By now, most students have made up their marbles about where they will college within the fall, although a few are still on waitlists. In recent years, some interesting trends have grown to be apparent in college planning and college admissions. Here are a few observations that may affect your student:

1. High school counselors are now being cut at many public schools resulting in the counseling loads to improve. The average senior high school counselor works together with 450 students and spends 28% of their time on college planning. More people are embracing educational consultants and college planners because of the individual attention they can provide.

2. Public universities have become more expensive due to budget cuts and rising tuition. Along with rising tuition, many state universities are saving money by limiting classes. Some feel for this reason students take an average of 6.2 years to graduate. For parents, what this means is one more 2 years of college expenses. All students are including some private schools which are committed to seeing their students graduate in Four years on their college lists.

3. The Ivy League schools are actually accepting less than 10% of their applicants. This means that students who strive for these schools cannot expect to get in with only top grades and test scores. A distinct segment is almost always essential. Guiding students in their extracurricular activities can make a difference.

4. International students are now being desired by colleges within the U.S, This is increasing the competition attending college admissions for those students. Many colleges are actively recruiting international students who come from wealthy families who are able to spend the money for full tuition.

5. Students whose families will pay the entire amount are having better results with college admissions compared to those who require financial aid. Some schools are no longer capable of being need-blind in accepting students. Affording university has turned into a problem for any much larger segment from the population. Many parents, however, are embracing college planners who are providing some very valuable guidance to help make college more affordable.

6. Applications have continued to rise at almost every school in the U.S. It has become very common for college students to use to a many schools. Signing up to as much as 15 or 20 schools isn’t out of the question for some. Many students feel they need the additional colleges due to the competition.

7. More students are applying Early Decision even though they aren’t always sure it’s the school they would like to attend. Since Early Decision is binding, this is a problem for students and colleges. Early Decision and Early Action continue to be debated regarding whom they benefit the most.

8. More students are considering a gap year to give the economy a chance to rebound before they enter college. A gap year can be beneficial to students who may not be quite ready for college. It’s also an opportunity for students to sign up in a unique experience they might not have otherwise.

9. Women continue to have a larger struggle in college admissions than men. Many schools today possess a ratio of 60:40 women to men. Therefore, more men seem to be accepted at schools with lower grades and test scores than women.

A large number of students have returned to class this week for another gruelling year of lectures, assessments, thesis’s and exams. Hundreds of pages of lecture notes and assignment drafts is going to be written and typed through the coming year. So do you, the University Student, possess the correct backup procedure in position for all your effort?

When it comes to data backup it is best to be pro-active. A lot of students possess a hard drive crash, personal files become corrupt or a draft overwritten before they realise that they didn’t backup their data. Now being the beginning of the year it’s time to make a decision of methods you should and will backup your important, hard work throughout the year.

Many universities recommend while using following methods for backup:

1 – Save or copy files to your Student Drive

2 – Copy to USB thumb or hard disk

3 – Burn a duplicate to CD or DVD

4 – Print a duplicate of the document

It is advisable to back up your files in a minimum of two of these ways.

Although the above methods are actual backups, they’re far from ideal. Here’s why:

Save or copy files to your Student Drive

Although the university does backup a student drive data, it is a manual process for you to copy your data towards the drive and is tough to have a version good reputation for your projects. Also in the event of data loss on the student drive or accidental deletion, it’s very time consuming and difficult to get the universities IT department to recover your missing data.

Copy to USB thumb or hard disk

This really is another manual procedure that requires you to copy your everyday try to the backup device. This device is stored either on your person or in your own home where it is subject to many potential perils of damage and data loss, along with your laptop or desktop computer.

Burn a copy to CD or DVD

Another manual backup alternative using the identical risks as copying your data to a USB thumb or hard disk. Yet you have the added chance of scratching or damaging the CD or DVD media, because this media is quite fragile.

Print a copy of the document

This recommended backup method baffles me. Especially as it is a recommendation in one in our countries advanced schooling institutions. Just how can a hard copy be classified like a reliable backup method? Hard copies are subject to all sorts of physical damage and when one happens to lose your computer data from your laptop or desktop PC, your backup isn’t an electronic copy. So that you have to re-type the whole document again. Picture this was your third year thesis of approximately 5000 words. Is an option for you personally? Unlikely.

A true fool proof and reliable backup option would be an automatic one, where you do not need to remember on the daily or god forbid, weekly basis to backup your critical data. Additionally, your backup shouldn’t be kept in the same location as the laptop or pc. As you can tell the recommend methods from some universities are not even close to ideal.

Listed here are the main criteria you ought to be looking for in a backup solution for the important data:

Your backup data ought to be stored offsite inside a different place to your laptop or pc
The backup process should be automated, to perform a minimum of daily. Generally students use laptops and there’s no guarantee that the laptop will be on in the specified time daily so two or four hourly backups may get each one or two complete backups daily
The backup should store historical version of the data. A version history / retention period is extremely important when working with data that can days or even weeks to complete
The backup data should be secure and encrypted/password protected to ensure the privacy of the work

The above criteria are very simple, but imperative to secure your work in the case of computer failure, data corruption, theft, accidental deletion, accidental overwrite, the list goes on. It is possible to lose your computer data, yet it is even simpler to prevent.