Omniac Attack Interview: Matt Cobb (2 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!
This is the second part of the interview. The first part can be found here.
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Can you tell me a little more about Admissions Directory and what prompted you to start it?
I think the main motivation was that, as I got involved in trying to figure out how to help my son get into a good college, I realized that there's a ton of information on the internet about college admissions. But when I say, "college admissions," I'm talking about it broadly, from the very beginning of the process, when you're thinking about taking an ACT or an SAT test, or when you're thinking about what schools you might be interested in, all the way to the end of the process when you're looking for financial aid and scholarships.
There's just a ton of information on the internet, but it's not organized at all. It's very hard to tell what's good, what's bad, or what's helpful. And it's very hard sometimes to just find good content, because there's so much of it. And so I saw a need for a web site that could help organize that information.
How does Admission Directory function?
The idea is that we're building up a community of people that are interested in college admissions and encouraging them to submit resources that they find helpful in the admissions process. So, everyone's out there, scouring the internet, looking for information on how many AP tests they should take, or what scores are good scores, or how to best prepare for the ACT, or how to write a good essay. We're encouraging our community members to submit that onto the site, and then it gets organized and catologued so it gets put into certain categories so it's easy to find.
So all of the test prep articles, for example, are easy to find with one click. And also, these things called 'tags,' that are over to the side where you can describe that resource in even greater detail. So maybe, "test scores required to get into Harvard," could be a tag so you could find that specifically.
And we're also encouraging and hoping that our community members, when they find one of these resources that are already on the admissionsdirectory.com site, they'll comment on it when they use it; to say whether it's good or bad, to affirm the original person's submission, to vote for it, vote it up or down. And so, what happens over time, the good articles, the good content, the good websites that are helpful will have higher scores and will be on the top of the results and they'll have comments associated with them, from a variety of people.
And you can read through the comments to see whether there's someone who's used this resource that's kind of like you, that has the same needs as you have, to help you decide whether you should spend the time to actually go to the website or use the service or the resource. I didn't invent any of these comments, if you go to the circuit city website and you're looking for a TV, for any particular model, there's a whole list of comments from people who have bought that TV. That's how I shop for a TV. I look for people who are kind of like me, who bought it and who liked it, and that gives me great confidence.
And then there are other sites, that are on the internet today - the most popular one is called digg.com, that uses the same approach to gather, organize, and rate news articles. And so the top news articles rise to the top. So if you're very busy and just want to read about the things that are the most intesting to everyone else in the community, you can just go in and pick the things off the top of the list.
So I'm essentially taking some of these techniques that have been used on the internet over the last few years and applying them to this very chaotic and disorganized huge mass of admssions resources and information.
The other questions I had are about your blog itself and sort of the idea of blogging about college admissions. Have you talked with Greg about using him as an example in your blog? Is that a discussion that happened before you started writing?
I mentioned it, and I certainly asked him if it was ok and he kind of didn't care. He had a fairly lackadaisical attitude about it, lackadaisical may be the wrong word, but he just wasn't engaged in the college admissions process quite as early as I was. And so, when I started this, it didn't really matter to him one way or the other. And any time I write something about him, I try to be cognizant of the fact that other people are going to read this and don't want to embarras him.
Right. We're always talking to students now about how their Facebook or Myspace page or personal blog may eventually influence their college admission, especially at a selective school like Harvard or Standford or any school that's an Ivy. They're going to Google that kid's name and see what else is out there. Have you given any thought to how you're actually impacting his college admission by blogging about him?
No, actually I haven't. But hopefully this will show that we're diligently trying to make sure that he's as prepared as he can be to go to a good school!
We see a lot of students who, during their freshman and sophomore years, come to our office just one time to talk, briefly, about what their path looks like. But it's junior and senior year when kids kind of wake up and get involved. So, it's neat to see that happening with Greg.
It's also interesting, I don't know if you have any experience with this, but I think there's a difference that I've noticed working with students on admissionsdirectory, between girls and boys. Girls seem to engage just a little bit sooner than boys do.
That's a truth extending very, very, very far into the college admissions process. We see a lot of schools where women are 60% of the population and men are 40% or lower. What you said, that girls are probably more involved, I have noticed increase during my time doing test prep and doing college admissions. Within the last 5-10 years, we have seen girls take the forefront.
I always joke with parents that, "Women are going to run the world, because they're going to be the only ones with college degrees. They're the only ones that are getting involved." And it's interesting that you've seen that same trend, working on the internet, which has traditionally been a very boy-friendly place.
I think the boys are all off playing World of Warcraft.
So they're using the internet for different things?
Fortunately, Greg is most interested right now in computer science, and the statistics favor boys in that area. So, he's at least got that going for him.
We visted a bunch of schools this summer, and one of them was Duke. And as I was sitting there, listening to the admissions director's presentation, and looking at the data that they passed out, it really seemed to me that being a male interested in engineering, as opposed to liberal arts, gave him a much better chance, on a percentage basis with all else being equal, than a girl interested in liberal arts, just based on statistics.
I'm kind of interested to see how the next four months play out, for me. And then, I have a freshmen in high school now, so the process starts over, although, I guess, not intensely for a couple of years.
Absolutely! The process starting over is the best part about working with parents with multiple kids, watching them become experts as it goes on. You know so much now that you didn't know originally, and unfortunately, Greg's only got four months left for you to use it. Your second kid will have a much better range of resources to draw from, not the least of which is your own website.
Great! Well, I really enjoyed talking with you and reading your blog and I look forward to continue communicating.
Well thank you! I'm excited that there does appear to be a community forming. I think that the advent of your program, and other blogs that I've seen start to pop up, mean that people are starting to see blogging as a way to get out this information and keep it current. And I'm really excited to see what we see, as the community, over the next couple of years in terms of resources.
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Big thanks to Matt for agreeing to the interview! If you've
got questions for Matt, please leave them in the comments...