This month, a conversation with someone who’s actually making a difference in a lot of young lives. (Though maybe not in the way you’d think!) Hope this interests some of you GMAT-takers, GMAT-contemplaters, and GMAT-haters. And if you want to share your own tales of GMAT woe and triumph, we’d love to hear them. Have a great weekend!

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When I first heard of Bara Sapir, she had the unenviable task of getting my sister hyped about the LSAT. When I first realized how good Bara Sapir was, she had talked my sister out of law school altogether. Sounds strange — especially considering that Sapir’s tutored hundreds of young people for the LSAT, GMAT, and other major standardized tests with great results — but Sapir isn’t exactly traditional. The founder of Test Prep New York and creater of the Full Potential audio test-prep series doesn’t go in for the standard self-flaggellation. In fact, her holistic methods focus as much on personal wellness — through techniques such as hypnosis, guided visualization, and “neuro-linguistic programming” (i.e., changing your vocabulary to effect a change in your performance) — as test questions. And with B-school becoming a hot topic for many of us as we shake off the summer, I thought some of you might like to hear from her about the GMAT. (Just because those hedge fund guys from that New York Times story last weekend don’t care about MBAs anymore doesn’t mean we don’t, right?)

If you’re laughing, I hear you. Normally, I might be inclined to call this New Age tomfoolery, too. But it’s hard not to think differently once you start hearing Sapir’s stories.

Lately, sitting in the audience at a workplace issues speech or panel, I sometimes feel out of place. At almost 27, I’m already getting a little too old (and yes, cynical) to really benefit from the great advice for young people just entering the workforce. But I’m not nearly old enough yet to talk about reinventing myself, balancing work and kids, or many of the other pressing issues that truly mid-career folks face.

Which is why, listening to Bernard Shaw speak as he accepted a lifetime achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists last weekend, I found myself completely caught off guard. Here was a man whose voice, in my house, accompanied some of the first major news events we were old enough to fully comprehend and form our own opinions about — most notably the Gulf War.

But while that voice sounded much the same last Saturday, the script was anything but a CNN newscast. Lulled into the stupor that often characterizes conference galas, all eyes focused when — as Richard Prince reported earlier this week in his Journal-isms column — Shaw said, “Journalists, hear me tonight. There are some owners in the business — bosses, parent companies — whose profit fixation and staffing directives and decisions sabotage the public good they profess to serve.” But that was just the start, and as I listened to Shaw, it occurred to me that — as awestruck as I was — this might be something worth sharing with you. So here’s what I learned from Bernard Shaw (on that August 11, at least).

A true story from my travels this week that I thought you might appreciate. And since I’ll be on yet another flight to somewhere tomorrow, when I should be writing our Friday featurette, this will have to serve as July’s “Conversations.” (For the uninitiated, these are our retellings of some good — or in today’s case, instructively bad — chats.) So I’ll see you Monday, and in the meantime, hope you enjoy it, let us know what you think, and have an excellent weekend!

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There usually isn’t much talking on early-morning flights out of New York City. We unlucky passengers have all had to rise with the sun, endure the indignities of the security line, and suffer Starbucks for breakfast. And the only thing that bonds us more than these inconveniences by the time we’re all buckled and blanketed (if you can find one) is our shared desire for sweet sound-sleeping/paper-reading/meeting-planning silence.

So imagine our collective surprise on a 7 a.m. flight from New York to Virginia this week — I’ll withhold further detail for the safety of the reckless loudtalker I’m about to embarrass — when a perfectly normal-looking, well-dressed, twentysomething man of corporate mien began chatting with his coworker in a voice only an arena crowd could love.

Before you chalk it up to crankiness, let me elaborate. By “chatting,” I mean he shouted the entire two-and-a-half hour flight, and she — evidently desensitized to this racket — simply nodded and interjected a question now and then. The dozen or so people on the small plane shot him periodic glares, sighed audibly in his direction, and fussily draped all manner of paper and pashmina over their faces. But he didn’t notice, and we settled down. After all, we’ve all been the unhappy neighbors of a Chatty Cathy (or…Chad) with no inside voice. They’re almost always just nervous about flying or unfamiliar with veteran traveler etiquette. But this time, the real action was just getting started.

It wasn’t until I heard the following that I really took notice: “Their English may be f—–d, but I’ll tell you, that code is always exactly what I want. So what if their accent is crazy?” Asians and South Asians, it turned out, were a source of good work and constant comedy for our self-identified star software developer. (Who I should mention was himself brown.) I quickly scanned the nearby seats for enraged passengers, as my position directly behind the superstar put me squarely in the danger zone. Everyone just stared at him, transfixed.

Meanwhile, Captain Oblivious continued his tirade. And I learned all sorts of interesting facts, including details about ongoing high-level negotiations at his firm, the visa status of his visiting colleagues, and the salaries of just about everyone he knew. We also heard about his own efforts to secure work-abroad papers and circumnavigate pesky new regulations, as well as his fascinating views on success: I could be making $500 an hour, he yelled, but then I’d be responsible for s–t. The Chinese also took a few more hits, as did my fellow Subcontinent folk.

By the time it was over, having begun reading Alan Moore’s Watchmen at the gate just that morning, I was seriously contemplating some vigilante violence. (Could I, for instance, catapult him into thin air with a good push through the window?) To say nothing of the fact that, with my best efforts to sleep thwarted, I felt — and no doubt looked — like something out of Swamp Thing. And Mr. TMI? The lights went on, he stood up, and without a hint of sarcasm, flashed us all a lovely, innocent smile. If I ever see him again, it’s going to take all my good upbringing not to kick him in the shins.

The moral of the story: We can hear you. And some of us work for major media outlets…

Got any “good” biz travel horror stories?

Today, another new Friday featurette — “Conversations” — which will give us a chance to profile and hear from someone interesting. We’ll do audio for each of these as well, but I should warn you that I’m new to that aspect of blogging, so I can’t promise award-winning radio (or anything close!) anytime soon. While I’m learning, though, it should be good for a few laughs ). And guys, I know we’ve been heavy on the women of late, but this might be good reading for you, too, if you’re going for that sensitive co-worker look. Hope you enjoy, and suggestions for future conversations are more than welcome. Have a great weekend!

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Some people get fired and take off to Fiji. Some fall apart and go on benders. And some are like Hannah Seligson, who after getting fired from her first job out of school — a plum consulting gig she only kept for nine months — was inspired to begin writing a book about it. But New Girl on the Job: Advice from the Trenches (published this week on Citadel Press) isn’t just another snarky, tell-all tale of Gen Y corporate woe.

Instead, the 24-year-old Brown graduate used her journalism chops to assemble the stories of more than 100 other Gen Y women in the midst of climbing the ladder themselves, and combined them with sage advice from women who’ve already been wildly successful — including Bobbi Brown Cosmetics founder Bobbi Brown, CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien, and Women for Hire CEO Tory Johnson — into a primer for young women with corporate aspirations.

And the lessons are many. While young people in general often have a tough time transitioning from college or home life into their first jobs, Seligson says, young women face some unique challenges. They’re more likely to become “assistant-ized,” for instance, where they’re given heavily administrative roles and languish in them for much longer than normal or necessary.

And because they can sometimes be more soft-spoken in the workplace, they are also more likely to be given the doormat treatment by their bosses. This can quickly lead to what Seligson calls “work martyrdom,” where young women find themselves working far longer hours than they need to or doing extraneous work simply for the sake of doing it.

As easy as it is to fall into these traps, finding good mentors can help young women avoid or escape them. But that’s just the first step to building the career you want. “Change is spawned by a movement,” Seligson says. “Sometimes we have a sense as Gen Y women that we’ve arrived, but we can’t let academic parity make us believe that there’s workplace parity. We haven’t arrived. But that’s why setting a precedent of success early on, in the formative years of your career, is critical.”

To that end, Seligson shared some of her best tips for the “new girl”:

• Map out a career plan. Find a career, not a job. This means thinking about your interests and talents, and building a career around them, because you’re far more likely to be good at something you like. And it’s all about taking a long-term view: Imagine where you’d like to be five years from now, and work backwards from there.
• Negotiate your salary. According to an American Association of University Women study, women one year out of college make 80% of what their male peers do, so that inequity sets in from the first day on the job. That’s why you’ve got to negotiate from the very beginning — even if it’s just for extra vacation time or other perks. If you don’t, you stand to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your career.
• Modulate your expectations. Anything worthwhile takes a long time. You never fly as high as fast as you think you should or want to, but that’s okay, because it’s a learning process. You may think you can do your boss’s job and do it better, but she’s been doing it for 15 years. So learn from your bosses and relish those experiences.
• Build your team. No one does it alone, or with just one person helping her. You need a board of advisors — a wide range of people who can help you develop professionally. Go to them with specific requests and objectives in mind to make the most of those relationships.
• Manage laterally and down, as well as up. We always talk about managing up, but it’s also crucial to manage people at your own level. Every employee should have peers on his or her side, but for women it’s especially important because we’re often already working against a boys’ club mentality. And as the average job tenure gets shorter, we’re all going to be job-hopping and in need of a broad network of people with their ears to the ground, so cultivating those relationships is major.

For more from Hannah Seligson, check out her site and her work on the Huffington Post. And listen to my recent interview with her here.