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Study Hacks

Demystifying Student Success

Disruptive Thinkers: Jason Shah Wants SAT Prep To Be FreeOctober 10

I Need a Pencil

I first encountered Jason Shah in an e-mail describing his web site, I Need a Pencil. I get lots of PR pitches about web products and I almost always ignore them. But something here caught me eye. First, Jason is a student; an undergraduate at Harvard, to be precise. Second, the service is free. And third, and most important, I Need a Pencil works in close conjunction with college access organizations around the world.

Put simply: Jason thinks that everyone should have access to SAT prep tools, especially those for whom access to college is neither expected nor guaranteed.

I concluded that Jason is someone that we had to meet. He agreed to sit through an interview to talk about his vision, life at Harvard, and what’s it’s like trying to run a company while a student.

Tell me the I Need a Pencil story.

I started INeedAPencil.com in March 2006 out of my frustration with limited options for students seeking quality test and college preparation tools without paying an arm and a leg. I was a junior in high school, and I was tutoring fellow students for the SAT when I realized how limited my reach was and how repetitive my job became.

Inspired by my family, especially my sister who had taught in

Announcing the Winner of the HP Laptop GiveawayOctober 9

The Envelope Please…

Earlier this afternoon I reviewed your entries for the Freshman 15 laptop giveaway contest. I separated out the entries that were: from students; showed a legitimate need for a laptop; and suggested a cool use for the machine if won. I then used Random.org to generate a truly random number (derived from atmospheric noise) to select a winner from this pool.

Without further ado, the winner is:

Dustin from Illinois

(more…)

Dream Job Diaries: A Day in the Life of a Recently Graduated Start-up EntrepeneurOctober 8

The Dream Job Diaries is a new semi-regular feature that investigates the reality of various glamorous post-college paths. If you have a job or know of a job you would like to see profiled, send me an e-mail.

Update 10/8/08: I inexplicably reversed the names of Lance and Dana in the original version of the article. It has been fixed below.

9 AM

The world headquarters of Wiggio Inc. can be found on the first floor of a triplex, situated across from the fire station in a gentrifying North Cambridge neighborhood. At 9 AM, one Friday morning this past September, Dana Lampert arrived to start the new day. He had been at the office until 9 PM the night before. This was considered good. The two nights previous he had been there until 3 and 4:30 AM, respectively, coaxing along a tricky upload of their web site to new servers.

Dana is soon joined by Lance Polivy, his college friend and co-founder of the company. They begin their day by diving into the more than 100 product feedback messages that have gathered over the past 24 hours. The feedback concerns Wiggio’s flagship (and only) product: the wiggio.com website.

This site was launched by Lance and Dana the previous s

Monday Master Class: Getting Things Done for College Students…Made EasyOctober 6

Complicated Goodness

In July of 2007, the first month of Study Hacks’ existence, I posted an article introducing Getting Things Done for College Students (GTDCS). This time management system was a modification of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD), tweaked for the college lifestyle. It was meant for students who needed something more than the simple system described in Straight-A or in this infamously titled post.

Here’s the problem…

Though the original article has become a cult classic among some GTD aficionados, it has also been described as…well…long and boring and complicated and hard to follow.

There. I said it.

In this post, I want to provide a much more simple summary of GTDCS — something th

Update on Laptop ContestOctober 3

A quick update on the Freshman 15 laptop giveaway contest. As of this afternoon Monday morning, I’ve received 72 120 entries, so your chances of winning are still really good.

I’ve also decided that my official selection criteria will be to choose randomly among the entries that I deem to show both a serious need for a laptop and a reasonable suggestion for using it. I think this will prove more fair than me trying to choose the single person who needs it the most — an impossible task.

Keep the entries coming!