Get Rich in College (Scheme 2)

I generally like to adhere to Henry Ford's advice, as such, my blog posts will always focus on things I've done rather than my plans.

Henry Ford "You can't build a reputation on what your going to do"

The blog was quiet for a while as I have been busy in what I'm going to call money making scheme 2. This scheme was entirely different to scheme 1 (Kanye Glasses) and what's brilliant is scheme 3 which i will be implementing shortly combines both (I know, I said I wouldn't talk about things I haven't done, but just felt it was relevant). Scheme 2 came about after a very positive reaction to the response I got for my "Top 5 Tips for College Exam Success". I realised that I had managed to get good results in college even though I didn't work as hard as my peers. Is it because I'm a legendary genius? maybe, but most likely it's because I studied incredibly efficiently. I created a system for learning off answers that allowed me to reproduce them in exams the exact way I'd learned them off. This meant that my answers always were really well structured and had great examples (also lots of big words!). What I only discovered after beginning scheme 2 was that most students did not do this. So I enlisted the help of another great speaker (and recent graduate) from my Toastmasters club and we created a 45 minute seminar to improve study efficiency.

Now there is a wealth of information about studying and exam technique out there. one book in particular had fantastic reviews. So I went to the college bookshop and looked at it....it was about an inch thick, and right there and then I decided that our seminar would be a different approach. Students are trying to get good grades without reading the book, so what are the chances their going to read a book about studying before their assigned material? A very small amount will, and will probably do very well, but the vast majority will not be willing to put in the time and effort of reading a study book. They just hit the books hard day and night for a few weeks before exams. So I wanted to create a study seminar that would actually help the majority of students (not just the top tier) and would be easy to implement. That is why the seminar is so short, we give the students a few ideas to try out and then let them off. We finish each seminar with a little motivational pep talk as well because motivation to study is crucial.

Once we created our seminar we ran a few trial seminars in colleges for free and got a great response. Doesn't everyone say that? The difference is we KNOW the students thought it was great because we got each of them to fill out an anonymous feedback form which asked them to rate each section out of 10. IMPORTANT NOTE for any business or service provider, feedback is what it's all about, it's not about the service (in our case seminar) you provide and how good it is, it's about what the students/customers get out of it. Getting the students to rate us, was incredibly beneficial. After every seminar we would input data into a spreadsheet and work out our averages, anytime one section scored poorly we analysed delivery and content and how to improve it. Likewise when we got a very high average score we also analysed performance and learned from it. The result was that after a month we had given 5 seminars for free to college students witch crowds varying from 7 to 80 students!

*feedback form, click to enlarge

We got our first corporate gig up the country and were required to give two seminars in two days.....to be continued