So here's what I'm up to...
First off, I've decided to be uber anti-stealth with this project. Since I'm only at the idea stage, could someone completely rip this off and go off and do it?
Sure.
Could they do it better than I could? I wouldn't bet against me, because I highly doubt anyone interested in innovating around this space is as passionate about this as I am.
Even when I was in college, I was running a non-credit seminar introducing freshmen to business concepts--mostly because I was trying to train new writers for the business newspaper I had started. When I graduated, I worked for two years to help get Fordham's Young Alumni mentoring program off the ground, and it is now their most successful career education program. Each year, the program matches students in their first two years with recent alumni who can give them some much needed insight into various career paths, but also sensible advice about how finding your passion is a journey that takes time, patience, and much preparation.
I ran NYSSA's SEMI Mentoring program for NYC-area Finance undergraduates for two years and mentored students in the program for five years. I also ran the internship program at the GM pension fund for two summers, even though I was younger than half of our interns.
Anyone who knows me knows that I've been really passionate about helping people find the same kind of career fulfillment that I've had the good fortune to find and now, I believe I've figured out how to tie together all the necessary ingredients--self assessment, professional insight, consistent networking skills, and early preparation--at scale.
Path 101 will be the place where you can send a student who hasn't the slightest clue about where they want to be when they finish school, but knows that wherever it is, they want it to be challenging and exciting as well. It will help them make a habit out of keeping up with industries, building and learning from their network, and perhaps even publishing what they're learning on a regular basis. It will be the digital extension of the career office that is available at 3AM when a student gets a sudden urge to be ambitious.
Right before I left for my trip, two people asked me in consecutive meetings what I really wanted to do. The answer that kept bubbling up was working with students on helping them find a career, but it was something that only recently I thought about being able to do at scale.
Path 101 is the shot I need to take at this--the culmination of a lot of experience with students over the last six or seven years. I'm incredibly excited about it and want to get started on finding the right technical partner who can help me see this through to fruition. That's my next step--connecting with someone who can do significant development and who sees enough value in this to want to be a significant equity partner.
I have two versions of a 5 minute presentation I put together using Jing. The first is just the presentation itself. The second is narrated using Jing's microphone integration. Frankly, I'd go with the mute one, because I have so much to say about this concept, I found it incredibly difficult to run through the same presentation with comments in the same amount of time. Either way, thanks for the five minutes of your time.