the Sam Jackson College Experience

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is spearheading an internet security task force, working with companies like MySpace, Google, Microsoft, and fifty attorney generals to help identify effective online safety tools and technologies. danah boyd, social media researcher and general awesome person extraordinaire, is soliciting people for a research intern position working with her on the task force.

I have been interning since the fall with Berkman danah boyd helping her to do research, and can attest to her being an amazing person to work with. What’s more, the Berkman Center is a great and vibrant community where you can really have a lot of fun getting engaged about exciting issues.

Snippet about the Task Force:

“The safety concerns posed by the Internet are part and parcel of the safety concerns that arise in human interactions in the physical world. These concerns are not unique to any one service or technology platform; they are shared by the companies that provide Internet services and the individuals who use these services. We should work together – private firms, technologists, experts from the non-profit world, and leaders in government – to solve online safety issues as a joint effort,” said John Palfrey, Executive Director of The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. “We are honored to assume the leadership of this Task Force and excited to convene the broad array of interests represented by the group.”

Anyhow, danah posted to her blog, and John Palfrey posted to the digital natives discussion list, a call for research intern applications. This is a really great opportunity to get involved in a great project, so check it out or send it to people you know who might be interested. Excerpted from danah’s blog below:

Connected to my role in the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, I’m seeking a research intern. The intern would be responsible for:

1. Creating an annotated bibliography of all scholarly research related to the issues taken up by the Task Force (e.g., Internet sexual predators, bullying, identity theft, COPPA, etc.)
2. Creating an annotated list of scholars and institutes working in the field and reaching out to them to see if new research is about to be published
3. Writing the first draft of a literature review of the relevant research
4. Other things that might come up…

The ideal intern will have strong research skills, strong writing skills, and an interest in the topic. Timeliness is also crucial – much is needed to be done by mid-June. The ability to self-motivate/self-direct is also critical; I will be doing virtually no micromanagement and the deadline is not movable.

The intern would officially be an intern at the Harvard Berkman Center and will receive the standard Harvard intern wage; living in Cambridge is not a requirement – most interactions with me will take place through email/AIM. The intern must be a student at a university (either undergrad or graduate level) and have full library access. Preference will be given to those in social science fields who are familiar with and can evaluate quantitative methods. The most ideal candidate would probably be a pre-quals graduate student who is working in this area and would love to be paid to do the literature review they have to do anyhow, but I’m not sure that this person exists.

This position will start the moment I find the right person. It will definitely last through June and can last much longer depending on the person’s interest (there’s plenty of related work through December). Hours are flexible; all that matters is getting the job done.

To apply, send me an email to zephoria at zephoria dot org. Include your CV, the names and emails of 2 professors who can attest to your research skills, a sample piece of writing (class assignments are fine) and a cover letter that includes: why you are interested in this internship, some background on your research skills, and whatever else you think that I might want to know.

Feel free to forward this announcement to anyone you think might be interested.

Definitely check it out! This is a great opportunity to do interesting work with brilliant and interesting people.

This is just a quick post to congratulate all those who were just accepted regular decision to Yale for the class of 2012. This is a great achievement! Some of you will come to Bulldog Days, some (like me) won’t, and some of you will decide to go somewhere else altogether.

It’s also just a note to say that even if your heart was set on Yale, and you were rejected or waitlisted, all is not lost! The dirty secret of college admissions is that people tend to be happy wherever they go, and what’s more, actually going to a school like Yale has no causal impact on your success or chances in life or etc–you control that, and statistically you’re just as able anywhere else (as shown by analysis of people who get into Yale, but choose to go elsewhere).

I’m reposting below a message from a fellow member of 2011, originally posted before SCEA decisions in December. Also, if you I know you in real life and you got in or even if you didn’t, please let me know because I am anxious to see if you might be joining me next year… you know who you are! Without further ado:

Hi! As a class of ‘11 yalie, i can tell you that lots of people on campus are excited that in a little over a day there will be several hundred new prospective yalies! As a former SCEA applicant, i can also understand how anxious many of you are right now. So before you log on to admits.yale.edu and get what you may think is the most critical result of your life up to this point, i wanted to share some thoughts.

Yale was my absolute first choice when i applied early action. I wanted to be in the northeast, the campus is beautiful, the residential college system really does work (ie, i don’t want to imagine what this semester would have been like if i didn’t have berkeley, but that’s beyond the point of this note), and as much as i hate to admit it, the huge endowment and name are big selling points. Yale also has its share of flaws, and if you have a romantic notion of a perfect life following your admission (as i did), you’ve been misled.

I don’t mean to tell you that you shouldn’t be excited about tomorrow. Yale is a great college and you’ve accomplished something very difficult if you’re accepted. What i do think you should know is that i’ve often thought i could have been just as satisfied, if not more satisfied, with a different college experience. Yale isn’t a perfect place, and yale isn’t “the one.” So if tomorrow at fiveish (for the most eager among you, i believe you could access the results at around 4:15 last year) you don’t see a big blue screen with a bulldog replacing the A in YALE, know that life is not over. Know that for most of us there really is no “one,” and that your college experience will be what you make of it. Know that my sister, who is every bit as smart as i am but went to a college that US News and World Report ranks below their top fifty liberal arts colleges, had a more satisfying college experience than i’ve had this semester. Know that Yale is a great place with interesting people and lots of options, but know that there are lots of great places with similar resources. Know that four years from now, you’re only going to have had one college experience and the quality of that experience is mostly dependent upon the attitude with which you approach it.

So for those of you who do see the bulldog tomorrow, know this: you are very lucky. Visit Yale, live our lives for a few days, and decide if this is the right place for you. The large majority of you will come to that conclusion, and that’s a testament to the magic of Yale. For those of you who don’t see that bulldog, it’s imperative that you embrace what i could not: If you had a realistic shot at Yale, you’re in very good shape and will be admitted to many other colleges, likely including several of Yale’s peer schools. What’s more (and more important), wherever you end up, your experience is contingent upon your outlook and actions more than anything else. There is no “one”, and the one you choose is just as likely as anywhere else to be the absolute best experience possible for you.

Best of luck, wherever tomorrow takes you.

~A bulldog ‘11

I don’t agree with every word, but it’s a pretty good message. To prospective students reading: let me know how things turn out! I am always interested in the going-ons of my readers, really. I hope everyone gets what they want, but that sadly can’t be the case. Just remember that what makes your college experience great is not your college–it’s you.

[message originally posted in December]

Regular Decision notice for the Yale Class of 2012 comes out this Monday, March 31st. This post is addressed to both the regular decision and early action members of Yale 2012, and is posted on the admitted students website as well as my own blog.

This is my first for the Yale admitted students web site, so if you are reading this there–congratulations on your admission! My name is Sam Jackson and I am a member of the Yale class of 2011. I’m from Newton, MA (right outside Boston) and I’m in Trumbull college here at Yale. Some of you may already know me from ‘real life’ or might have been reading my blog already–others know me only as some random member of Yale 2011. This post is addressed to all of Yale 2012 but also applies to anyone who is wondering whether my credibility is impacted by my new role as an ‘Undergraduate Recruitment Coordinator’ on the Yale payroll with the admissions office. I just wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and explain some of my motivations in blogging.

I’ve spent the last two and a half years blogging about college admissions and higher education marketing trends, reaching (among others) an audience of admissions officers and professionals as well as higher education marketers. I’ve used that access to call for more honest and authentic marketing efforts and for greater transparency and access in general. I also blogged about my college admissions process since it began, and today continue to blog about life here at Yale. As all of you readers are no doubt intimately aware, applying to college sucks.

I wish it didn’t have to be like that. My efforts to convince people to change their ways haven’t exactly had an instant payoff. Right now I’m organizing a way to offer large sums of money for a scholarship to the student who can think up some of the best solutions (more on this later!) but that won’t affect what you have already had to suffer through… and I can only offer my condolences for the painful, stressful process. It’s not quite over yet, but the worst is behind you. Choosing can be maddening, but it’s better than having no choices at all… and if you’re reading this at admits.yale.edu, it means one of your choices is Yale. So, could definitely be worse.

I am blogging exactly as I always have been, only now I get paid for what I was already doing. Truthfully, I would pay Yale if it meant that I could easily reach all of you admitted students! (Coincidentally, so would a lot of other, less reputable people–Yale and other schools wouldn’t sell your information, but huge amounts of money are spent to buy up your contact information once you reach college-admissions age. When you took the PSAT or SAT, and then wondered how you subsequently got huge volumes of mail, it’s because the College Board sold your personal information if you consented to the ’student search service.’ Of course, the problems of the College Board are another story, one I chronicle often: e.g., a year ago I detailed 51 ways your SAT could be mis-scored, none of which the College Board would want you to know about, because things like that might reduce public confidence in the security of their testing procedures.)

I hope you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt when it comes to blogging credibility. If it were about the money, after all, my main interest wouldn’t be Yale–I get an order of magnitude more money from direct advertising than I do by being paid $12.80 an hour to blog for Yale. My bread and butter has always been leveraging my cynicism and negativity towards marketing efforts and institutions which I feel are not effectively serving students–especially prospective students.

I have a few posts on my blog explaining why I matriculated to Yale, why I wanted to go, a few cheerleading Yale, etc. But I also have quite a few more calling Yale out for all the things it does wrong, and things that could be improved. In fact, the way I actually came to this position–blogging for you now–was through a post I made last July attacking the admissions office for its position on official admissions blogs– that is, blogs where the admissions officers themselves are blogging, but which can (and generally should) also incorporate student voices. This admitted students website has student blogs, but they are not publicly accessible (i.e., publicized). If you are interested in more of my writing on the subject, it’s what I’ve been writing about for years on my blog and the topic of my presentation at the 2007 College Board Forum in New York–I’ll stop ranting for now.
So… expect to see lots of posts on why Yale is failing to recruit more low-income students, problems about its admissions practices, and other problems along with all the nice things I have to say. I have lots and lots of great things to say and write about Yale–I love it here. Maybe you’re already in love with Yale, too; maybe you’re not sure yet. Either way, you have a lot to look forward to next yearm whether it’s at Yale or anywhere else.

(Whatever your level of excitement, congratulations on your admission to Yale– I am excited to find out more about everyone joining us next year!)

Thinking about schools as possible tourist attractions seems to be in line with the marketing and school “branding” talk that I try to discourage. However, any Harvard student would counter that it’s just a fair description of their state of affairs: sit down in a lawn chair with a notepad and a sharp eye for an afternoon and you’ll see an endless stream of tourists, all constantly rubbing the same toe of the John Harvard statue (to which drunk students forever do unspeakable things).

So it’s a fair question and reasonable point of comparison. How is it at Yale? Can you walk to class without tripping over roving bands of camera-wielding tourists, gawking at undergrads like they’re all in a richly furnished zoo enclosure? Is Yale a tourist attraction?

In a word, no.

It’s true that old campus has a fair number of tour groups circulating in lazily predictable routes, and that they can be spotted on a couple other hotspots on the campus tours which leave from the admissions office. But the individual group sizes, and the overall volume, is very manageable. We do not have people trying endlessly to sneak into our dorms or libraries–the libraries, in fact, don’t require ID to enter the main areas.

Compare with Harvard where the library has regular ‘incidents’ when people try to sneak in just to take a look… or so I am told. The libraries at a lot of schools have this nice level of access for prospective students, so it’s not that Yale is special about it, it’s just a nice benefit from the medium-high volume rather than the stupidly-crowded nature of certain other schools.

Sometimes I like to join the tour groups silently, listen for a minute, then leave. This seems to really confuse prospective students, and leaves me sad that the tour guides are always giving the same semi-duplicitous accounts of Yale lore; still, it helps me stay in touch with the prospective student mindset and is good for blogging. It seems that sometimes, the worse the weather is, the better the tour, as guides work harder to make Yale appealing aside from the good weather and usual cheer of New Haven.

There are busloads of Chinese tourists / visitors who come to Yale, foreign-language tour guides leading them around campus–Yale is actually much better known in China than Harvard, a lot of the time, but when I just stopped at Harvard over spring break I did see a nice number of well-heeled Hong Kong students heading around on a big tour group.

If you stopped reading after my “in a word” explanation, and skipped to the end, don’t worry! You didn’t miss any super-insightful truths about Yale. There is a reasonable level of outsider interest, but because they don’t go inside residential college gates it’s not much of a problem at all.

Of course, I think Yale is quite worthy of being a tourist attraction… : )

Headline part-inspired by Snively @ MIT blogs, but mostly by the exact question asked by my bff Greta when visiting her this past week at Harvard.

I discovered an interesting pattern while playing around with Google Trends: if you compare ‘Yale University’ and ‘Harvard University’ with the tool, there is an eerie similarity in their trend lines. Even minor up and down ticks are mirrored across search terms. See for yourself: trends chart below, Harvard in red, Yale in blue.

The trend is clearer for Google search data, but there are still some pretty strange similarities for the news references (below the main chart). I understand that every time one school does something, the other feels compelled to respond, but the fact that these trends link together so closely is very interesting. My first question was whether much of this might just be seasonal–fluctuations in the course of the admissions cycle. To test this, I compared Yale with a few other schools, trying to eliminate large sports schools as a factor. Georgetown vs. Yale produced fairly similar results to Yale v. Harvard, but not with the same level of overlap.

Years ago I did this same comparison with Phillips Exeter Academy vs. Philips Andover Academy (interestingly, historically they were once prominent feeder schools for Harvard and Yale, respectively) but the results there were not numerous enough to show any significant overlap; the numbers there were probably inflated by vanity searches from the students at either school.

Other interesting trends to take from this data: search volume for both of these terms has declined continually over the years, relatively speaking. Why is this? Is it because people are better able to use the school sites and don’t do as much searching, or is it because of a methodological feature whereby their search volume stays stable but relative to other terms decreases? It’s not clear, but it’s an interesting trend all the same.

International attention is something else to compare. If all the queries came from Australian applicants, hypothetically, that would shift things in the calendar because of their different school cycles. But more realistically, it’s just an interesting reflection of foreign interest. Harvard predictably comes out ahead, but check out these countries which are ranked by how much people are searching for Yale (Harvard comparison):

Google lets us get even more precise, though: down to city level. This is really interesting because we see the rate at which Yale students search for themselves compared to how much Harvard students search for things about Yale. If we then compare this to another chart, showing how often Harvard searches for Harvard, we see that Yale–via New Haven–doesn’t even make the top ten. In other words, Harvard is by some measures more interested in Yale than Yale is in Harvard. Inferiority complex much? : ) (Yes, I realize this is methodologically flawed… just joking).

Finally, we can compare the international chart with a language chart. English is first, then Chinese, then, surprisingly enough, Italian.

Very interesting for a few minutes googling! I highly recommend playing around with google trends and exploring interesting things about your own favorite words, or trends, or schools. Dogs and Puppies beat Cats and Kittens, etc. Have fun, and don’t draw too many sweeping statistical conclusions : )