Cognito Mentoring

Belief: likely

This page describes my relation to Cognito Mentoring (CM), which was an “advising service for intellectually curious students”. I originally saw the post on Less Wrong that Jonah Sinick made, and emailed CM for the first time on January 1, 2014. I was too intimidated to contact them on my own, so I asked a friend to contact them as well; we ended up reviewing each other’s emails before sending them off1.

CM and I then exchanged around 20 emails, mostly about college and major selection (since at the time I was in my final year of high school). Sometime around the beginning of March 2014, I responded to the survey put out by CM about how well they did in helping me. The following is the review that was generated based on my survey answers (also posted on the reviews page of CM under “male high school senior joining University of Washington (UW) in Fall 2014”):

I found out that majoring in math at UW was not a good choice for me. Cognito Mentoring pointed me to Alex K. Chen’s Quora content and connected me to him through email. Reading Alex K. Chen’s answers on Quora has also been immensely useful. Finding out Quora as a resource has also been useful (I knew of its existence before, but not of its utility in finding out information about e.g. UW and the university experience in general). In particular, this post convinced me to contact UW admissions to have my intended major changed from mathematics to computer science (which should make me eligible for direct admit to CS). I also plan to follow Alex K. Chen’s advice once I am at UW.

The Cognito Mentoring wiki (though still under construction) has been useful. I have begun watching some of the Center of Math videos (I had found them at one point, but lost the URL, and couldn’t relocate the website, so it has been good to find it again) and Vipul’s math videos (for some reason finding the videos was difficult because the main page of the channel doesn’t list all the videos…), which are closer to the math that I had wanted to learn, and still want to learn.

It was very useful to receive targeted information about UW and math, but I feel that a lot of the advice could have been placed on a website (i.e. the advice was general enough that having them available for everyone would have saved time for all). I realize that the Cognito Mentoring wiki will solve this problem.

In addition to the things listed above, I can attribute various other positive changes in my life to the advising I received from Cognito Mentoring:

To be sure, I think I am one of the mentees that benefited most from Cognito Mentoring. For example, I think that although my friend who contacted CM along with me benefited from the service, she did not get as much out of it as I did—in other words, I think that she would have pretty much ended up at the same place regardless of the mentoring, whereas in my case, I think that my output and impact on the world would have been much less without CM. I’m not sure there is a definite reason for this difference, other than that I “clicked” with the ideals behind CM.


  1. I later found out that Jonah and Vipul thought my friend and I were a single person trying to A/B test CM!


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