glossary

Academic Adviser/Counselor: A highly trained professional who can help you make effective academic decisions and refer you to valuable campus resources.

Academic Plan: A tool used by students and their advisers to plan and track a student’s progress toward obtaining a degree or certificate.

Accountable: Responsible for completing tasks and meeting obligations.

Action Plan: A list of steps you’ll take to accomplish a goal and the order in which you’ll take them.

Active Reading: A reading strategy that involves engaging with the material before, during, and after reading.

Barrier: A personal characteristic or something in your environment that prevents you from making progress toward a goal.

Behavioral Interview Questions: Specific interview questions designed to reveal information about how you act and react in certain situations.

Budget: A plan that documents income and expenses for a specific period of time.

Career Counselor: A specially trained professional who uses career assessments and other resources to help students explore career options and make career decisions.

Chronological Résumé: A résumé that lists work and extracurricular experiences in reverse chronological order, with the most recent appearing first.

Cite: To give another author credit when you include his or her ideas in your paper or project.

Cloud: A place on the Internet where you can store your files.

College Major: A collection of courses that are organized around an academic theme.

Cornell System: Method of note taking that organizes each page of content into sections: initial notes on the right, key points in a cue column on the left, and a summary section at the bottom of the page.

Cover Letter: A formal letter in which you introduce yourself, your interest in a job, and your appropriate skills and qualifications.

Critical Thinking: The ability to consider information in a thoughtful way, understand how to think logically and rationally, and apply those methods of thinking in your classes and your life.

Cumulative Exams: Exams that cover everything you’ve learned in the course up to that point in the term.

Discrimination: Treating people less favorably because of their membership in a particular group.

Diversity: Characteristics or attributes that make us different from one another and that can be the basis for membership in a group.

Elaborative Rehearsal: The process of making connections between new ideas and other information already stored in your memory.

Emotional Intelligence: The ability to recognize, understand, and manage your own and others’ emotions.

Empathy: The ability to understand another person’s emotions.

Encoding: Taking in information and changing it into signals in our brain.

Extrinsic Motivation: Motivation that derives from forces external to you, such as an expected reward or a negative outcome that you want to avoid.

Fixed Mindset: The belief that one cannot improve one’s talents, skills, and abilities.

Functional Résumé: A résumé that groups entries by skills and experiences.

General-Education Courses: A set of course requirements that gives all students a broad liberal education in the natural and social sciences, humanities, arts, and mathematics.

Goal: An outcome you hope to achieve that guides and sustains your effort over time.

Growth Mindset: The belief that one can improve and further develop one’s skills.

Information Literacy: Finding information, evaluating its quality, and effectively communicating it to others.

Integrity: Being honest and displaying behavior that is consistent with one’s values.

Interpersonal Communication: An active exchange of information between two or more people.

Intrinsic Motivation: Motivation that stems from your inner desire to achieve a specific outcome.

Learning Preference: Your preferred method for acquiring and working with information. Also called a learning style.

Long-Term Memory: Memory that stores a potentially limitless amount of information for a long period of time.

Metacognition: Thinking about thinking or about learning.

Mnemonic: A learning strategy that helps you memorize specific material.

Multimodal Learner: Someone who uses many different learning strategies to adapt to the situation at hand.

Occupational Projection: The predicted rise or fall in the number of new jobs in a particular field.

Paralinguistics: Changes in the voice (such as volume or pitch) that convey emotion.

Paraphrase: To restate information in your own words.

Personal Success Plan (PSP): A tool that helps you establish SMART goals, build action plans, evaluate your outcomes, and revise your plans as needed.

Plagiarism: When one person presents another person’s words or ideas as his or her own.

Positive Psychology: A branch of psychology that focuses on people’s strengths rather than on their weaknesses and that views weaknesses as growth opportunities.

Prioritize: To give an activity or a goal a higher value relative to another activity or goal.

Procrastinate: To delay or put off an action that needs to be completed.

Professional Association: An organization through which individuals who share a trade or job function can network and promote the interests of their profession.

Purposeful Reading Questions: Specific questions you want to be able to answer when you’ve finished reading.

Resilience: The ability to cope with stress and setbacks.

Résumé: A document that lists your education, work experience, and extracurricular activities.

Rote Rehearsal: Memorization of specific information or facts by studying the information repeatedly.

Self-Efficacy: Your belief in your ability to carry out the actions needed to reach a particular goal.

Sensory Memory: Process that uses information from the senses to begin creating memories.

Service Learning: Classes that combine classroom instruction with volunteer experience in the community.

Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs): Illnesses, some treatable and some incurable, that are spread through the exchange of bodily fluids during sexual activity.

Short-Term Memory: Memory that stores a small number of items for a short period of time.

SMART Goal: A goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant to you personally, and time-limited.

Supplemental Instruction: A student-led study program for especially difficult classes.

Test Anxiety: Nervousness or worry about performance on an exam.

Thesis: The main idea or argument of a paper or an essay.

Transferable Skills: Skills that can be applied in many different settings, such as work, home, and school.

Work Values: The aspects of your work or your work environment that you consider important.

Working Memory: The part of short-term memory that actively processes memories and information.