Modern College, Week 5: Reflections on our first month

This post is part of the Modern College book project, in which we will be publicly documenting our experience writing a book on college with the help of the community.

This past weekend, Kasey and I hit the one month mark in our Modern College book project. I wanted to use this blog post to reflect on our experiences this first month and think critically about how we will successfully move forward.

In our first post, we laid out a goal of publishing the best book on college in a period of just 12 months. While the goal was ambitious, we felt that we had a number of systems in place to help us accomplish it.

One of these systems involved breaking our book down into bite-sized pieces that would make the entire process seem more achievable. For the month of January our goal was seemingly simple: Define our book’s thesis & overview.

As it turned out, this wasn’t as simple of a task as we originally thought. Within a week or two we had landed on what we thought was a pretty solid thesis:

Over the past several decades, we’ve witnessed many shifts within society. And yet, our advice on the college experience has not appropriately reflected these changes. In order to maximize opportunities in college and set oneself up for success beyond, it is crucial to deconstruct the outdated processes and replace them with ones that better reflect the modern college experience.

Usually, a solid thesis should drive clarity around the rest of the book, however, we realized that there were still many questions left unanswered. These gaps really became apparent as we began to talk to more people about the book idea, specifically with college students.

In some ways, it’s a bit deflating to reach the end of the first month and feel like there is less clarity around the book than when we started. However, we probably have figured out more than I am giving us credit for right now. I also suspect that while this month moved slowly we will reflect back at the end of this project and realize that some of our most important ideas came up during the last 5 weeks. To put it another way, you sometimes need to move backwards before you can move forward. Or in our case, sometimes you need to get more confused in order to find clarity.

To help gain our bearings, I want to do a quick rundown on what we know to be true now, and what some of the gaps were that we discovered this month.

Some of the things we know:

• We know that we still want to write a book on college.
• We know that there isn’t really a de facto book on college, despite there being books for other periods of life.
• We know that a lot of college students are having to figure out some of the biggest challenges of college not only on their own but also on the fly.
• We know that college students are interested in hearing about other people’s stories from college.
• There are some major themes that are apparent across college students we talked to.

Here are some of the gaps that remain:

• How can we convince college students to read, let alone, buy a book on college?
• What audience are we actually targeting? For instance, the content a senior in college wants to read about is certainly very different from that of a freshman. Is there a way to target both groups simultaneously? Or are the topics simply too different?
• It’s unclear how to handle topics that only apply to certain subsets of college students. Financing college is a HUGE challenge for some students, but for others, the issue has been entirely abstracted away through good fortune.
• How do we market/sell this book? This may be getting too far ahead of ourselves, but we really don’t want to write a book that no one actually wants to buy. It’s unclear who would actually buy this book, and if that group that would buy it is the same as the end readers.
• What’s the right mix of advice, stories, and hard facts to provide in our book? Should it be a completely toolkit-style book, memoir-style or something different altogether?

Despite these major gaps, I believe that we are still on the right track. The key is to not get discouraged, stick to the core parts of our plan and make adjustments where necessary.

In terms of next steps, we will move onto the second step of our plan: Research & gather ideas. This step is a little vaguer than other steps, so it will be important that we break this down into clear action items.

We know that there are some areas that we need to delve deeper on, so we will start by creating a basic list of topics/ideas that we feel warrant more research and then share that list in our next blog post.

It is also important that we continue to lean into our research. We are setting a goal of interviewing at least 10 more college students in the next month. So to summarize, we should finish the month of February with the following artifacts in hand:

• 4 more weekly blog posts
• Notes from at least 10 interviews with college students
• A document with a list of key topics & at least 1 page of research on each one

We will also have to find ways to overcome the following challenges:

• Setting tangible goals for each week and sticking to them.
• Building a stronger following around our book project.
• Dealing with the 3 hour time difference between Kasey and me.
• Staying passionate about the project and not giving up.
• Addressing some of the major gaps listed above.

It’s already been 1 month, and while we still have a lot of work to do, the most important thing is that we are still here, we are still passionate, and we are getting closer to our goal, one step at a time.

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