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The Internet has become undeniably important to fostering communication and disseminating information. Student blogs can help us get to know people that we might otherwise never meet. They can expand not only our conceptions, but also those of prospective students, parents, and anyone else who wants to know about what students think, feel, and care about here at Brown.
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<p>Chang cites College Confidential as a helpful source of inside information for college hunters, but chides Brown for not offering a blog of their own. Do high schoolers and their parents find that student-written college blogs are indeed a helpful source of information when researching colleges?</p>
<p>The NY Times article she’s referring to is this one:</p>
<p>EDUCATION | October 02, 2009
M.I.T. Taking Student Blogs to Nth Degree
By TAMAR LEWIN </p>
<p>The student blogs I’ve read are engaging and interesting, and I think they would give prospective students some idea about how at least these few individuals go about life at their schools.</p>
<p>But I think the degree to which they are actually a helpful resource in practice depends in large part on how they are “marketed” and highlighted by the university. And here there are major differences.</p>
<p>If you go to the MIT admissions website, the first thing you see are links to their student blogs. They are deliberately steering you to them. To the point where many would click on them even if they had no particular interest in reading anecdotes pertaining to daily student life there, because it seems to be where MIT wants you to go.</p>
<p>At D1s alma mater Oberlin College, e.g, it’s more subtle than that, they are not front and center but a link to the blogs is still evident on the first webpage of the admissions website, in a big box on the right hand side. Most visitors to the site would see it and follow up if they were interested. I would imagine these blogs get decent visitation from interested prospects, but not as much as MITs.</p>
<p>In contrast, the undergraduate admissions front webpage at my alma mater Cornell, e.g, makes no mention that student blogs even exist. The link to them is buried in a single line of a subsequent “Student Life” page. Many visitors probably never even get to the “Student Life” page, and even if they did they could more easily overlook the link than in the other two examples. These blogs get few comments, not because they are less interesting, engaging and potentially useful than at the other schools, but rather because probably most prospective applicants never even see them or realize they exist. IMO.</p>
<p>I like student blogs, but all too often, they’re just not interesting. I don’t judge the school for that, I judge the writer. If the blog writer isn’t a good writer, of course I’ll find the entries to be boring. But there are plenty of really good ones, like Oberlin, or Uchi that are blogs. I just looked at the UChi one, and came up with this:</p>
<p>“*If you read the blog about admissions and facebook, let it be known I get a number of friend requests from prospective students every year. My personal facebook policy is that I will friend you if you become a part of the University of Chicago network and not earlier. I will grant exceptions if I went to summer camp with your older sister or had a huge crush on your older brother when I met him at a dance party in seventh grade. Please state those connections upon friend request and provide pictures of your older brother from his seventh grade yearbook so I can indeed verify that he was the hottie I wanted to dance with.”</p>
<p>Guess that solves part of the: Should we Facebook? Issue. Haha. Not only that, it’s good writing…which helps. But if it was bad, I don’t think it would always <em>hurt</em>.</p>
<p>I think this would just be a way of extending the typical comments from students listed all over webpages and the kinds of things heard on tours.</p>
<p>I’m not sure that blogs are useful because to extend beyond the typical sales pitch-type information they would need to be increasingly personal and revealing, and I’m not sure that bloggers will cross lines in a more significant way than any guide will.</p>
<p>Having been a student blogger (for MIT, where the Admissions department emphasizes the student blogs pretty strongly), I do think that bloggers will get more personal than a random tour guide. There was plenty of stuff in my life that was interesting that I never blogged about, because it was too personal or otherwise inappropriate, but there were plenty of times when I was pouring my heart out.</p>
<p>Also, bloggers can provide a more personalIZED picture of a school. A tour guide can tell you about the dorms, the activities, and so on. A blogger can tell you about their experiences with <em>specific</em> dorms, activities, etc. If you have a lot of bloggers, you can cover a pretty nice cross-section of student life in much more detail than you would see in tours or generic admissions materials.</p>
<p>Don’t believe everything you read. Opinions vary, depending on someone’s experience and/or personality, and often a writer has never visited a university. Sometimes they did a cameo appearance and really didnt discuss anything of substance with people while there. And kids are kids. They change opinions like clothing styles. Many are interested in only their point of view and no others. Blogs, like CC, are a starting point, and sometimes offer helpful hints. In the end, the decision is up to the applicant. Sometimes when paring down a list of potential schools you simply have to be arbitrary. My D1 didnt want to go farther north than NYC and that meant anything in Connecticut or Massachusetts or New Hampshire etc was out of the question. Plenty of excellent schools up there, but it was a no go. Simple as that. </p>
<p>People often look for ratification of their own views when reading other’s opinions. Its human nature.</p>
<p>"I’m not sure that blogs are useful because to extend beyond the typical sales pitch-type information they would need to be increasingly personal and revealing, and I’m not sure that bloggers will cross lines in a more significant way than any guide will. "</p>
<p>While they might be yet more useful if they were not formally associated with the college admissions office, the student blogs I’ve read still ought to have value in my opinion. Because the bloggers describe what living there is actually like. One can get a sense of what they do for fun, what their weekend is like, what their life is like generally. Which may be highly influenced by the specifics of the school and its location. This goes beyond sales pitch information, the ones I’ve read are personal and revealing, actually, that there are probably constraints does not mean that there is not much of value within those constraints.</p>
<p>“…often a writer has never visited a university”"</p>
<p>??? the blogs at issue here are written by students who attend the university !!!</p>
<p>I agree with all the benefits of the bloggers mentioned by ghostbuster and monydad, but all of those things I feel are reflected equally well by tour guides, and I say that as a former guide who writes quite a bit on the Brown board here (which could be considered some form of blogging).</p>
<p>??? the blogs at issue here are written by students who attend the university !!! - perhaps they are on the college websites (though is that necessarily so? Can anyone post on them? Are they restricted entry to students with college email addresses/ID’s?).</p>
<p>But there are blogs everywhere about colleges that ARENT restricted to students attending there, including this website here: CC.</p>
<p>The point I was making was that opinions vary and many times they aren’t accurate, but merely reflect a personal experience that is not relevant to the general population. Read them with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>“But there are blogs everywhere about colleges that ARENT restricted to students attending there, including this website here: CC.”</p>
<p>Perhaps so, but such blogs are not the subject of OPs post, if you read post #1 here, hence, are not the topic of this thread. Which it titled," Importance of Student Blogs on Admission Pages?" </p>
<p>To find the blogs that are actually on-point for this thread, just go to a college’s admissions department website and look for links to their student blogs. Not all schools have them, several specific schools that do have them have been cited above.</p>
<p>“…all of those things I feel are reflected equally well by tour guides”</p>
<p>My experience with tour guides has been otherwise, more like “here is this building”… with just a touch of the other stuff. At some schools we visited, tour guides talked to huge groups via megaphones (cough cough YOUR school, actually), and barely had time to say much off-script to particular individuals at all. But if you provided your “tourees” with bi-weekly updates on your current doings, over the course of your whole stay there from the time you were appointed, and then also provided each of them with the same information from the perspective of six of your fellow tour guides,you must have been giving some long tours.</p>