Omniac Attack Interview: Matt Cobb (1 of 2)
This last week I had the pleasure to sit down with Matt Cobb, parent, fellow college admissions blogger, and creator of Admissions Directory, a Digg-style college admissions aggregator. We talked about his college experience, his interest in college admissions, and his endeavors on the web to make information more accessible to students in need of information!
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Thanks for joining us, Matt!
Thanks for having me, Mark.
What is your background, coming to the table, for college admissions? Where did you go to college and what made you interested in admissions?
I'm a bit of a college snob, partly because i went to Stanford twice.
I got into Stanford as an undergrad, and then went back and got an MBA there. This was decades ago. In fact, this year was my 30th reunion year for Stanford.
I got into Stanford back when it was easier to get into the elite schools. And I'm also from Florida, so I figure that I must have met some kind of geographic distribution quota back then. I certainly did OK in school, I had good extracurricular involvement and good grades, but I wasn't a stellar student. So I was always just a little surprised that I got into Stanford, but nonetheless, I really enjoyed that.
After I got out of undergrad, I worked on Wall St. for a number of years and then went back to Stanford Business School. So I have a couple of degrees from Stanford, and I was actually born and raised in the Bay Area, so that was a little bit like going home since I was living in Florida at the time. And so i have a great appreciation for a good college education, as a result of that experience.
What would you say you had at Stanford that was a good match for you and that did provide you with something extra that you would not have received at a non-Ivy school?
I certainly got a great education from great professors. To this day, I think back fondly to some of the introductory courses I had from world-class professors. In fact, the other day, my younger son, a freshman in high school this year, was taking an introductory psychology (psych) class, and he was looking for a study that he could use. And I said, "You know, a really neat study is the Standford Prison experiment by Phillips Zimbardo. And that came up recently, with the Abu Ghraib mess in Iraq, as one of the academic studies that kind of explained the behaivor of those soldiers.
I actually took a Psych 1 class from Philip Zimbardo, and he covered that experiment just a couple of years after he had ran it.
I had a similar experience taking an economics (econ) 1 course from a guy named George Bach, who was the grand daddy of econ teachers and had the best selling general econ textbook, back in those days. And, in fact, it was that course that made me decide to become an econ major, which then led me to become a business major and kinda launched me on my current career trajectory.
What brought you back to the college admissions table, to looking at these issues again? Obviously, you're not looking into going back to school...
Mostly it's the fact that I have a son now, who's a senior in high school, and I wanted him to get into the best school he could. Or, at least, have plenty of options that he could choose from. When I started thinking about this, and as I've mentioned before, I'm a bit of a college snob, since I went to a good school. I have this higher regard for selective schools, rightly or wrongly, and I realize that it may be over inflated, but that's just the way I feel, since I went through that experience.
So, I started paying attention when my son, Greg, got into high school, and realized that it was a lot harder these days to get into college...into any college really, but especially the selective colleges. That made me realize that Greg was going to have to pay a lot more attention to this, or should pay a lot more attention to this, than I ever had to.
I read some of these stories recently about people of my generation, or even people a little later than me, their whole preparation for the SAT was making sure they had two sharpened number two pencils and that they got there on time.
Right, right. And that was my preparation as well. I didn't do anything else for it.
Yeah, and you took it once and that was it, and you know, it wasn't that big of a deal. And obviously the world is very different now, and it was just sorta focusing on what he, or what it was going to take for Greg to get into, you know, whatever the best schools were that he could get into. Then I started researching it and learning about it, but I'm also an internet consultant and so I have a professional interest in this as well.
First I used my blog as a way to learn about blogging, because web 2.0 technology is the modern web technology is an area or part of my practice. So I wanted to have some hands on, practical experience, and I couldn't think of anything else I'd rather blog about than something I had some interest and passion in, which was college admissions, kinda in this time frame.
You started the blog as sort of a self contained exercise and college admissions was the first thing to come to mind?
It wasn't the first thing, but it was the thing that I most wanted to, or that I could see myself writing about on a consistent basis. It was an area of interest and I wanted to blog about something that I was interested in. And as you would notice if you were to go back and look at the history of the blog, I had a couple of false starts, where I posted for a little while and then there were seven or eight months lag. And even though I was interested in college admissions, the fact that I started when Greg was a sophomore, I think, it just wasn't an all-consuming enough topic to keep me focused on it with all the other distractions in my life.
Now that he's a senior, and it's like, T minus four months until all the applications are due, and he's now finally, himself, engaged in the process, it's something that it's much easier to do on a regular basis.
And it's evolved because I also have started Admissions Directory. So now the blog, in addition to helping me learn about blogging, is also a part of my business strategy for promoting that website.
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Check back soon for more of my interview with Matt as we discuss his website, resources available to college applicants, and his son Greg! If you've got questions for Matt, please leave them in the comments...