the Sam Jackson College Experience

The extremely heavy rainfall here in Boston over the weekend took me away from all my research / work as I tried to help mitigate the effects of 10+ inches of rainfall in the Boston area on our house / basement… we managed to jury rig together a pump and then get some going, but it wasn’t a pretty sight and still isn’t.

Anyhow, when I was able to find a moment break from that, I finished up a quick redesign of my main Sam Jackson ’splash page’ @ http://www.samjackson.org. Thanks to http://www.os-templates.com/ for their creative commons’d CSS templates for the main page, as well as to http://thingsthatarebrown.com/ for CSS templating magic on the Resume page.

Please check it out and let me know what you think. Yes, it does behoove me to fix this blog up a little bit too since some pieces are falling off here and there, but we’ll get to that some other time….

Hey everyone, as is readily apparent, I haven’t made very many updates this summer. I’ve been having a pretty good time in San Francisco with Google, and will try to share some photos of non-confidential fun.

In the meanwhile, in the interests of testing out my employer’s neat products, here is a Google Voice call widget which will let you give me a call and leave me messages, in case somehow you read my blog and are too intimidated to leave so much as a comment (please!) but are less fearful of actually calling me. Anyway, go have a ball. Please don’t make your number private, because it will discourage me from calling you back if you leave an unintelligible voicemail. : )

One of my classes this semester, The Intellectual in Politics (HUMS 331 / PLSC 328), has a final research project which revolves around the use of the Yale University Archives and the Manuscripts and Archives division. An institution hundreds of years old has a great deal of interesting documents pertaining to its own history, but Yale also has thousand upon thousands of other collections of papers from noted intellectuals over time. All told, Yale has more than 12 miles of papers entrusted to it by various persons.

Our final project for this class will be to create an online exhibit around five different documents, so I will definitely share it when I’m done.Everywhere you look, there are amazing things to find – you can request the personal notes and documents of people from important people hundreds of years since left to the history books, or zoom in to chronicle the personal diaries and thoughts of noted government figures and other intellectuals. It’s really just like a time machine, except with more paperwork to fill out.

At the moment, I am in Sterling Library reading through some of the records associated with the presidency of Kingman Brewster, my personal favorite Yale president. While there is too much to type altogether, I am going to share one piece that I really like that I just read. It makes me sad to think that in 1965, it was a *problem* that students were not motivated by money. How different were the problems facing educators in 1965? Read on to find out:

This is text of a speech of President Kingman Brewster, Jr. before the American Council on Education, Washington, D.C., October 8, 1965

“If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?”

Boredom is not a newcomer in the halls of academe. But there is a mounting impatience and if we admit it, a new and unpleasant aroma of scorn among some student groups –impatience with education, scorn for educators.

Of course faculties are, and always should be heavily populated by people who are dedicated to the proposition that the search for truth is an end in itself. I am not one of those who buy the notion that the only worthy end of thought is action. Thought and learning, like experience and beauty can be ends in themselves. Not the least part of our job is to awaken a capacity for this enjoyment in the oncoming generations so that theirs may be delight in living as well as doing.

But the tragedy of the highly motivated impatient young activist is that he runs the serious risk of disqualifying himself from true usefulness by being too impatient to arm himself with the intellectual equipment required for the solution of the problems of war and poverty and indignity. You and I have seen too many among our students of high promise squander their talent for a lifetime of constructive work at a high level for the cheaper and transient satisfaction of throwing himself on some immediate barricade in the name of “involvement.” Posturing in the name of a good cause is too often the substitute for thorough thought or the patient doggedness it takes to build something.

Because we assume our own faith in education perhaps we have not preached it well enough. We have left it to the economists and the politicians to translate teh value of education into earning power and let it go at that. A generation whose brightest minds are unsatisfied with the dollar as the measure of success cannot be expected to find relevance in such appeals.

One of the new responsibilities for our old generation of educators is to remind the most highly motivated among the oncoming generation that there is no shortcut to the intellectual capacity which is now required to be useful in this ever shrinking ever complicating world. The chance to make a constructive difference in the lives of others, not the full dinner pail, is the highest reward of a higher education. If impatient anti-intellectualism of the radical left is not to seduce many of our best brains away from true usefulness; we and our faculties have to resassert again and again that emotional oversimplification of the world’s problems is not the paper to their solution.

But let me return to my text. What of the ends? If they don’t justify the means, what does?

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

About a month ago, I wrote about patterns I found comparing Yale and Harvard in Google searches through Google Trends. Well, just today, Facebook released a simply fascinating tool called “Lexicon” which is the same thing, but for wall posts. Computers (not humans!) track the content of every wallpost for words and phrases, and you can search for trends and comparisons over time using this new tool. Very cool, right?

Lexicon shows the number of users that posted each term per day on a profile, event or group Wall. It does not count repeated terms by the same user on the same day. This is to account for the seasonality of Wall posting in general; for example, there are fewer overall posts in the month of December.

My complaint about my previous Google Trends related efforts had been the fact that Google Trends was not targeted enough to college age students to give more precise sampling to *really* show the trends when it came to buzz about individual schools over the course of the admissions cycle. Facebook’s demographics pretty much fix this problem, and the following chart is very exciting.

The greatest influence here can be seen from Harvard and Princeton dropping their early programs. Yale has a huge attention buzz boost in December, but by spring admissions time it is at parity with Princeton (Gasp!) and Harvard has a significant edge in attention. As with Google Trends data, the same incredibly eerie trend occurs where everyone talking about school A talks exactly proportionately with those talking about school B with the same upticks and downticks, with high levels of accuracy.

In general, the same observations as before apply… just nice to see them borne out in slightly cleaner data somewhere else. Read about the patterns I found in the Google Trends data by clicking here, or see below.

Compare with Google Trends data (Red is Harvard, blue is Yale).