College Terms: S-Z

College Glossaries:

By term: A - H | I - R | S - Z

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College Terms: S - Z

• Scholarship: Money being given to you for your studies. You usually do not need to pay scholarship monies back. Scholarships can come from your school, an organization, or a contest.
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• Service Learning: Service Learning is an approach to learning (i.e., classroom learning) that is often complemented by experiential learning (i.e., volunteering, immersion programs).
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• Teaching Assistant (TA): Often the same thing as a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI), a TA is often a graduate student who helps out in your classes. They made grade papers, lead seminar discussions, and sometimes teach classes.
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• Tenure: Tenure is something unique to higher education. A traditional path of someone who wants to teach at a college is to get their PhD, and then get a job as a professor on a campus. For the first six years or so that they are teaching, they are usually in a "tenure-track" position. This means that they are focusing on teaching, doing research, getting published, and contributing to the campus community. If all goes well, the professor is then granted tenure. Earning tenure is equivalent to ensuring one's job on a campus. If you have a tenured professor teaching your class, it means you have someone who has been at the school for a while and been judged, by a committee of their peers and the academic dean, to be an essential member of the faculty and campus community.
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• Tuition: The cost of your classes. Some schools charge tuition based on how many units you are taking, while others charge a base rate per semester as long as you stay within a certain range of units.
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• University: In contrast to a college, a university traditionally offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees and programs. (There are, of course, some exceptions to this rule.)
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• Visiting Professor: Just like the "professor" term mentioned above, a visiting professor usually has a PhD. However, a visiting professor is usually someone not normally associated with your college or university. He or she may only be there for one semester or one academic year, and is usually also doing research or other work. It's hard to gauge what a visiting professor will be like, since you usually can't check with other students about their experiences with someone who hasn't taught classes on campus before.
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• Work Award: Another name for work study.
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• Work Study: this is basically a "job" that you will have as part of your financial aid package. (Note, however, that you still need to go out and find a job yourself; this just provides funding for it.) Most students work on campus but some work study jobs can be set up off-campus. You are usually not allowed to make more money in your work study job than has been allocated in your financial aid package.

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