home schools are Christian based is reason enough to go this route. But even if you took that out of the equation you would be left with flexible schedules, like going year round and taking a week off anytime you like. One on one training and tutoring, a nurturing environment as apposed to one that requires self defense as part of the curriculum.

It is easy to realize that the home school beats public school, and even private schools for that matter. One must consider the time it would take to pursue such a task though, along with the cost. I have found places that get the process rolling for a $75 Registration fee, $25 processing fee, and then $500 - $750 per child, depending on the number of children. These organizations will provide proper paperwork, curriculums, planners, schedules and support to keep it in line with all the various state laws that apply.

For those interested in many more statistics and getting further details on home schools, a good starting piont would be at http://www.wulliebull2.com/homeschool . Included is a fun read call "The Teachers Interview", which will need no explanation.

Should an MBA be open to anyone?

WHETHER the revolution in communication technology, with its culture of instant access, has made our lives easier is open to debate. But what is certainly true is that it has changed the face of business education. Once the poor relation of its campus-based equivalent, the distance-learning MBA has become a valuable alternative for students unwilling or unable to invest up to two years of their working lives in the classroom experience.

But has the concept of distance learning spun out of control? The sector now boasts a dizzying array of offerings from traditional, established providers like Warwick Business School in Britain to super schools such as the University of Phoenix in America, with over 455,000 students around the globe. In India, where universities and corporations are launching courses on a daily basis, distance learners are now counted in their millions, and look set to increase. Many observers expect the Indian distance-learning market to double every year for the next five years.

Online degree costs vary wildly, from as low as $200 for a set of books and a year of internet study, to $30,000 for a degree programme at an established school. So does pricing indicate the intrinsic worth of some programmes over others, or are we just seeing a logical fragmentation of a vast worldwide market? While it might be easy to sneer at the low-cost providers, do they perform a valuable function in democratising business education?

Although President Obama wants America to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by the end of the next decade, William Pepicello, president of the University of Phoenix, warns that for the first time in American history a new generation is in danger of being less educated than the previous one. Left unchecked, this will result in a shortfall of highly-skilled professionals—a problem that will not be addressed just through conventional students who go directly from high school to live and study on campus.

According to Dr Pepicello, such students make up only 27% of his undergraduate population today. The remainder are those who want to participate in higher education, but who are shut out of traditional institutions. They are often in their early 30s, possibly parents, working full- or part-time, and likely to be the first generation in their family to get an undergraduate education. Such students need to access classes at times that are convenient to them. This flexible integration of learning is one of the underlying appeals of distance learning, from Kansas to Kolkata.

But does student quality drop when targeting such a mass market? The University of Phoenix views its admissions approach as being inclusive, arguing that bricks-and-mortar universities exert a form of elitism by using grades and standardised testing as a way of restricting class size, whereas the distance-learning university can offer places to a wider student body whose priority is simply to move ahead.

Warwick Business School, on the other hand, insists on the same rigorous academic entry criteria for all its MBA programmes, whether distance learning, full- or part-time. Ray Irving, the school's head of learning resources development, explains that Warwick is targeting a different market segment, focusing on experienced managers with no option for a career break. An accredited distance-learning programme offers them a good alternative and access to a world-ranked school, no matter where in the world they are based. With students from over 110 countries, Warwick points to dramatic growth in the number of distance learners on its programmes from African countries such as Nigeria, as well as from North America.

India emerging

It is India, though, that is witnessing some of the fastest rates of adoption for distance learning. Since 2001, 24x7 Learning, one of the country's leading e-learning technology platforms, has welcomed over a million students to the various courses that they host for both academic institutions and corporate universities. Anil Chhikara, the company's president, believes the Indian market for online education is just five years behind America's—and is catching up fast. Inadequate physical infrastructure for India's 230m potential students, coupled with better technology, has driven a huge and diverse distance-learning market. Many of India's leading firms from retail to telecoms are also using e-learning to meet their business training needs.

Indian legislation ensures that a government or public sector employee who earns an online degree will benefit from an increase in both pay scale and pension. And for a student at the other end of the scale? Michael Cann, a graduate of the Warwick DLMBA, used his degree to move from middle management at a medium-sized pharmaceutical firm, through the executive committee of a leading UK bank, to the recently elected position of chairman of the British Generics Manufacturer Association. For Michael, distance learning gave him the chance to apply immediately what he learned in the classroom as he moved up the corporate ladder. A case of mission accomplished.

How do learners select a distance learning modality?

Learners should first assess the level of their need and desire for the learning. They should only engage in distance learning if their desire is strong. Learners should also assess the availability of the course or training in the different modalities. They should ask themselves:

1. Which modality offers the greatest schedule and location flexibility?
2. Which modality offers access to the most resources?
3. Which modality offers the most comfortable environment for discussion and critical thinking?
4. Which modality better matches his/her learning style?

These basic questions should help as a self assessment of the modality that best suits their needs.

Why distance-learning MBAs matter

DISTANCE-learning business education is a resounding success story. In America, specialist universities, such as the University of Phoenix, have hundreds of thousands of postgraduate business students enrolled. In India the total is probably in the millions. If, perhaps, the very top tier of universities are yet to offer distance programmes, still some very notable ones do: Carnegie Mellon or Thunderbird in America, Warwick or IE in Europe, for example.

Yet students who take their MBAs at a distance can find themselves railing against some intense snobbery. Full-time counterparts often decry that the only way to take the degree is to immerse oneself in the experience—to take time out from one's career to contemplate.

Perhaps, in an ideal world. But many people don't find themselves in the happy position to be able to take such an expensive sabbatical. Distance-learning programmes fall into two distinct camps, both of them laudable. The first might be labelled “democratic”. These are programmes that are open to all, regardless of geographic location, previous work experience or, because they are often cheap, ability to pay. It is easy for an MBA at a prestigious institution to sneer, but there is nothing to say that business education should be the bastion of the elite. Of course, there will always be a demand for Harvard MBAs in the boardrooms of McKinsey or Barclays. But business education is fundamentally about personal betterment. And that is something to which everyone should be able to aspire.

Nevertheless, such programmes can be thought of as a distinct branch of distance learning, and are not intended to be the focus of this report. It is the second type of programme that we are concentrating on here; those that are somewhat less democratic. Programmes that apply stricter entrance criteria and are offered by more traditional universities. Where students are expected to have good first degrees and significant work experience. And where the degree they receive will be of an equal standing to the full-time variety. Students might choose such a programme because they are in a part of the world which lacks high-quality schools, and it is the only option available to get a good degree. Or they may just prefer the idea of working at the time that suits them best.

Students on these programmes are less likely to change careers than their full-time equivalents. But they would expect to rise up within their own company. Indeed, many students will be sponsored by their current employers with just this is mind. And it is here that we see one of the most important benefits. Rather than squirreling themselves away in academic isolation, distance-learning students can apply what they learn on their programmes the very next morning in the workplace, making it the most practical way to study.

Distance learning isn't for everyone. It is very difficult to juggle work, family and study. Students need plenty of self-discipline. Choosing a school means considering more than a school's reputation: does the school keep you engaged? Is the technology effective? Does it offer value for money? Hopefully this report will go some way to helping answer those questions.