Hi Mitchell,
Thanks for your interest.
Both Vipul and I went to graduate school with a view toward learning more math rather than as a stepping stone to a career outside of academia. Our academic credentials may have some signaling benefits, but if we had wanted to optimize for careers outside of academia we wouldn't have gone to math graduate school. As it turns out, our academic background has been quite helpful with the advising work we've ended up doing.
Our goal is to help our advisees attain life satisfaction. For some of them this may come from a high paying and stable career, for others it may come from pursuit of intellectual interests, for others it may come from a blend of the two. We feel that we're well equipped to advise people in any of these situations.
My name is Jonah Sinick, and I'm posting to announce a new advising service for intellectually curious students: Cognito Mentoring. I'm working on this in collaboration with Vipul Naik.
We have very broad intellectual interests, cutting across topics such as rationality, economics, pure math, psychology, humanitarian issues and classical music. I have a PhD in pure math, have been an active participant on Less Wrong, worked at GiveWell for a year, and have done research for Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) on how effectively can we plan for future decades and on how well policy-makers will handle AGI. Vipul has a PhD in pure math, and started Open Borders, a website devoted to discussing immigration liberalization.
We both have experience working with intellectually curious young people. I worked for three summers at MathPath (a summer camp for middle school students who are interested in math), taught at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (an academic magnet high school), and currently teach for Art of Problem Solving (an online school for high performing math students). Vipul has trained students for mathematical olympiads, and taught calculus and linear algebra at University of Chicago for years.
We spent several months researching the educational resources that are available to high performing students, college selection and college admissions, psychological findings on intellectual giftedness, and the experiences of past and current members of the population that we're serving, and we’re ready to help. We're currently offering free personalized advising on these things by email, Skype, or phone. You can connect with us here. If you're interested, we look forward to hearing from you.