The phrase "advance themselves" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to indicate that someone is taking action to improve their situation or to reach a higher level of achievement. For example: "The students worked hard to advance themselves academically."
It's almost like mocking someone's sexual orientation in order to advance themselves," he said.
Academia has a lot of competitive individuals trying to advance themselves.
If they want to advance themselves, why not aid them to become physiotherapists or nurses?
They were greeted with awe, since they have taken the chance to advance themselves by living every boy's dream.
For women from working-class families or farms in Germany, the occupied zones offered an attractive opportunity to advance themselves, Ms. Lower said.
She falls into the hands of an obstructionist professor who has his own, Darwin-proof theories about how species advance themselves without benefit of evolution.
Leaders of the church and press urged blacks to open businesses in Harlem as a means of advancing themselves.
This may seem small, but remember that many runners who advanced themselves into scoring position may have scored anyway later in an inning or could have ended up stranded.
You ignore the reality that these motivated young people will lose out on a chance at advancing themselves and, more important, will not be part of classes of underachieving students who desperately need their presence.
To make his case, Mr. Hannas draws on a raft of data about Asian scientific research practices, technology piracy and graduate study abroad, all intended to show that Asians are brilliant imitators but poor innovators, adept at borrowing and improving on Western science but not so skilled at making advances themselves.
But most widely used drugs are only minor advances themselves.
