Below is an excerpt from Andrew Yang‘s new book, Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America, which comes out in February 2014. Andrew was named Managing Director of Manhattan GMAT in 2006, Chief Executive Officer in 2007, and President in 2010. He left Manhattan GMAT in 2010 to start Venture for America, where he now serves as Founder and CEO. 

The Prestige Pathways.  

Let’s imagine a very large company. It is a leader in its industry and much admired by its peers. It invests a tremendous amount of money—literally billions of dollars a year—in identifying, screening, and training its many employees. Those employees who are considered to have high potential are sent to special training programs at substantial additional cost. Happily, these top training programs are considered to be among the best in the world. After these employees complete their training, the company encourages them to choose for themselves the division in which they’d like to work. Employee preferences are deemed to be the most efficient way of deciding who works where.

This seems like a good system, and it works well for a long time. However, perhaps predictably, many of its most highly rated employees eventually become drawn to the finance and legal divisions because these divisions have very effective recruitment arms, are more visible, pay better, and are thought of as providing a more intellectual level of work.  Over time, proportionally fewer of the top recruits go toward the management of the company or the company’s operations.  The company’s basic training division is considered a backwater, with low pay and low recognition. And only a relative handful of employees go toward research and development or the launching of any new products.

Take a second to think about the company described above. What do you think will happen to this company as time passes? And if you think that it’s not set on a path to success, what would you do to fix it? This company reflects, in essence, the economy of the United States of America.

If you are a smart college student and you want to become a lawyer and go to law school, what you must do has been well established. You must go to a good school, get good grades (already accomplished, for many), and take the LSAT (a four-hour skill test). There is no anxiety in divining the requirements, as they are clearly spelled out. Most undergrads, even those with little interest in law school, know what it takes to get in. The path location costs are low.

The same is true if you want to become a doctor. Becoming a doctor is hard, right? Sort of. It is arduous and time-consuming, but it is not hard if you have certain academic abilities. You must take a battery of college courses (organic chemistry being the most infamous and rigorous of them) and do well, study for the MCAT (an eight-hour exam), and spend a summer or even a year caddying for a researcher, doctor, or hospital. These are time-consuming hoop-jumping tasks, to be sure, but anyone with a very high level of academic aptitude can complete them.

If you attend an Ivy League university or similar national institution, legions of suit-wearing representatives from the big-name investment banks and consulting firms will show up at your campus and conduct first-round interviews to fill their ranks each year, even in a down period (as with the recent years following the financial crisis). They will spend millions of dollars enlisting interns and educating the market annually. Most freshmen have no idea what management consulting is, yet seniors can rattle off the distinctions of different firms with little difficulty. All undergraduates have friends in the classes above them who have gone through this process and gained analyst or associate positions at major investment banks and consulting firms.
Read more

Below is an excerpt from Andrew Yang‘s new book, Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America, which comes out in February 2014. Andrew was named Managing Director of Manhattan GMAT in 2006, Chief Executive Officer in 2007, and President in 2010. He left Manhattan GMAT in 2010 to start Venture for America, where he now serves as Founder and CEO. 

Smart People Should Build Things. 

I believe there’s a basic solution to our country’s economic and social problems. We need to get our smart people building things (again). They’re not really doing it right now. They’d like to. But they’re being led down certain paths during and after college and told not to worry, they can figure it out later.

Take me, for instance. I wasn’t very enterprising when I graduated from Brown in 1996. I had a general desire to be smart, accomplished, and successful—whatever that meant. So I went to law school and became a corporate attorney in New York. I figured out I was in the wrong place after a number of months working at the law firm. I left in less than a year and cofounded a dot-com company, Stargiving, which helped raise money for celebrity-affiliated nonprofits. It was extraordinarily difficult. My company failed spectacularly, but I recovered. I went to work for a mobile software company, Crisp Wireless, and then a health care software company, MMF Systems, over the next five years, eventually becoming the CEO of a test-prep company, Manhattan GMAT, in 2006.

I spent five years running Manhattan GMAT, helping young people get into business school. I taught our corporate classes of investment banking analysts and consultants at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Company, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Deloitte, as well as hundreds of individual students over the years. Some were exactly where they wanted to be. But there seemed to be just as many top-notch young people who wondered why they didn’t like their jobs more. They sought a higher sense of engagement with their work and their careers. Sometimes they would put words to what they were looking for; they’d say they wanted “something entrepreneurial” or “to be really excited about something.”
Read more

Manhattan Prep is offering special full tuition scholarships for up to 4 individuals per year (1 per quarter) who will be selected as part of Manhattan Prep’s GRE Social Venture Scholars program. This program provides the selected scholars with free admission into one of Manhattan Prep’s GRE live online Complete Courses (an $890 value).

These competitive scholarships are offered to individuals who (1) currently work full-time in an organization that promotes positive social change, (2) plan to use their master’s degree to work in a public, not-for-profit, or other venture with a social-change oriented mission, and (3) demonstrate clear financial need. The Social Venture Scholars can enroll in any live online preparation course taught by one of Manhattan Prep’s expert instructors within one year of winning the scholarship.

The deadline our next application period is 9/6.

More details and how you can apply can be found here.

Manhattan Prep is offering special full tuition scholarships for up to 4 individuals per year (1 per quarter) who will be selected as part of Manhattan Prep’s GRE Social Venture Scholars program. This program provides the selected scholars with free admission into one of Manhattan Prep’s GRE live online Complete Courses (an $890 value).

These competitive scholarships are offered to individuals who (1) currently work full-time in an organization that promotes positive social change, (2) plan to use their master’s degree to work in a public, not-for-profit, or other venture with a social-change oriented mission, and (3) demonstrate clear financial need. The Social Venture Scholars can enroll in any live online preparation course taught by one of Manhattan Prep’s expert instructors within one year of winning the scholarship.

The deadline our next application period is 6/14.

More details and how you can apply can be found here.

I just read a really fascinating post on the New York Times’ Well blog. We’ve known for a long time that exercise has a whole host of good benefits, including benefits associated with memory. Two recent studies have delved even deeper into how this works.

How does exercise help memory?

In the blog post, New York Times journalist Gretchen Reynolds details the two new studies¾one conducted on humans and the other conducted on rats.

In the human study, elderly women who already had some mild cognitive impairment were split into three groups. One group lifted weights, the second group engaged in moderate aerobic exercise, and the third group did yoga-like activities.

The participants were tested at the beginning and end of the 6-month exercise period and the results were striking. First, bear in mind that, in general, we would expect elderly people who are already experiencing mental decline to continue down that path over time. Indeed, after 6 months, the yoga group (our control group) showed a mild decline in several aspects of verbal memory.

The weight-training and aerobic groups, by contrast, actually improved their performance on several tests (remember, this was 6 months later!). In particular, these groups were not losing as much of their older memories and they even became faster at some spatial memory tests involving memorizing the location of three items. In other words, the women were both better at making new memories and better at remembering / retrieving old ones!

Read more

Take a sneak peek into Manhattan Prep’s 500 Essential Words and 500 Advanced Words GRE flashcard sets!

Turns out, metaphysical doesn’t just mean “really deep, man.” And let’s not even talk about ontological and empirical. Check it out:

Want to adopt 1,000 new flashcards? Visit our store here.

Did you know that our acclaimed GRE Strategy Guides are also available in the eBook format? You can now enjoy the full weight of the knowledge contained within our strategy guides without having to lug around the full weight of the books! It’s win-win!

To celebrate digital GRE prep, we’re giving away a complete set of our 8 Manhattan GRE Strategy Guides in the eBook format and, so you have something to read them with, we’re also giving away a brand new iPad along with them!

To enter to win, all you need to do is go to our Facebook page and “Like” our status about this giveaway. We’ll pick a winner at random from the list of people who “liked” that staus on May 15th at noon, EST.

Good luck!

We are launching a new GRE workshop called Thursdays with Jen and we would like to invite you to attend. Every other Thursday, join MGRE instructor Jennifer Dziura for an hour and a half study session. Regular readers of the blog will probably recognize Jen as the contributor of many of our blog articles. In fact, Jen is our Blog Editor and Lead Content Developer, and the instructor of our first-ever GRE classes.

In these special Live Online sessions, open to the public as well as current students, Jennifer will conduct mini workshops on a few different GRE-related topics. Both the verbal and quant sections of the GRE will be covered.

If you can’t attend the session, don’t worry. A copy of the recording will be made available the following Monday. You can sign up for an upcoming session, or find recordings of past sessions, here: //www.manhattanprep.com/gre/thursdays-with-jen.cfm

Each session will deal with new GRE topics. To suggest a topic or ask a question for next time, email Jen at jdziura@manhattanprep.com. We hope to see you this Thursday for the workshop!

Manhattan GRE’s three-day boot camp is a program designed for students who have strong math backgrounds and/or have been studying for the GRE for at least 1 month. Taught by top-notch teachers and built on content-based learning, class sessions are interactive and challenging, building students’ proficiency and confidence for every question type on the exam.

The course includes a complete set of our 8 Strategy Guides, plus access to 6 online practice exams.

Course Details
Date: Friday, November 18th – Sunday, November 20th
Location: 138 W. 25th St (our NYC center)
Price: $590

Detailed Schedule
11/18 – 3 hour session 5:30PM – 8:30 PM Online
11/19 – 3.75 hour Online Practice Exam 10am-1:45pm (online or in our center, space permitting)
11/19 – 3.5 Hour Session 2:30 PM – 6:00 PM
11/20 – 3.75 hour Online Practice Exam 10am-1:45pm (online or in our center, space permitting)
11/20 – 3.5 Hour Session 2:30 PM – 6:00 PM

Please note: The session on Friday November 18th will be held in a Live Online classroom. Saturday and Sunday sessions will be held at the Manhattan GRE center (138 W 25th Street, New York, NY 10001). Student should also set aside time to take two 3 hour and 45 minute practice exams, one prior to each of the two in-person sessions. These tests can be taken at home or in Manhattan GRE’s testing center (testing center availability limited).

Meet the Instructor

Jennifer Dziura is Manhattan GRE’s Blog Editor and Lead Content Developer. She has scored perfectly on the GRE twice, has written or contributed to more than 10 published test prep books, and is the author of Manhattan GRE’s 500 Essential Words and 500 Advanced Words flashcard sets. In her M.S. in Education program, she worked on projects relating to using research into the brain to decrease stress and enhance learning and memory. She has helped over 2,000 people master the content for the GRE and other exams. Jennifer uses her obviously copious spare time to co-host an adult spelling bee.

Note: Images are from our favorite boot camp movie, GI Jane. Actual GRE bootcamp looks more like this (no pushups!)

Sign Up Here

Ever wish there was a more convenient way to take advantage of your morning train ride or doctor’s office waiting room session to get that nagging GRE® study out of the way? If you answered a resounding “yes!” to that question, then your wish has been granted. Read more