<p>These are two different questions. </p>
<p>1) Do colleges look at facebook?
2) Do colleges google your name?</p>
<p>also do state/public colleges do this?</p>
<p>Assume they will, and you’ll have nothing to worry about.</p>
<p>Change your privacy settings on your facebook. Trolololol</p>
<p>Employers, including summer employers, may as well. Some may also require a drug test as a condition of employment.</p>
<p>I agree that you should assume that they do.</p>
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</p>
<p>Exactly lol</p>
<p>Obviously the colleges can’t check Facebook/Google every single applicant…</p>
<p>BUT</p>
<p>they can do so whenever they choose to, and if any facet of an application piques their interest, they will do so.</p>
<p>If you claim to have won a major honor, it’s easy to check up
If some aspect of your application doesn’t jibe with the rest, it’s easy to check up</p>
<p>If you are tempted to lie about something on your application, if it’s about something important enough to make a difference as to whether or not you will be accepted, assume it’s also important enough for them to check up on. If it’s not important enough for them to check up on, it’s probably not important enough to influence the fate of your application.</p>
<p>Oh god could they actually do that O_o
I hope they google my name though , they will find it in a big fancy newspaper article.
But I really don’t want them to see my FB account (( especially the SAT practice tests’ scores that I share on Facebook 
)) . I think i’ll just change my privacy settings.</p>
<p>I have written letters to the edtior (NYT, Daily News, Star Ledger.no life) and written comments on The Economist, HuffPo websites about very divisive issues. And in the Daily News case, some colorful tabloid language. If an adcom does not like it, can’t he or she just reject me? I don’t care about FB, that’s clean. I’m afraid of the google.</p>
<p>Not planning to add any honors to my application.</p>
<p>You used your real name on those websites?</p>
<p>Yes. Letters to the edtior require name and location.</p>
<p>I’m just asking if its standard practice to google applicant’s names. And if this is done at all in public colleges.</p>
<p>IDK about public colleges; I would think they’d have too many applicants to carefully google each one.</p>
<p>But it’s not uncommon for private universities to google promising applicants.</p>
<p>I know. If I claimed to be a nobel lauerate they would google me. But do they just google every name that comes across their desk?</p>
<p>In the absence of any reports, news stories, anecdotes about schools doing facebook/google checks on your name… the answer, in my opinion, is no.</p>
<p>I find the whole idea of these kind of checks antithetical with what universities stand for.</p>
<p>I venture to say any school discovered doing that kind of background checking would face some serious push back where the guilty parties would be taken to the woodshed.</p>
<p>Not every name, especially since some names are shared by a lot of people. It only makes sense to google someone if they have a unique name. In any case, I wouldn’t be too worried about it.</p>
<p>There have been news reports about colleges looking at FB</p>
<p>Thanks. My name isn’t that common though.</p>