MySpace in College Admission (for teens) (continued)

Creasy also cautions that when students contact admission officers through the school’s message boards and blogs, the information becomes part of the formal correspondence and can be factored in to the admission decision.

Applying to college isn’t the only thing you should worry about when you post your information online. Your profile can follow you as you try to get a job.

According to the 2005 study by executive job-search agency ExecuNet, cited in the Chicago Tribune, 75 percent of recruiters use Web research as part of the applicant screening process.

The same article notes that a recruiter withdrew a job offer after seeing the candidate’s blog.

One recent grad took down his profile when someone called him about a friend he went to school with. The caller identified himself as an employee at a consulting firm who was “facebooking” all the applicants and contacting their friends to check them out (Sposato 2005).

An intern was fired when the CEO discovered that the intern’s Facebook profile noted that he would “‘spend most of [his] days screwing around on IM and talking to [his] friends and getting paid for it’” (Conlin 2006).

There’s even a verb for people who get fired for what they put on their Web sites—dooced—named after the blog of a woman who was fired for writing about her job in her blog.

Basically, the point is that whatever you post, it never goes away. Once your information is online—even if you take it down—it becomes public information, as your page can be saved on anyone’s computer.

What You Can Do

• First, be safe! Never post personal information such as your address, daily schedule, phone number, etc. Check out these safety guidelines from the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use and Wired Safety.
• Make your profile private so that strangers can’t look at your information, and be cautious about adding new friends who you do not personally know.
• Take down any questionable photos or exchanges between you and your friends. Give it the “Grandma Test.” If you wouldn’t want your grandmother to see it, then you don’t want other adults to either. Remember, pictures and references of you on your friends’ pages can be damaging too. You can ask them to take down this kind of information.
• Don’t get a false sense of security on sites like Facebook, where you need an academic address, to view pages. It’s easy for faculty, alumni and random people to get on and look at your wall and photos.

Although blogs can be fun, remember that what you post is for public view, like broadcasting it on the six o’clock news. So when it’s time to apply for college, give your blog a second look to make sure you feel comfortable sharing everything you have posted with an admission officer and, later, with potential employers because your site becomes permanent, public information about you.

Greenfield, Jimmy. “All Up in My Space.” Chicago Tribune, March 28, 2006.

Kornblum, Janet and Beth Marklein. “What You Say Online Could Haunt You.” USA Today. March 8, 2006.

Conlin, Michelle. “You Are What You Post: Bosses Are Using Google to Peer Into Places Job Interviews Can’t Take Them.” BusinessWeek. March 27, 2006.

Sposato, Bree. “MySpace Invaders.” New York. Nov. 21, 2005.