extra, extra, make it professional

My topic is extracurricular activities and professionalization. First, I had to look up professionalization because I didn’t know what it meant. According to the Princeton online dictionary:
S: (n) professionalization, professionalisation (the social process whereby people come to engage in an activity for pay or as a means of livelihood)
An example of this would be American sports
Extracurricular activities are important for college students for many reasons. It helps students to build respectable resumes. Potential employers look at the involvement level on resumes, and generally view high levels as positive. These extracurricular activities are also important as students try to get into colleges. Students can find hope in this, for according to The College Board, “the good news is that colleges pay attention to your life both inside and outside the classroom. Yes, your academics probably come first, but your activities reveal a great deal about you, such as:
How you've made a meaningful contribution to something
What your non-academic interests are
Whether you can maintain a long-term commitment
Whether you can manage your time and priorities
What diversity you'd bring to the student body

According to collegematchus.com’s article, “ College Admission Trends,” Those, “Students hoping to gain an edge in an increasingly competitive admission picture can improve their chances by “professionalizing” their extra-curricular by using slide portfolios, CD’s/CD-ROM’s, to showcase their work to art departments and admission committees. By creating artist’s statements, portfolios or publishing their manuscripts in advance of applying to colleges, students can stand out more from the rest of the crowd.” I suppose they make their hobbies and activities seem more like an opportunity to get paid or earn a livelihood, which is more appealing to colleges and potential employers.

http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=professionalization
http://www.collegematchus.com/top_trends.htm

Therapeutic Touch

Energy has taken on a new identity in recent years. It has become something found in people, in nature, and in homes. It has also become something that is impossible to measure and unrelated to science in any way.
This is unfortunate because, as Robert Todd Carroll so perfectly puts it in his Skeptic Dictionary, “only healers with special powers at "unblocking," "harmonizing," "unifying," "tuning," aligning," "balancing," "channeling," or otherwise manipulating New Age energy, can measure this energy. How? They measure it by feeling it.” That leaves those of us who can’t “feel” this phenomenon at the mercy of those who claim that they can.
A curious 9-year old named Emily Rosa took this dilemma into her own hands. She tested 21 therapeutic touch (TT) practitioners to see if they could feel her life energy when they could not see its source. The test was very simple and seems to clearly indicate that the subjects could not detect the life energy of the little girl’s hands when placed near theirs. The Skeptic’s Dictionary stated that, “they had a 50% chance of being right in each test, yet they correctly located Emily's hand only 44% of the time in 280 trials.” If they can’t detect the energy, how can they manipulate or transfer it? What are they detecting? In another instance, Dr. Dolores Krieger, one of the creators of TT, was offered $1,000,000 by skeptic James Randi, to demonstrate that she, or anyone else for that matter, could detect the human energy field. So far, Dr. Krieger has not been tested.


http://skepdic.com/energy.html