Skip to content

Rethinking SAT Preparation

As my MBA start date draws closer, I’m starting to think in more concrete terms about finances. Happily, scholarship grant money is covering tuition and fees, but I’ll still be giving up my salary and savings aren’t going to cut it. I’ll probably be taking out a Stafford loan in the near future, but my goal is to pay it back as soon after graduation as possible. Towards that goal, I intend to work while in school.

My plan is to do parlay my test scores and higher ed experience into an SAT tutoring and admissions consulting service. In the back of my mind though, I’m wondering if I can turn that service into a full-fledged business: after all, I will be studying entrepreneurship – my own test prep company could basically serve as a risk-free laboratory for those studies. I have a few preliminary ideas:

  • I believe Princeton Review and Kaplan are both overpriced and bloated in terms of tutoring. Their study materials, however, are excellent, and I wouldn’t want to try to compete in that arena, at least initially.
  • PR & K don’t pay their teachers all that well. This partly explains how Manhattan GMAT cut into their market share so significantly.
  • I’m trying to figure out a way to incentivize score increases. In other words, pay the most effective tutors more, measuring effectiveness by how many points a student gains from one test to the next. This is more complicated than it sounds, because not all students start at the same place, and some students are more difficult than others. But I think the principle is solid.
  • I think tutors should have control over their time. This is one of the things I loved about teaching piano lessons – I controlled my schedule. Plus, the idea of a Results-Only Work Environment is still pretty fresh in my mind.
  • I have lots of concerns over colleges’ use of the SAT. Though that’s not the issue I want to spend my life tackling, I do think it’s possible to mitigate some of the problems through SAT prep. One idea I had was to train new tutors by assigning them low-income students who are good candidates for college, who would pay only a token fee for the service.

The plan right now is to obtain a few clients with some craigslisting and some targeted flyering. Since I only want to work part-time while I’m in school, it’s probable that I’ll fairly quickly reach the point where I want to think about bringing others on board.

If anyone out there has done any test prep, I’d love to know the things that really helped you or things about your job that you really didn’t like.

Posted 30 June 2009 † Ryan § Business Time ‡ Comments (0) °

L is for Legacy Candidate

My latest Kindle book is maybe one of the most depressing things I’ve ever read. It’s called A Is for Admission: The Insider’s Guide to Getting into the Ivy League and Other Top Colleges, and it’s written by Michele Hernandez, a former member of the Dartmouth Admissions staff. It’s depressing because it thoroughly extinguishes any glimmer of hope that Ivy League college admissions really is about the whole person, or that it really is as holistic a process as the college’s glossy brochures would have you believe. As I was reading the formula for exactly how these schools calculate a student’s academic potential (wherein test scores account for 2/3 of the value), it dawned on me that:

  • It is possible to create an admissions process that identifies students with the intelligence to contribute in any field they choose, the self-motivation to seek out the resources the university can provide in that regard, and the interpersonal skills to work effectively with their peers in solving problems requiring the concerted effort of a team.
  • The current Ivy League process outlined by the author by far overemphasizes the former.

A caveat: The admissions process doesn’t necessarily exclude self-motivated, socially adept students, and in fact many students that fall into that category will choose to go to Ivy League schools. Another caveat: I think the author overstates Dartmouth’s similarity to other top schools for the sake of argument – for instance, Stanford’s admissions process by all accounts really is much more holistic than the one outlined by Hernandez. Still, it’s clear to me that there’s a lot of room for improvement, because as it stands right now, schools like Dartmouth and Harvard and Princeton are passing up positive-impact students for who they view to safe bets.

Posted 29 June 2009 † Ryan § General Interest ‡ Comments (0) °

What’s More Baller Than Having a Tailor? Having Two Tailors

Quite a few people have asked me about my tailor recently. There’s a place in San Francisco called Seymour’s Fashions, and it’s the only tailoring shop I’ve ever been to that really knows what they’re doing with menswear. I get the feeling that most local tailors do mostly women’s clothes, so while they may understand technique, they all too often have trouble with style. At Seymour’s, I feel completely comfortable walking in and just asking what needs to be done, and they do it perfectly.

By the way, a tailor is supposed to be a gentleman’s secret and all that, so no way is this going on Yelp. This is ryanjacobs.org-only information right here.

The other place I go is the place in the Stanford Shopping Center Mall. I generally don’t ask too many questions there – I mainly just go to them if I already know what I want done, and they do a good job. There’s a French lady there named Efrant who recognized me and asked me about my jeans. She asked me if they were “that kind that you’re not supposed to wash.” I told her no, the ones I was wearing weren’t raw denim, but I did have a pair at home (my Wings and Horns jeans, which are now at two months). She asked me why you can’t wash them, and I tried to distill the reasons, telling her basically that the personal/individual fades your jeans acquire will be more pronounced the longer you go between washes. She stingingly responded, “What a scam.”

I left it at that, because of course she’s mostly right. But I can tell you that my W+H pair is the one I wear most often (and I have a lot of jeans), and I can also tell you that part of it is that most stock washes just look wrong to me. I’ve always gravitated towards cleaner, less detailed washes, even since before raw denim was a thing – every factory sandblast takes away a little soul. With raw jeans, every scratch and scrape to which you subject your pants just builds that much more character. Add to that a great masculine (not skinny) fit and good quality denim, and I almost start to think that my W+H were worth the premium. Plus I got them at almost half off – a tougher trick than waiting for a sale at Gap, but you just have to know where to look.

Posted 24 June 2009 † Ryan § Lookin' Good ‡ Comments (0) °

If Blayne had a Kindle, it would be Kindlicious

A couple weeks ago, I acquired a Kindle in the sweetest way possible: as a gift from my program director and the assorted personnel at my work. They had preloaded it with some personal notes, which leads me to the first thing I noticed about the device – for ten cents, you can e-mail documents to your Kindle. I can already tell that this is going to come in really handy for reading the numerous b-school cases I’ll be slogging through come autumn.

The second thing I noticed about the Kindle is that no one really understands what the hell a Kindle is. For those of you really living in the dark ages, a Kindle is this. Many people know the basics, but the following conversation between me and my dad illustrates the cognitive dissonance in people’s minds when they consider the device:

Me: Hey dad, look at this.
Dad: What is it?
Me: It’s a Kindle. It’s like an electronic book, but you can actually store lots of books on it, and take it with you.
Dad: I don’t know if I would like that. I get tired just reading a single page on a computer.
Me: But that’s what’s cool about it – it’s not backlit at all, so there’s no eye strain. In fact, I find it even easier to read than an actual book, because book pages reflect more light.
Dad: It’s still a computer.

So here it is for the last time: it’s easier to read things on a Kindle than on the physical page, and I defy you to conclude otherwise. It turns out that the biggest problem with the Kindle is actually the one that comes up the least in conversation – there’s just not enough available reading material. At first, I was stoked to be able to have a pocket copy of maybe my favorite book of essays ever, David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster. But it turns out that it’s not available on Kindle, and it probably won’t be anytime soon no matter how many times I click the associated “I’d like to read this book on Kindle” button. The other problem with the Kindle is that it’s not great for books where pictures or illustration play a large role. For example, I still prefer cookbooks in print, despite the newly attainable convenience of having a portable recipe binder.

Despite these two drawbacks, I think the Kindle is a worthwhile investment, and in many ways it is everything my iPhone is not. For your enjoyment, here is my own little mini-Goodreads – it’s a list of all the Kindle Books I’ve purchased so far:

All these titles are, of course, also available as snail-books.

Posted 18 June 2009 † Ryan § Nerds! § The Farm ‡ Comments (3) °

Unless, of Course, UCLA Figures Out That They Should Accept Me

I’m looking for housing in San Diego! Here’s my “housing wanted” ad, cross-posted from the San Diego Craigslist:

I am a 26-year-old straight male looking for housing in San Diego starting August 1 or later. I currently live in Northern California, but I will be a full-time MBA student at UCSD starting in September, and I also lived in San Diego during my undergrad years so I know the area. I’d like a place in La Jolla, Pacific Beach, Clairemont, Hillcrest, or Little Italy. Requirements (non-negotiable): my own room, an internet hookup, in-unit or onsite laundry that I don’t have to pay for, no pets, no smokers. I’m able to pay anywhere from $600-$800 a month, depending on how nice the place is. I prefer a co-ed living situation because in my experience, people are generally more respectful, but it’s not a dealbreaker.

Here are some things of varying relevance that I like: those organic produce boxes that get delivered every week to your house, my acoustic guitars “Ginger” and “Buttercup,” the Vanguard Balanced Index Fund, eyeglasses and jeans from Japan, wine.woot!, that Talking Heads video where David Byrne is wearing a giant suit, cooking and particularly grilling, the beach, the Swedish game Kubb, playing the Swedish game Kubb on the beach (seriously it’s that awesome. I’ll show you how to play), house parties, rowing machines, rooftop bars.

Here are a few things of varying relevance that I dislike: indoor malls, clutter, the word “metrosexual,” energy drinks, when my chef’s knife gets run through the dishwasher, Coldplay.

If you have an opening and think we would be good roommates, drop me a line with some pictures of your place and a good way to reach you! I promise I’m not a craigslist weirdo.

Posted 09 June 2009 † Ryan § General Interest ‡ Comments (1) °

I Can’t Wait Until There’s a Ryanjacobs.org Book

I’ve been telling everyone I know about a book I read recently. The book is Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, with the attached subtitle No Schedules, No Meetings, No Joke–the Simple Change That Can Make Your Job Terrific.

Though I have a litany of gripes about this book, I think the premise is provocative enough to be worthy of your $5 (the current bargain price on Amazon). The authors’ main point is that the amount of time you spend at work has nothing at all to do with your value to your company. There might be a correlation, true, but it is foolish to use time as an indicator of job performance – it’s an antiquated practice that began during a period where the correlation was strong enough to somewhat justify the practice. The authors suggest an alternative approach to workplace management, which they call the “results-only work environment,” or “ROWE” for short. In a ROWE, you have complete control over how you spend your time, and complete is the key word there. In a ROWE, you can go to the office whenever you want, and leave whenever you want. One of the commandments of a ROWE is that all meetings are optional – even if your boss calls the meeting, there should be no sanctions if you choose not to attend. It’s easy to throw out a laundry list of these enticing tidbits, but one of the elegant things about the authors’ idea is that it really must be all-or-nothing. For instance, you probably have lots of objections to the “all meetings optional” idea, but that’s because you work in an environment where time is still used as an indicator of productivity, and are unable to escape that mindset.

As I mentioned, there’s a lot I don’t like about the book. First and foremost, it’s part of that annoying genre I’ll call “tie-in consulting.” There are far too many overtures inteded to get the reader to find out more at the website, at the speaking engagement, etc. – and ultimately spend money on “the movement.” Seriously, they call it a movement. This nasty habit of management books needs to die, right now – if I’m going to buy a book, I want the product to be the book, and I want the marketing confined to the back jacket flap. Another problem with the book is that it’s basically a long introduction, and lacks some theoretical depth. For instance, I’d love to know the authors’ vision of how a ROWE would work in a retail environment. I’d like to know goal-setting strategies managers that are geared specifically towards a ROWE. I’d love to know how companies that are currently in a ROWE deal with problematic time-related labor laws (this topic receives a very unfortunate gloss-over). I’m on board with the idea, but I want to know details about its implementation, and I want that to be covered in the book.

All in all though, Why Work Sucks is a convincing outline of a way to make work life much better for everyone involved. It starts with a simple idea that generates some complexities, and those complexities are explored adaquately enough that I can recommend the book as a light read. For $5, anyway.

Posted 04 June 2009 † Ryan § Business Time ‡ Comments (0) °

What Happened to the Candid MBA?

I’m realizing that some people who are just finding out about ryanjacobs.org only know me from my other blog, the Candid MBA. If you’re one of those people, you’re probably really confused as to why I’m talking about bread pudding and LeBron puppets. Long story short, I couldn’t think of a way to make the Candid MBA what I wanted it to be, and I foresaw it taking time and energy that I didn’t have, especially now that I’m trying to figure out my financial situation during the time I’ll be enrolled at school.

Also, this is a new experiment. I’m blurring the boundaries between my work and my personal life. Call me crazy, but I think we can all agree that we’re firmly in the 21st century, and part of that means employers will stop caring what’s on your proverbial MySpace. So there will be some MBA talk on here. There will also be some NBA talk on here. There will also be talk about denim, like for instance the denim on my latest pair of Wings and Horns jeans which is totally awesome and I also love the stitching details (stay tuned for more).

Anyway, welcome to ryanjacobs.org. Newcomers, I hope you stick around. Everyone else, thanks for talking some sense into me and encouraging me to get this thing up and running again.

Posted 29 May 2009 † Ryan § Ryanjacobs.org ‡ Comments (0) °

I’m Really Just in Denial About the Sharks

Being a lifelong die-hard Warriors fan, I pretty much never watch basketball. But this year’s high-drama NBA playoffs are actually drawing me in, even despite the strident Nuggets-Lakers color commentary. Between both semifinals, we’re seeing everything, even in the commercials – the LeBron/Kobe puppet roommate commercials are pure genius on the level of the Geico Gecko. Unstoppable!

Posted 25 May 2009 † Ryan § General Interest ‡ Comments (0) °

Some Bread Pudding Was Eaten

Yesterday was Friday, and there was much rejoicing. I left work and headed for the city to go to a bonfire party at Ocean Beach, but I had about an hour to kill before hand. Naturally, I decided to make a stop at Tartine to refuel and caffienate.

This was no ordinary day at Tartine. I walked in, and there was a band inside consisting of an accordionist, a violinist and a contrabassist. When I told this story later at the party, most people had the same reaction I did: “I didn’t know all those people could fit inside Tartine!” They were set up in front of the bar by the window. I’m not particularly critical about unexpected live music – for the most part, I’m usually just glad there’s any music at all. However, this particular band was a happy surprise. They played French café music that wasn’t really French – it was a mix of classical songs, Eastern European-sounding folk songs, and Willie Nelson. The bandleader was this Marié Abe character. They sounded like they had actually practiced/played the arrangements together at some point before the gig, and their arrangements included fancy music things like hemiolas.

In addition, it was apple bread pudding day. Great success!

Posted 23 May 2009 † Ryan § Dining & Eating ‡ Comments (0) °

Creative Writing is a Contact Sport

This weekend, I had a flare-up of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. I came in to work today wearing my super-stylish wrist brace. However, there are two people in my office with even more impressive ailments: Our administrator “Judy” just had a joint in her pinky surgically replaced, and our poetry lecturer “Mike” has a torn meniscus. The latter is on crutches, while the former has a cast with an entire pulley system attached for her physical therapy. When he was asked what had happened, Mike replied, “poetry injury.”

Anyway, that’s my excuse for not blogging much recently. That and a severe lack of Project Runway.

Posted 19 May 2009 † Ryan § The Farm ‡ Comments (0) °