March 11, 2008
Posted by Sam Jackson
Now an Official Yale Blogger!
Yale doesn't have publicly available admissions OR student blogs, but it does have student-written "Bulldog Blogs" accessible to admitted students. Last year, when I was an admitted student, I discovered that these were actually just ripped from the particular students' personal blogs and reposted on the admitted students website. I thought about publishing all this information online, but decided against it. Well, a year has gone by, and now I am happy to share at least one of the current batch of Yale blogs--my own!
The Sam Jackson College Experience will soon be beamed to the whole crop of admitted students, in time for the regular decision round. I'm really excited about that level of access to this great audience!
I may be motivated to say more things about Yale since I'll have a huge increase in Yale-bound readers, but if you feel that I will be tempted to say only good things, think again! I love Yale and have lots to say that I think will help convince people to come join me in New Haven--but I am not planning to skew coverage (you'll see the same tough angles I have taken in the past) and am not toeing the admission office's line on anything I don't believe in. I will have more details for everyone after spring break, but I'm excited!
I'm a current senior at Yale University and I've been blogging about college admissions and higher education marketing trends since I began my college application process in 2005. I now also write about my experience here at Yale.
7 Comments
March 11, 2008
Congratulations Sam!
So I have to ask, does Yale pay their bloggers? If so would you be comfortable sharing that information? We pay ours slightly (honestly I don't even know what the compensation is without asking) and am just curious what other institutions are doing. How is that working are they just linking to this blog from a blogger page or will you be writing post on the colleges site?
March 12, 2008
Congrats on becoming an official Yale Blogger.
I like that approach to the "official bloggers", simply aggregating existing student blogs into an official page. I tried to do that at my former employer and the idea got squashed as too risky. Is there a large number of students doing this or is it a pretty exclusive group to be in?
March 12, 2008
Interesting. I had no inkling of this secret society of Yale blogs, although it makes sense; there is a notable dearth of such material in the blogosphere, aside from the occasional mention on this excellent blog (which I stumbled upon in a similar search). In any case, I look forward to hearing more after the break.... I'm about to break into a case of Bulldog gin, so I'll catch you on the flipside of this vernal binge.
March 12, 2008
@ Kyle -- I think so, but I actually don't know the details. Since I was not anitcipating any particular increased workload, and was treating it more as as a syndication deal or something, I was not too concerned before signing on the dotted line. Which I didn't actually exactly do yet. I just clarified issues of IP and distribution since those were most important to me, and made sure everything that is mine remained mine. If I am able to report on it, I will disclose all the details I can. But basically I am just being given money to do the same things I already do.
@ Stewart -- There were a fair number of students, but not as over-the-top huge as some schools I had seen. Less than 10, I think, last year? Will have more detailed info after spring break when I meet up with the admissions office and learn more about things. The actual process for them is apparently fairly low-tech -- just putting HTML in somewhere on the backend, basically. So it's not as sophisticated as pulling RSS, but last year when I would look at the posts and then click through things were indistinguishable from that writer's LJ or whatever because it was just copy-pasted. I might not allow that if it were google indexed, but since it is a walled garden it is OK to just have the content duplicated that way.
@yaleross: There are a few other yale blogs that I know about out and about, but it can be hard to track them down. I know of plenty of Yalies offline who blog (in some fashion) but have never really put in a serious effort to stalk down more yale bloggers. The admissions office knew about me because I had been in touch with them previously about other concerns.
March 13, 2008
@Stewart - We syndicate some alumni blogs in our blog network. Instead of asking alumni to blog we just link to their professional or personal blogs with their permission.
@Sam - No problem if you can't disclose some things.
March 13, 2008
Syndicate by links, or scrape RSS?
March 14, 2008
Links. Also we usually ask them to link back to Wofford so it turns into some double love because we drive people to their site and we get a good backlink to the school's homepage. Networking!
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