<p>i've heard stories that they might look you up to see what you are really like, anyone ever heard about this? it would suck if they did and rejected you if they didn't like what they saw</p>
<p>How would they check your facebook? Hire people in your HS network to spy? Are you serious? </p>
<p>But you should always be careful about what information you post about yourself online. Prospective employers and college admissions officers have excellent chances of at least googling you.</p>
<p>I'm not sure if the colleges have the time or recources to do this, but many employers do. My coworker googled up a candidate after interviewing him and discovered that the young man had quite a blog on the web with detailed description of the interview, including his lunch with "the associate chicks". Needless to say, the link to the blog was heavily circulated among the employees, and "the associate chicks" made sure that the e-mail landed in the hiring manager's inbox...</p>
<p>well they can search them through your email that you put on the application, so i changed my default picture to like a carton and deleted my quote, maybe i'll out a good one up, my profile is private anyways. But i did hear about jobs searching for you</p>
<p>there is no freedom, is there?</p>
<p>You have the freedom to post whatever you want, anyone else has the freedon to search and read it. You also have the freedom to make your page private.</p>
<p>I agree w/sunnyflorida: aisgzdavinci, why do you think if someone blogs about illegal activities or posts activities of ill behavior that they should be shielded from an employer who is looking to devote resources to them and to entrust them with major responsibilities?</p>
<p>remember: HR departments will sort through to only a handful of potential candidates. You an bet that googling thru 5-7 people is easier than a college admissions office who deals with 10000s of apps.</p>
<p>You want to keep your private details private? Then do so. No one has a gun to you head when you're about to upload the skantly dressed/drunken pics...</p>
<p>I have no sympathy to someone who shows such poor judgment. The employment marketplace will work the same way.</p>
<p>I just have to add that a college admissions person or a future employer "googling" you is certainly not big brother. The internet is a VERY public place. You are posting things on a worldwide bulletin board. You are putting it out there for anyone to see. Anyone. And sometimes it never goes away. To be honest, that is all about freedom. But when you take it public, it is in the public domain. And that means its no longer private. And you can't always get it back.</p>
<p>Some colleges are asking for IM screen names now in the personal information they ask for from prospective students, making it easier to look applicants up.</p>
<p>Why in the world would you voluntarily give college admissions IM screen names? It's not like they can demand that information from you, since you can say you don't have one.</p>
<p>Look, they aren't spying on you. Usually only people in your network can see your facebook anyways, so as long as they don't hire someone to join your network (which would be spying and border unethical) you're safe. Of course, this doesn't mean you should make public the things that colleges wouldn't want to know.</p>
<p>This is why properly setting the privacy settings in Facebook is so crucial. If you don't adjust your privacy settings from the default, I'm quite sure anyone with a Facebook account will be able to see at least part of your profile and media, if not all of it. What is to stop an admissions officer from getting a Facebook account? After all, I'm sure most of them are college alumni. According to the Facebook guidelines, if you don't arrange otherwise, anyone can view your information. Myspace is even worse, because anything you put on Myspace that is not copyrighted or trademarked becomes the property of Myspace (Beware budding musicians!)</p>
<p>
[quote]
I have no sympathy to someone who shows such poor judgment. The employment marketplace will work the same way.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Is that directed to me?</p>
<p>No aisgzdavini: pls don't take it like that. It's an observation at the embarrassing and sometimes reckless level of exposure people are sometimes doing -- hopefully it's wisdom that may be heeded.</p>
<p>From the Brown Daily Herald
Home > Campus News
Admission officers poke around Facebook
Rachel Arndt
Issue date: 9/10/07 Section: Campus News</p>
<p>This fall, Brown hopefuls might want to consider a new potential aspect of the application process: their profiles on Facebook. Though they deny doing so on a regular basis, University admission officers sometimes follow up on anonymous tips to examine applicants' profiles.</p>
<p>These days, Facebook is no longer a place just for students - as its Web site states, "All that's needed to join Facebook is a valid email address." There are currently 39 million active members on the social networking site.</p>
<p>"We don't use Facebook unless someone says there's something we should look at," said Dean of Admission James Miller '73. But Miller conceded that admission officers take outside tips seriously. "Anything we get, we follow up on," he said.</p>
<p>Associate Director of College Admission Elisha Anderson '98 agreed with Miller. There is a "limit to what we can appropriately judge people on," he said, but added, "You have to remember (Facebook) is a public place." He said there was "maybe one case" in which Facebook yielded information that affected an admission decision.</p>
<p>Sometimes admission officers receive friend requests on Facebook from applicants, Anderson said, noting that accepting the requests "would appear weird."</p>
<p>At least one admission officer at Brown questioned even case-by-case visits to Facebook profiles when evaluating applications.</p>
<p>"I don't think that's a fair practice," said Victor Ning '07, a Brown admission officer who said he looks only at the materials the students send to the office. Though he said he doesn't think admission officers consult Facebook during the application "reading season," he still warned, "Students should definitely be careful," adding that potential employers could be on Facebook too.</p>
<p>Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, was stunned that any admission officers would use Facebook in the admission process. "If they use it, our recommendation would be to stop immediately because it's inappropriate," he said.</p>
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<p>Nassirian expressed concern about the importance of boundaries in checking students' backgrounds.</p>
<p>"Where do you stop?" Nassirian asked. If admission officers began to systematically use Facebook, he worried, they might then begin to treat the admission process as an investigation.</p>
<p>The admission process should include only the information the student consents to giving, he said. For an admission officer to look at something the student has not submitted is "highly problematic," Nassirian said.</p>
<p>Nassirian was to careful to distinguish between finding information accidentally and seeking it out in media like Facebook. It is acceptable if an admission officer were to accidentally find information about an applicant through a medium other than the application, he said.</p>
<p>Though the practice of checking on college applicants' Facebook profiles is not widespread, Nassirian said, students should understand that their "behavior out there on the Web is behavior in public."</p>
<p>Anderson said he has interacted with college applicants on Facebook. One student's profile picture was "a little bit inappropriate," Anderson said, so he sent the student a message advising him to change his picture.</p>
<p>"I don't look at high school students who are applying to Brown on the Facebook," he said. Still, his Facebook profile's education and work information includes a description of his work at Brown: "I'm the Decider."</p>
<p>do colleges care about what you wrote on the internet? Cuz on amazon, I found a profile of me back in 6th grade writing a bunch of crap...</p>