as I googled myself, I found a person with the same name posting some cringey kid singing with only 20 views on his youtube. Also found a cringe twitter account that looked like a kid’s. Also a livestream video at some foreign school of some middle school kids singing. the FB account I found wasn’t mine and had generic anime as its profile picture and cover photo.
Also found my own LinkedIn, Instagram, and a few articles on my [censored for privacy] club making a national presence, with my name tagged in it.
Anything to worry about? should I instead set up my FB account to look semi-professional in hopes that google will rank it higher than the cringe content? or should i be an atrocious person and tell them to take down the content?
thanks!
Yeah, this is one of those things that high school GCs say to kids when advising about college applications. But I don’t see how any college adcom could know for sure that they’ve identified the right person. Plus, I seriously doubt that AOs have time to do internet searches.
If you google my son’s name, the first image that pops up is a mug shot of a kid in North Carolina (with the exact same name as my son) who broke into a store and was caught. The freaky thing is that this kid is the same age as my son and has the same hair color/eye color/build as he does. I might myself have mistaken the crook for my kid, if I didn’t know better.
The odds are good that in addition to cringy kid, they can also find you, right?
It probably won’t take a genius to figure out which of the identities is yours. Stop worrying. There are a million examples of multiple kids with the exact same names— we have 2 in our Junior class; they’re identified by the town in which they live. (As in John James Smith, Valley Stream as opposed to John James Smith, Garden City.) It’s not the first time it’s happened.
There are also a lot of people with very unique names. My last name is shared by only 17 people on the planet, all of us have unique first names. I occasionally envy the John Smiths of the world. My kid can be found with only a cursory search. Luckily all that search finds are some oddly angled selfies so we’re good.
Do college AO’s really have the time or inclination to look at social media? Probably not. Do some? Yes. Do employers? Yes. So plan accordingly. Personally, I am of the mindset that you should not post anything on your account that you would not want your grandparents to see.
Don’t worry about other people’s accounts.
As a moderator on this site, I come across users who attempt this strategy often. It is a bad strategy. Even if you or a site removes content, nothing ever really disappears from the internet. With a bit of digging, someone will find it. The better strategy is not to post it the first time around.
@doschicos That article doesn’t address mistaken identity at all. It’s bizarre that this possibility is not at least acknowledged, when social media is brought up as a factor in college admissions.
My son’s name is not common, but there are three people on Facebook that share it.
I guess that adcoms could add words (like high school name, etc.) in a google search to narrow down the possibilities, but it still seems like a gamble that they could tag an applicant as undesirable for something that someone else said or did.