A FEW weeks after he took the SAT, Jason Shah realized something more vexing to him than algebraic formulas or word usage problems: that many students can’t afford or access programs to prepare them for the test, and college.
The epiphany came in a West Philadelphia middle-school classroom that his sister ran as part of her Teach for America commitment. Many students had trouble with reading and spelling, and Mr. Shah, then 16, wondered how they would be able to study for the SAT in a few years.
He returned home to New Smyrna Beach, Fla., raised $10,000 from family and friends, found Web developers and began INeedaPencil.com, a Web site that offers free SAT prep, including lessons that use conversational language and sports analogies and full practice exams.
“Certain students either don’t do well on the SAT because they don’t have the resources or don’t take the SAT because they think only rich kids take the test,” Mr. Shah says. “It just bothers me deeply that it’s such a simple problem that doesn’t have to exist.”
Now a senior at Harvard, Mr. Shah still runs the site. The project led him to major in sociology and minor in computer science, which gave him skills to run and change the site on his own.
About 36,000 students have used it in the last three years, Mr. Shah says, and students report, on average, seeing a 200-point increase in SAT score after using the service — perhaps so high because these students have had no previous help, he says.
Mr. Shah won a $15,000 grant in a campus business competition and participated in a social innovation incubator. “Being in college and being surrounded by people doing really big-picture initiatives,” he says, “I learned from people’s mistakes about where to get funding, how to market the idea, the flow of the Web site. It looks very different than when it was launched.”
Mr. Shah says that the site has taught him more about social entrepreneurship than sitting in a classroom and studying business theory.
“You’re actually doing something,” he says. “I learned a ton in college, but I’m a hyper-practical person in a lot of ways, and you’re dealing with the day-to-day challenges of things like, ‘How do you help a student across the country?’ Or dealing with the pressure of the server going down while you’re in the middle of a sociology lecture.” — KATIE ZEZIMA
‘That New Book Smell’
WHEN Elizabeth Jane Handel was a young girl, her mother would read books to her each night. A middle-school project — sorting old books to donate to other schools — made Ms. Handel realize just how lucky she was. She wanted to share the gift of reading, and a family friend mentioned that women at the prison where she worked had extremely limited resources.
Ms. Handel started A Book From Mom, a program to donate children’s books to the women’s prison in Framingham, Mass. “I thought if I put books in the prison, mothers could select a book when their child came to visit and it would help ease the tension of the visits,” says Ms. Handel, now 21 and a junior at Barnard College.
Ms. Handel requires all books be new, because “every child deserves that new book smell.” Parents choose which book to read with their children, and the child takes the book home as a gift. Ms. Handel, who collects the books at drives and mails them, has since expanded the program to other prisons in her home state of Massachusetts, and dads can now participate.
An English major who wants to be a writer, Ms. Handel didn’t even mention the organization when applying to college. She has benefited, though. Running it has helped her develop public speaking and leadership skills, she says. “It’s given me a lot of courage.”? — KATIE ZEZIMA
Score One for Peace
FOUR years ago, Mitch Arnold was sitting in his church in Fort Atkinson, Wis., listening to a speech by a school principal from Haiti.
“What really got me was when he said that kids play soccer in dirt and rock fields,” says Mr. Arnold, now 18. “They don’t have nice fields. They use cans as goals. Here we have these nice fields with real goals, real nets, real soccer balls, whereas they use whatever they can find because they really want to play.”
Peace Is the Goal was born. The charitable foundation aims to spread peace through “the world’s game.” Using his own money as well as donations, Mr. Arnold bought balls, pumps, goals, shinguards, cleats, uniforms and field cones and sent them to Haiti.
Since then, he has sent more than $27,000 worth of soccer equipment to impoverished regions of 44 countries.
Next up, he hopes to go to the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities or the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to study psychology and Spanish. He plans to continue his charity in college. As he noted in his application essays: “My gifts of compassion, peace and action would only be equaled by my intellectual gifts that I would utilize in the classroom and the lab. As a college student, I aim to grow as I help others to grow.” — ABBY ELLIN
Putting Up a Fight
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