the Sam Jackson College Experience

The issue of pollution in China is a very great one, and not a matter than can easily be summed up in one blog post, no matter how exhaustive. However, after several rain and then snowstorms over the weekend, the air quality today is so nice, and the scenery so beautiful as a result, that I just had to stop delaying and start writing a little bit about it.

Today the air quality in Beijing, as measured by the US State Department monitoring station at the US Embassy, is at one of its best levels I have ever noticed in my following the reported figures. In fact, at this very moment, the current rating is “Good,” the highest possible rating. This is extremely unusual, and really lovely for my lungs today. I noticed how clear the sky was, and how nice the air was to breathe, and this morning I had class on the 5th floor of a classroom building. Here’s the view that I have, reminding me of the beautiful scenery that you can ever-so-rarely see just outside the city…

Indeed, 风景很漂亮！ (The scenery,’fengjing,’ is ‘hen piaoliang,’ very beautiful). Apologies for photo quality, it’s just a borrowed iPhone shot, as I always forget to bring a camera to track the Monday morning classroom view.

It’s extremely difficult to describe what Beijing is like on its bad air days — which are many, even in the Fall, when the air is light-years better than the Summer air, apparently — to those who have never experienced it. This is true of a lot of things about China, of course, but in the case of pollution it is especially striking. I went to L.A. this summer for the 4th of July, and that was certainly a striking comparison to the San Francisco air I was used to all the rest of the summer. However, the comparison between San Francisco and L.A. can’t even begin to describe the difference between Beijing and say, New York.

Whenever I learn a new “comparison phrase” in Chinese class, my first instinct is to look out the window and talk about pollution (污染, wuran) or the air (空气， kongqi). Something like, “Although Beijing is very pretty, the air is not so good” (一方面北京很漂亮，另一方面北京的空气不太好). Although some say that they start to forget what blue skies look like, I thankfully (or not, depending on how you look at it) haven’t come to that stage just yet. Every day a large part of the equation that determines my happiness is determined by the color of the sky and the quality of the air.

Here is a photo, captured at a particularly bad moment, at the Summer Palace. This day was not cloudy, this photo was not retouched, and there was nothing wrong with my camera. On a day like this – which are especially bad, but not especially infrequent – you can stare directly at the sun without any real harm or pain, it seems, because it is so obscured through the smog. The photo was taken at a slightly ‘darker’ setting so as to bring out more detail, but the lack of contrast is real.

Not so great, right? That’s the seventeen-arch bridge at the Summer Palace, Kunming Lake, Beijing. Here’s a photo of another part of the lake, reflecting the summer palace, on a notably better day. This photo from someone nice (neverecho) on Flickr.

You can see a big difference, I hope. Now, the air is usually not as bad as in photo #1, though usually not as good as in photo #2, at least as measured by the “how much does it ruin sightseeing” factor. Every day I have Chinese class on the 5th floor of a building that looks out at the mountains in another direction, and my teacher told me two months ago that if I looked out a certain window, I could see the summer palace. I thought I didn’t understand her – that I had lost something in the translation – because every day, no matter how hard I looked, I saw no evidence of the place… until today, when I saw the top of the Buddhist Incense Tower (the same tower pictured above) beautifully framed by the mountains behind it, from about 2.5 miles away. (Sorry, forgot to take the camera after remembering how I should have brought it to my first class… am sick today!)

Here’s a photo (again) of me at the Forbidden City, on what was a really uniquely great air-quality day. They’re not impossible, just relatively rare. Blue skies, hooray! We hear that things have been especially good recently, which is at once comforting and scary. Comforting to know that things are improving, scary to know that they used to be worse, given what they’re like today.

I think that this demonstrates some of the variety that you see here in Beijing alone. In the first week we were here, the air was more like in the unfortunate Summer Palace #1 example, and you literally couldn’t very well see more than a few hundred feet down the street very clearly. It was some time before I even knew that the mountains in the first photo existed, since you certainly couldn’t see them rising out of the North China Plains just on the horizon. I want to go revisit places that I went in early September just so that I can now actually see them, since as time has gone on things have generally improved with the seasons.

The New York Times reported about two weeks ago on air quality in Beijing and China. From that article, I see that there were apparently 221 “blue-sky days” for 2009 through September, according to Beijing city officials, a city record since their blue-sky index began in 1998. While this sounds great, not all 221 of those blue-sky days were as blue as the one you see above, and they most certainly did not register as “healthy” or even “moderate” on the air quality indicator metrics that would be used in the United States or Europe. As the article explains, the Chinese official air-quality indicators are quite misleading and skew data in a way which looks more favorable for China; the US Embassy monitor is more thorough and realistic in terms of what it measures and how it does so, even if it is not located in as many monitoring sites.

The positive notes in the article include massive reductions in per-car emissions, huge shifts to newer pollution control regimes in Beijing factories, better boilers and furnaces in power plants and homes, cash-for-clunkers programs to eliminate old cars from the roads, etc, etc, etc. Interesting to note is the ease with which Chinese administrators and authorities can act – if they choose to do so – given the generally feeble powers of businesses or other private groups to oppose the government — when this works well, it works!

Last weekend I took a walk around some hutongs around 20 minutes from Tiananmen, and you can still see people there burning the coal briquettes described in the article as being so terribly harmful to the environment. With the cold winter ahead, I can only imagine how many people would go through. The photo below shows them highlighted through the doorway into someone’s home. (Note that some parts of these hutongs were nicer, and some were worse; some had more rubble, while some looked like nice neighborhoods, and most of them were at least a little bit paved, unlike the one here)

Beijing, however, isn’t all of China, though the same characteristics that manifest here in Beijing are present elsewhere to varying degrees. Nearby Shanxi province is reputedly the most polluted in all of China, in both air and water, with little of the political will to clean up and much less international face to lose for not doing so.  On a positive note, when we left Beijing after that first, polluted week, we were amazed and happy to arrive in Yunnan Province to a pure-seeming environment with perfect blue skies every day.

Yunnan lives up to its name: "south of the clouds," with lots of big sky.

Meanwhile, on our visit to Shanghai, we were blessed with very good weather and air, and most of the days were substantially better than Beijing; the worst may have been worse than what you would find in the U.S., but there was perhaps just one day out of our visit that had distractingly bad air quality, a much better ratio than what we normally experience in Beijing. Indeed, just as the Olympics helped to shape Beijing, so this upcoming 2010 World Expo is leading Shanghai to create a huge push for its own increase in blue-sky days (above and beyond what Beijing hopes to accomplish) among other big changes. Below is a photo of Shanghai’s Pudong skyline on a typical day when we were there, more or less, with this one erring on the side of “less” – obviously not perfectly haze-free, but better than what we were used to back in Beijing.

Air quality is what is most noticeable about the environment (环境) here, but obviously other things are important. Arguably, while air quality is currently estimated to be responsible for upwards of 700,000 deaths in China, water is an even more important factor in the human-environmental equation. In fact, water quality and water security in the US are too-little talked about as well. This past weekend, we had a lot of rain and snow – I mentioned this at the start as the cause of today’s wonderfully clear day. What I didn’t mention is that the reason we had so much snow here in Beijing is because authorities fired huge amounts of silver iodide into the clouds in order to seed them and cause more precipitation, in order to try to alleviate more drought here in Beijing.

Weather modification like this seems to escape the notice of many of our Chinese roommates: for example, on the 60th anniversary, several people I spoke with were just “amazed!” that the weather coincidentally happened to be so great on that auspicious occasion… not quite suspecting that it could have been artificially concocted. In any event, these frequent efforts at weather control from the central government only underscore the importance of water here in China. I don’t know very much about the water available – what’s wrong with it, how unsafe it might be, or exactly how prevalent counterfeit bottled water is in places that I go. I do know that I love street food, and that I love bubble tea smoothies made with ice of dubious origins…

I’m only here for a single semester, and I don’t think I can accumulate too much long term trouble, be it from air or water, no matter how hard I try to taste all that Beijing has to offer. My immune and digestive systems are strong, and despite a few slips here and there, I’ve been fine. I’m mostly just worried about the 1.3 billion people who live here full time.

Then, of course, there’s the carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere, and the other pollutants that make their way across the ocean only to come back to visit me in the United States. But I try not to think too much about all that.

Or, “It’s not lying when admissions office does it” –

Just wanted to quickly highlight something which is not gross lying, but just mild misrepresentation. The Yale Admitted Students website has fantastic images of student rooms which are really really scrumptious and gorgeous and make you feel like everyone at Yale lives in wonderful palaces — also, that they all clean their rooms. I was stunned when I first saw them and asked the admissions office if they were real rooms of undergrads or if they were staged photos (when I was applying) and I was told, no, they’re all real.

And they are, in a certain sense, at least… anyway, of couse, they want to put Yale’s best face forward, and I don’t mean to say that rooms aren’t often great! I am still puzzled why they had Emma Watson stay overnight in one of the less spectacular freshman dorms, if they’d wanted to really court her; still. (Emma, if you’re reading, I hope you chose to apply and matriculate! Harvard is Azkaban and if you come to Yale I’ll never mention Harry Potter when you’re around. Feel free to e-mail me with any questions about Yale; this offer applies to prospective Yalies who aren’t movie stars, too.) Read the rest of this entry »

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

Thinking about schools as possible tourist attractions seems to be in line with the marketing and school “branding” talk that I try to discourage. However, any Harvard student would counter that it’s just a fair description of their state of affairs: sit down in a lawn chair with a notepad and a sharp eye for an afternoon and you’ll see an endless stream of tourists, all constantly rubbing the same toe of the John Harvard statue (to which drunk students forever do unspeakable things).

So it’s a fair question and reasonable point of comparison. How is it at Yale? Can you walk to class without tripping over roving bands of camera-wielding tourists, gawking at undergrads like they’re all in a richly furnished zoo enclosure? Is Yale a tourist attraction?

In a word, no.

It’s true that old campus has a fair number of tour groups circulating in lazily predictable routes, and that they can be spotted on a couple other hotspots on the campus tours which leave from the admissions office. But the individual group sizes, and the overall volume, is very manageable. We do not have people trying endlessly to sneak into our dorms or libraries–the libraries, in fact, don’t require ID to enter the main areas.

Compare with Harvard where the library has regular ‘incidents’ when people try to sneak in just to take a look… or so I am told. The libraries at a lot of schools have this nice level of access for prospective students, so it’s not that Yale is special about it, it’s just a nice benefit from the medium-high volume rather than the stupidly-crowded nature of certain other schools.

Sometimes I like to join the tour groups silently, listen for a minute, then leave. This seems to really confuse prospective students, and leaves me sad that the tour guides are always giving the same semi-duplicitous accounts of Yale lore; still, it helps me stay in touch with the prospective student mindset and is good for blogging. It seems that sometimes, the worse the weather is, the better the tour, as guides work harder to make Yale appealing aside from the good weather and usual cheer of New Haven.

There are busloads of Chinese tourists / visitors who come to Yale, foreign-language tour guides leading them around campus–Yale is actually much better known in China than Harvard, a lot of the time, but when I just stopped at Harvard over spring break I did see a nice number of well-heeled Hong Kong students heading around on a big tour group.

If you stopped reading after my “in a word” explanation, and skipped to the end, don’t worry! You didn’t miss any super-insightful truths about Yale. There is a reasonable level of outsider interest, but because they don’t go inside residential college gates it’s not much of a problem at all.

Of course, I think Yale is quite worthy of being a tourist attraction… : )

Headline part-inspired by Snively @ MIT blogs, but mostly by the exact question asked by my bff Greta when visiting her this past week at Harvard.

Norman Kraft of Zen Writes Inc. keeps a higher education marketing blog called “Zen and the Art of Higher Education Marketing” which I read regularly (or at least as regularly as he posts–happily, the last couple of weeks have been pretty consistent) and generally find to be very on the mark. Two weeks ago he posed an interesting question–what effect do appearances have in the context of the admissions office itself? He writes:

For many colleges and universities, admissions office space seems almost an afterthought. Too often, the office entrances are difficult to find and once found, the admissions area is hardly one of the highlights of the college tour. I’ve seen admissions officers attempt to prevent parents and students from seeing their offices by arranging meetings in open spaces on campus, or at a library or student center.

Your admissions area is your first impression, and as the old saying goes, you only have one opportunity to make a good first impression.

Let me address this question from my perspective as a student and a recent college-admissions-office-visitor. First and foremost, the admissions office is not the first impression someone has of a school when visiting. Not precisely, at least. Parents don’t blindfold their kids, drive them in erratic randomized patterns, and then lead them up to the admissions office only to then ‘unveil’ the first impression of the entire school. There is the journey to the admissions office first, and even that little step can have a significant impact. How so?

Although I knew that there were realistic constraints for space, sometimes the positioning of an admissions office alone would seem to send a message to me. Take, for example, the University of Pennsylvania admissions office: it is very convenient and easy to find because of how central it is to campus (1 College Hall, ground floor). To get there we walked through especially nice portions of the campus and a vibrant part of Philadelphia; that was the first impression of the school. My memories of the admissions office itself are not especially great because my preoccupation at the time was coping with the 105+ degree heat wave.

The real distinction between admissions offices first and foremost is SERVICE. Yes, it was a painful heat wave at Penn and that wasn’t their fault. The day before, though, the temperatures were almost as bad and I had visited both Yale and Wesleyan with my family. The biggest difference, where tour and admissions office experience was concerned (schools aside)? Wesleyan offered free bottles of water. It was also, hands down, the nicest, most accommodating, and most convincing of anywhere I visited, but that’s another story. The water was part of that. I know it’s not in the budgets for Penn and Yale to offer water to all the people who come and visit–they had rather bigger crowds–but those are some of the differences that we take away from tours. The little details that count.

Wesleyan-Yale isn’t a very fair comparison, as I’ve said. So let me use another situation with slightly more even odds: Harvard vs. MIT.

I visited MIT on March 14th, 2006–it was the first school I visited. I remember the date because it was Pi Day! Anyway, I visited MIT with my friend Greta and we got slightly lost in the infinite corridor and on campus looking around for the admissions office because MIT buildings are all designated by numbers are we weren’t paying that much attention since it was our spring break. Something like that. We found the office in the end and it was a messy place inhospitable to visitors–we were sent elsewhere for our tour and info talk. It felt like the reception / office ratio was off. All the same, we had a good time at MIT (read the visit report).

Compare with Harvard: we wandered over to Radcliffe yard and found the admissions office after some searching, but given Harvard’s visitor volume what happened next was unfortunate. We were sent from a messy office environment to what looked like a semi-dilapidated basement auditorium where we were told about how selective Harvard was before being sent out on the worst college tour in my complete touring experience.

There were many similarities in presentation and aesthetic experience, but when I ask Greta or think myself about the MIT visit we don’t think about how the office was messy. We just think about how exciting the UROP program sounded and how friendly everyone was. The aesthetic details only come into play over at Harvard when we start trying to look for something to redeem the experience.

Are aesthetics important? Sure. But they’re not the most important part of the experience or ‘first impression,’ at least not in my mind, and it’s important to remember that. I didn’t see any places that were installing gold leaf in the admissions offices while cutting back on staff, but I just thought I’d share my thoughts on this all the same.

For the record, Johns Hopkins gave out free water bottles a few days later when it was equally hot.