the Sam Jackson College Experience

At the start of February I announced my desire to organize a scholarship through my site. A little more than a month later, things are really going strong. Here’s where things now stand–still working things out:

The Idea: A contest to propose the best new ideas for using new media, the internet, and technology to improve the college admissions process and/or higher education marketing in general.

The contest will be sponsored (at least in part) by some of those same agents most want to hear about the ideas for reform and who are looking for innovative solutions. They’ll have direct exposure to the ideas so that they could be better implemented! After a winner (winners? still fundraising) is chosen, their proposal / essay and other top ideas will be put online for everyone to see and learn, leading to a great dialogue about ways to make things better for both students and the college / marketing forces who want to engage them.

Participants: Current high school students, but also recent high school grads who are now undergraduates: students who have recent experience with the

The Prize: Cash towards college education! I have been working hard over the last month not just with midterms but also trying to drum up support for this scholarship idea. My original target was to get ~$500 from a wide range of individuals and organizations in higher education and college admissions fields as well as general sponsorship and donation (technology companies, anyone?). We’re getting close to that target! But wait, things get better…

The other day, I was very happy to learn that I had just won a brand new Toshiba x205 laptop in a recent Gizmodo contest! This is a really nice laptop, worth $1400, which would definitely make a great addition to someone’s dorm room. 17″ screen, 4 speakers and subwoofer, 250 GB hard drive, nice Nvidia GeForce 8700M graphics card… I know college laptop costs can be pretty significant, so hopefully this could help blunt that for whoever wins. Hopefully we will be able to find it a happy home soon! I’ll have more details when it arrives at home in a week or two.

Thanks to Toshiba for indirectly sponsoring it… I had been trying to lobby other laptop manufacturers but so far have been unable to get in touch with the right people. The Lenovo VP for USA was supposed to come to Yale this past weekend, but had to cancel–my plan had been to corner him and ask. In any event, I am absolutely still interested in looking for more partners, and if I had more to give out we could offer it to more people and really expand things.

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So! I now have a laptop and a few hundred dollars cash ready to give away, and I’m pretty psyched. It makes me want to set my sights higher, but to do that I need more help from my readers (and people they know…). So please forward around my request for more help in organizing this scholarship, and let me know if you want to get involved or if you have any leads on people who might want to get involved. Either send me an e-mail at sam [at] samjackson [dot] org or use the contact form (or comment here)! Still hammering out more details and will solicit some prompts and start working on framing the questions for scholarship applicants soon, and things will definitely keep growing as I add participants.

For would-be sponsors: This is a really great opportunity to give something (a very small donation, even!) while getting a lot (of good publicity, exposure, and of course, useful insight and new ideas). It’s all going to a good cause and so I highly recommend getting involved! Alternately, if you feel you don’t want to give money to any random student talking about college admissions, and would rather give that money just to me, I still have open advertising inventory for the new few months, so let me know.

This afternoon I had the pleasure of going to a cozy Yale Daily News workshop with David Pogue ‘85 where we all gathered around a table in the boardroom and learned about Pogue’s unusual path to becoming the technology columnist for the New York Times (from musical comedy to tech journalist!) and then had a chance to ask some fun questions. Let me quote Pogue’s bio, for those who don’t know him:

the weekly personal-technology columnist for the New York Times and an Emmy award-winning tech correspondent for CBS News. With 3 million books in print, he is also one of the world’s bestselling how-to authors. He wrote or co-wrote seven books in the “for Dummies” series (including Macs, Magic, Opera, and Classical Music); in 1999, he launched his own series of complete, funny computer books called the Missing Manual series, which now includes 30 titles.

So, cool guy, influential in tech circles. The story of how he gave up on composing for broadway and turned to tech journalism seemed to be yet another chapter in the big book of “noteworthy people who had no idea of where they planned to go in life and ended up somewhere very different.” You can tell when someone starts off by insinuating that their remarks will be of questionable use to a niche audience (say, student journalists) because of the bizarre path they took to their final career. I’ve concluded that more people take crazy circuitous paths to their futures than realize it having heard that routine so many times at Exeter!

He is here I assume ostensibly for the Calhoun master’s tea he went to immediately afterwards (he was in Calhoun back when he was an undergrad); he is also doing a bigger gadget show-and-tell tonight. I have to do a lot of work so I decided to spend some time before dinner catching up and missing out on the tea because I’m assuming there will be a lot of overlap, but I may make it to the show-and-tell. My question to him would be about his remarks on the NY Times being ‘with the times’ as far as internet went–given that their lame paywall on the website just went down yesterday once they realized that it would bring more organic visitors deeper into the site and increase ad revenue. So maybe I’ll get a chance to ask him later.

In any event, this is just one of the many, many, many prominent and interesting people who come to Yale each week to give lots of public talks… my calendar is full with more in the days and weeks ahead.