Fill in the blanks with suitable words and expressions from the box.

Plagiarism, mind-map, feedback, deadline, first draft, submitted, assessed, writing up

1. It’s a good idea to start with a ………. when preparing an essay.

2. Always write a ………… before ……… the final version.

3. Your essay should be all your own work; ………… is a very serious offence in most colleges and universities.

4. There is usually a ………, a date by which you must hand in the work.

5.After the essay is ………, it will be………… and usually you can get …………, comments from the tutor.

F. Creative Consolidation

Write an article for a magazine about the importance of education in contemporary competitive world, developing one of the following theses.

- “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.”(US President John F.Kennedy)

- “Schools should be responsible only for teaching academic skills and not for teaching ethical and social values.”

- “Since science and technology are becoming more and more essential to modern society, schools should devote more time to teaching science and technology and less to teaching the arts and humanities.”

Write an essay expressing your own opinions on the following statements.

a) George Reedy, a retired professor of journalism from Marquette University, writes in his farewell speech:

The doom of the specialist draws closer every time someone punches the keys on a word processor. Of course, we will still need doctors, lawyers, plumbers, and electricians. But will there still be a brisk market for all the specialties we have fostered in the economic and social fields? I doubt it. The future will belong to those who know how to handle the combinations of information that come out of the computer, what we used to call the “generalist”. The day of the generalist is just over the horizon and we had better be ready for it.

Do you agree with Reedy’s prediction? If so, what are those specialties that will no longer be needed and how will a generalist approach solve the problem of dying specialties?

b) At some universities in the United States, undergraduate students are allowed to design individualizes majors, self-designed courses of study for students who may not find their calling in a traditional college department. Majors such as “Documentary Film and Native American Studies” and “Comparative Communism: China and Russia” have been created by students to fit their individual interests. Faculty claim that, although these major may seem narrow, they allow for a brad-based education and that students tend to be quite motivated and do well in them. Students explain that a university education is now too expensive for them to waste time studying subjects that do not interest them or help them in their career goals.

What is your reaction to this program of study, given the arguments for specialized and generalized approaches to higher education?

Project Making

 Human race seems to have never been satisfied with the education system. Design an education reform. Be ready to present it at the conference on the problems of education.

 Your multinational corporation has just established a new department for training personnel. However there is no clear policy about training and support for expatriates (specialists who are supposed to work abroad). Each person has been dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Propose a company policy about expatriation, covering training, preparation and support both before departure and while they are abroad.

 There are an increasing number of training courses on cross-cultural awareness to try to minimize the impact of culture shock. But the problems of re-entry and reintegration are often overlooked. Make list of these problems. Try to work out some policies or actions that a company could take to reduce these problems.

Reading Selection

➢ Look through the articles and choose one for presentation. Find at least one more article on the same topic and make a synthetic review. [24]

■ 4.7 A. What Do Employers Say?

Getting an MBA is one thing. Getting employers to take it seriously is another. MBAs have not tradition­ally commanded the same respect in the UK as in the US, but an increasing number of UK employers are now taking them very seriously indeed.

None more so than top management consulting firm McKinsey. Of its 260 London consultants, around half have MBAs. The company actively recruits 30-40 people a year from major business schools, such as INSEAD in France, Harvard and Stanford in the US, and London Business School and Manchester in the UK. It spends around £1 million a year sponsoring its 25-30 graduate recruits to complete full-time MBAs at the same institutions.

'Essentially we see an MBA as a short cut to busi­ness experience', says Julian Seaward, head of recruit­ment for McKinsey's London Office. 'It enriches peo­ple with a lot of management theory, and perhaps a bit of jargon thrown in.'

However, the company still prefers MBAs gained abroad. With a longer established reputation in the US, business schools there still have the edge in attracting candidates, while INSEAD has positioned itself as an international school with a cosmopolitan faculty and student body.

'The networking and experience of other cultures is very useful as a lot of our clients are global', says Seaward. Nevertheless, McKinsey is actively raising its profile over here with a recently-launched scheme offer­ing external candidates sponsorship through a United Kingdom MBA with a guaranteed job afterwards.

With a £50,000 Harvard MBA, McKinsey knows how attractive its staff are to other employers. Those who wish to leave within two years have to repay their sponsorship, but Seaward believes the staff develop­ment strategy has a good return rate. 'We look for peo­ple to develop a long-term career with us, not just an analyst job for a couple of years, and reward high achievers with good salaries and opportunities.'

Equally convinced of the value of MBAs is direct marketing company OgilvyOne Worldwide, which recently established an MBA bursary for staff mem­bers.

Chairman Nigel Hewlett believes the MBA's formal education in analytical skills and constructing solu­tions provides a very useful training, producing people who have a good overview of business issues rather than a concern for details.

The company is currently undertaking an evalua­tion of the best UK schools in which to invest their bursary. With the recent big increase in the number of institutions offering MBAs, Hewlett is concerned that not all MBAs are equal. 'There are clear differences in terms of quality.'

But not every company favours MBAs. In the early 1990s, Shell actually abandoned its own MBA course at Henley when it realized it was not producing gradu­ates who fitted the jobs for which they were destined.

'We're slightly ambivalent towards MBAs,' says Andy Gibb, Shell's head of global recruitment. 'A lot of Shell's work is technical, while MBAs from leading schools are pitched at a more strategic level. It can be frustrating and unnecessary to be trained for strategic thinking, when the job you're moving into is not really suited to that. We would rather focus them on techni­cal leadership.'

Companies like chartered accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers take a more middle-of-the-road approach. While it does not actively target MBAs or recruit them directly from business schools, a grow­ing proportion of its senior consultants have got them, and it is increasingly on the lookout for MBA graduates.

“Our business is changing from audit and tax man­agement more into consultancy roles,' says UK recruitment partner Keith Bell. 'MBAs do bring a breadth of vision to the business problem rather than a narrow viewpoint, and that can be an advantage. But the issue is the longer term. If you sponsor some­one to do an MBA, will you get them back again?'

From The Independent

Culture

chartered accountant – an accountant who has successfully completed special examinations

bursary– an amount of money given to someone so that they can study at a university or college (=scholarship)

Vocabulary

command – order:command sb to do sth; deserve and get because you are important or popular: command attention/ respect/ authority; control: command a majority; command a view – if a place commands a view, you can see something clearly from it; command (n) : be in command; have sth under your command; at your command; have a command of (=have a good knowledge of sth); be in command of yourself/ your faculties (= to be able to control your emotions and thoughts

overview – a short description of a subject or situation that gives the main ideas without explaining all the details: give an overview of

concern – sth that worries you: concern about/ over/ for; be a cause for concern; be of concern (to sb)- be important to sb and make you worry; sb’s concern –if something is your concern you are responsible for it; a business or a company( The restaurant is a family concern); a going concern (= a business that is financially successful); concern (v): to whom it may concern – an expression written at the beginning of a formal letter when you do not know the name of the person you want to communicate with; as far as I’m concerned

destined – (adj) (not before noun): be destined for; destined to do sth; destined lover/ profession(= the person, thing etc that you will have in future); destiny (n)

ambivalent – not sure whether you want or like sth or not;ambivalence (n)

frustrate – make sb feel annoyed or angry because you are not able to do what you want; prevent sb’s attempts or plans from succeeding; get frustrated with; a frustrated poet/ actor/ dancer etc – someone who wants to develop a particular skill but has not been able to do it;frustration (n): in/ with frustration