Plan for application

This time I prepared some advices for Roa’a’s application to have a discussion with her. In our meeting, I started the conversation from an advice that she should go to observe classes that she is interested in or may take in the future after she is admitted. If she attends class and engages in discussion, asks questions and participates when appropriate, she will be standing out in a good way. This can also make her interest and commitment in success obvious, which may end up helping her if she needs to ask her professor for help with anything, or if she is interested in pursuing a master degree in his or her field. She agreed with me, but told me that she was afraid that if she showed up in a class one time, but then found it not interesting or she couldn’t go later because she was busy. That would give the professor a bad impression. I comforted her that at least she got the chance to make an impression on professors and let them know that she was interested. Besides, if she is interested in working with a specific professor for a thesis or graduate project, there is another good step she could take. Reading articles or papers the professor has published recently, or seeing work they've shown if they're in a creative discipline, can help her get a better idea of what their academic priorities are. Finally, I told her that sometimes, academic departments would have parties and other social events that professors, staffs and students would have an opportunity to interact in a more relaxed and fun environment. But here Roa’a was confused because she thought there was no channel for her to get this kind of information about the parties or events in educational leadership program. I suggested that just as we have mentioned before, going to observe classes is a good way to make friends with students and professors who are in that program, then she could get information from them.

Then our pronunciation project went well just as always, and this time Roa’a already recorded the one of the two passages in the Recorded Practice before we met, and she showed it to me. Now I feel my judgment about her English proficiency before was not completely right. Because I was always thinking that her English was good since she talked with me in a relatively fluent way. After listening her record this time, I felt she may be just good at daily life communications because she has been in US for years, but when it comes to academic readings, it seems her performance is not so good, especially her intonations, stress and pause of sentences. I have a feeling that she was like talking to someone in emotion when she was reading the passage about astronomy, so I should give her some guidance in how to read in a non-daily life way. This new finding will be my focus in our next meeting.

When we were going to say goodbye, she asked me if I was free tomorrow in the evening, because there would be an interesting activity at Hub about Turkish culture, and because her mom is from Turkey so she is also interested in Turkish culture. I told her I would definitely like to join her, but I had a shift at that time. Actually I am so excited that she asked me out.