The biggest thing to happen to the college search scene in years just went public, and it’s called Unigo. It is a tremendous new company which I think will really make big waves: it’s essentially an online, user-generated college guide book, though that description sells it short. This weekend’s New York Times Magazine does a good job telling readers all about Unigo, but I’d like to take a moment to share my story about this very exciting enterprise as well.  Unigo is a must-visit site for:

1. anyone applying to college (how I wish I had such a resource!),
2. anyone at college (to tell the true story of your institution), and
3. anyone working at the college (to get an easily accessible angle on what students are thinking and saying).

What makes Unigo so clever and interesting? So slashdot-worthy? Unigo launched last week with tens of thousands of reviews, photos, and videos for a pre-launch list of 225 colleges–30,000 reviews at launch, and that number grows daily. I expect to see a big explosion after this press bump, since these first few ten thousands were just done with the organizational skills of a few interns and the great Unigo team. I know they’re great because I got a chance to visit their NYC office and meet them : )

Unigo’s founder, Jordan Goldman, contacted me out of the blue last spring asking me if I would be interested in a secret project of his. I knew little about Jordan except what I remembered from reading The Gatekeepers, where his college quest was profiled, and from what Google told me. Still, I figured that anyone who insisted I come to New York to learn about their secret internet project must really have had something interesting for me to see, so I hopped on a commuter train as fast as I could to meet with him. And how glad I am that I did! I learned all about Unigo (then going by the stealth name ‘ByStudents’ to collect its reviews) and really just fell in love with the project.

I gladly took a spot on the advisory board and have been really excited over the last few months as I’ve seen the web site transition from wireframes to code and finally to launch. (I even helped contribute some content myself, working with some Unigo staffers to film a series of exceptionally boring videos about Yale.)

So, a little more about Unigo - pulling here from the press release. Unigo features…

Original articles from students and recent grads on every aspect of college admissions and college life;

An Intelligent Calendar to guide students through the search/application process;

“Unigo Match” to help students find the colleges that are right for them, and current students at those colleges with whom they can interact

For 225 top colleges, editorially-written overviews, accompanied by tens of thousands of current student reviews, photos, videos and documents

Ability to search through reviews of every college by each reviewers’ gender, ethnicity, major, political leaning, hometown and more, so you can see every college from a variety of perspectives

All content can be rated, commented on and flagged by other users to ensure truthfulness and accuracy.

Jordan is going a long way towards enabling some of the changes that I have been working towards with my blog. As Chuck Hughes, a former Senior Admissions Officer at Harvard says,

“It’s frankly incredible that this hasn’t been done before. Unigo gives high school students and parents an unprecedented volume of the content they need, centered around one of life’s most stressful decisions.  And it gives college students all the reviewing, video-sharing, photo-sharing, document-sharing and networking capabilities now familiar to web users everywhere – but all in one place, and with a purpose.”

Jordan tested out this approach with some dead-trees guidebooks (Students’ Guide to Colleges) in 2005 and 2006 while at Wesleyan. One visitor to my site was impressed but wrote me to say that they stole my vision — on the contrary, Jordan was already making it happen long before I was even blogging, connecting current students with prospective applicants in an authentic and honest communications channel.

So what makes Unigo different? I went on at length about this with a few reporters this summer, though to my chagrin it looks like none of my interviews were catchy enough to merit printing ; ). In short, Unigo succeeds where many other websites have failed because it goes above and beyond flawed quantitative approaches to college admissions searches. Too many sites ask readers just to crudely rate different aspects of schools and then write a few scant sentences about their entire experience. The brilliance and genius of Unigo is that the questionaires students work from really inspires thoughtful and lengthy responses which are meaningful to readers. It’s not a problem that was easy to solve, as anyone who has administered a survey can attest.

It’s true that Unigo will not be a perfect source of information, and it’s not a replacement for all college admissions rituals. But I think that time spent on Unigo (free!) is much better than time spent supporting distorting publications ($$$ for a yearly update of US News & World Report’s joke of a report). I don’t think that someone should make their entire admissions decision on the basis of what they can see on their screen–how do you average together a few hundred subjective opinions of someplace to make your own judgment?–but I think Unigo will be a great complement. Especially for people who are less able to just up and travel around the country to visit schools, the addition of more photos and videos, and especially more raw footage, is a fantastic boon. Or, in this global world, imagine the international student faced with a one-dimensional college website–where else were they to turn before now?

The fact that Unigo will also have editorial reviews will helpfully add a nice layer of polish to the volumes of user-generated reviews, but just reading through them there is a real amazing quality to the collection. At some schools, more than 10% of the student body contributed! This is a really amazing figure. Can you imagine, even if you went to visit a school, talking to 10% of its student body and asking them how they felt about their experience?

I could write more about Unigo, and would like to continue this conversation with any readers who would like to have it - please comment and tell me what you think, and let Unigo know at their company blog, too. I won’t keep your attention any longer - go ahead and check out Unigo for yourself, maybe look at your own school / alma mater / dream school, then come back here and tell me what you think!

More background about Unigo:

Jordan Goldman, Unigo’s founder/CEO, is now 26 years old.  As a 17 year-old Goldman was featured in a New York Times article on the college admissions process.  Times education reporter Jacques Steinberg began following Goldman, and the specifics of Goldman’s own college search later became the subject of Steinberg’s New York Times bestselling book The Gatekeepers.The next year, as a college freshman, Goldman set out to improve the college search process by creating a series of more accurate, honest and 100% student-written college guidebooks.  Goldman’s Students’ Guide to Colleges went on to be published by Penguin Books in 2005, was updated for publication in 2006, and was featured in Forbes, US News and Time Magazine.

Goldman created Unigo.com and formed a board headed by Frank V. Sica (a private equity investor and board member of JetBlue), and an advisory board that counts Tom Rogers (CEO of Tivo), Bob Chase (former president, National Education Association), Chuck Hughes (former Senior Admissions Officer, Harvard University), Don Ross (Chief Revenue Officer, Bankrate.com) and education blogger Sam Jackson as members.  Goldman’s partners in Unigo include design firm Deepend New York, build firm GotCoders and entertainment firm Autonomy.

Contact:
Sharon Fuchs
Sharon@unigo.com
(O) 646-861-7845
(C) 917-364-6194

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Greetings, readers! I’m sorry to have left everyone hanging over the summer. I was in Washington, D.C. working as a policy intern for Google, which was fascinating and a lot of fun. Now that school is back in session I have lots more to write about, once again, so will be resuming my more regular schedule quite soon. I’m currently in the midst of shopping period, frantically trying to take as many classes at once to pare down my list from 200 possible courses to about 4.5-5.5 credits worth of coursework. I’ll keep you all posted!

As usual, I am very very very happy to answer any and all questions, so please send them my way - comment here if you have something you’d like me to specifically write about. Thanks!

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Today I am very excited to announce that the college admissions scholarship I originally outlined and later updated is finally off the ground: myUsearch has stepped up to the plate and is offering $1000 to the best student essay answering the following questions: What has been the most frustrating part of your college admissions process? Why is it important for colleges and universities to change this? What suggestions do you have for colleges and universities to try to relieve your frustration and the frustration of your fellow students?

The program I originally envisioned would be specifically linked to an effort to promote the development of new resources for students in the college admissions / higher ed marketing spaces. I remember how frustrating and painful college admissions was–that’s why I started this blog, and why I continue to work to try to make things better. With my younger sister (now 15) just gearing up to apply to college, and the demographics and admissions figures ever-worsening, there is no better time for a scholarship like this one which will hopefully bring us all some really great new ideas. I am going to work to make sure that the best of these suggestions received get heard by schools.

The scholarship is open to fall ‘08 freshman and those students applying for 2009 (important update as of 5/22!). pursuing an associate or bachelor degree at an accredited U.S. postsecondary institution with a combined household income of $100,000 or less. If that describes you, apply today! If it doesn’t, tell a friend for whom it might be applicable. More rules and instructions after the break in this post.

I will be involved in the judging, and personally I would encourage participants to write about ways that new technology (especially the internet and new media) could help improve the college admissions / higher education process — basically, I’m hoping to see some really great stories and ideas which will then be put into action convincing colleges to make these reforms happen!

I originally wanted to organize a scholarship from the ground up myself, but it turns out that this is quite tricky! Having myUsearch administer the scholarship proved to be a good alternative. I do want to thank all of my friends and colleagues who were ready to put money on the table for my proposed scholarship, and I would say that I hope to be able to do more in this direction, long term. This is going to be a great start.

More details in the days ahead! Complete Press Release and instructions below.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Finished my last final this afternoon, so I’m home free. After 55 pages of papers, 6 hours of sitting for testing, I’m all done. Just packing this evening (…all evening…) and moving things into college storage tomorrow. I’ll be back in Newton Tuesday night. It’s been a very interesting year, lots of new experiences, and I will be posting some reflections soon–just have to take a little breather first, spend some time with my dog and relax. I’ll be home for the next few weeks until I am leaving memorial day for California, then starting June 1st at my internship in Washington D.C.!

Good luck to all those readers who still have final exams going… more details soon.

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Two weeks ago I outlined all the courses I was taking this semester, and a few days ago announced that I was going to become a complete recluse while I worked on my final papers and studied for tests. Let’s combine those two thoughts, and take a look at what my finals schedule and workload looks like. This is not exactly typical, thankfully. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have to do it all!

In the order that the final exams are due:

• May 2nd (already due): 15-18 page paper for EP&E 353, Critique of Political Violence. I wrote 17 pages exploring the possibility of “nonviolent nonviolence in a violent world.”

• May 5th: 20 page paper for EP&E 440, Nonviolence and Political Power in the Twentieth Century. I am writing a paper questioning the Universality of Eastern European nonviolent movements 1920-1980 and tracing the disconnects between universality in theory and universal practicability, comparing successful 1980s nonviolent movements with unsuccessful antecedents and comparing with Gandhi and MLK.

• May 6th: 3 hour comprehensive French FR139 final, 9 am sharp… on science hill. Why my french final is in Sloane Physics Laboratory, I don’t know. I just resent the fact that it’s about 20 minutes away.

• May 6th: 10-15 page Sociology SOCY015 research paper. This is why I was running that survey for current Yale students. Collected the data, now have to analyze it, compile literature, write about findings.

• May 12th: EVST 245: 3 hour environmental studies final, wherein I will have to come prepared to regurgitate my prepared response on how to develop an effective global environmental governance scheme. So, basically, save the world.

So… that’s why I shouldn’t be blogging right now, why I’m going to stop blogging right now, and why I could be a little bit happier… wish me luck!

0_o

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