the Sam Jackson College Experience

Hey everyone, as is readily apparent, I haven’t made very many updates this summer. I’ve been having a pretty good time in San Francisco with Google, and will try to share some photos of non-confidential fun.

In the meanwhile, in the interests of testing out my employer’s neat products, here is a Google Voice call widget which will let you give me a call and leave me messages, in case somehow you read my blog and are too intimidated to leave so much as a comment (please!) but are less fearful of actually calling me. Anyway, go have a ball. Please don’t make your number private, because it will discourage me from calling you back if you leave an unintelligible voicemail. : )

That’s not really a reflection of the “changing times in social media” or the “stagnation of blogging in favor of more compact forms of communication” or the “trend towards ever-increasing narcissism in online self-expression.” No, it’s mostly just for the continuing reason that there is unfortunately little that I feel really needs to be said on the subjects that this blog addresses, and that I’ve been very busy.

I finally found an apartment in San Francisco, and though I am sure there will be conflicts and problems, I am very happy about that indeed. In blog-related updates, I have changed the contact form from the years-ancient “WP Contact Form” to the new, sexier Contact Form 7 with additional CAPTCHA support to assist the Resistance effort against robots and spam computers. Apologies if this causes any inconvenience; for the most part it should just makes things better, with more AJAX and an exciting new layer of database calls. I’d just been getting a really intolerable amount of spam recently, so, it had to go.

Hopefully I’ll be able to share more about my fun summer exploits, and I will definitely make a greater effort to document it than before. Mostly, I’m just baffled as to what combination of organic traffic and robot crawlers continue to read my website. If people actually read my new posts (if only to tell me how banal they are) it would be a good encouragement. Anyhow, that’s all for this late night update. As always, follow me on Twitter for up to the minute updates of my baking exploits and random ruminations. The feed is shown here in the sidebar as well.

That’s not really a reflection of the “changing times in social media” or the “stagnation of blogging in favor of more compact forms of communication” or the “trend towards ever-increasing narcissism in online self-expression.” No, it’s mostly just for the continuing reason that there is unfortunately little that I feel really needs to be said on the subjects that this blog addresses, and that I’ve been very busy.

I finally found an apartment in San Francisco, and though I am sure there will be conflicts and problems, I am very happy about that indeed. In blog-related updates, I have changed the contact form from the years-ancient “WP Contact Form” to the new, sexier Contact Form 7 with additional CAPTCHA support to assist the Resistance effort against robots and spam computers. Apologies if this causes any inconvenience; for the most part it should just makes things better, with more AJAX and an exciting new layer of database calls. I’d just been getting a really intolerable amount of spam recently, so, it had to go.

Hopefully I’ll be able to share more about my fun summer exploits, and I will definitely make a greater effort to document it than before. Mostly, I’m just baffled as to what combination of organic traffic and robot crawlers continue to read my website. If people actually read my new posts (if only to tell me how banal they are) it would be a good encouragement. Anyhow, that’s all for this late night update. As always, follow me on Twitter for up to the minute updates of my baking exploits and random ruminations. The feed is shown here in the sidebar as well.

Yale actually has blogs that it hosts on its own, at blogs.yale.edu. They’re open to faculty, students, etc to be set up. If I knew about this, I forgot. Not the best consolidated resource for student blogs, as it doesn’t appear to be especially well utilized, but worth a look all the same. This site is separate from the special admitted students website that Yale has, which has some student bloggers on it.

I found…

• the Center for Language Study has a blog (and a twitter–language labs are often very trendy)
• A lot of information about Yale’s Windows server infrastructure from Ken, who works for Yale ITS.
• Beth Castle, another person who works at Yale but is not a student
• The best one of all is perhaps this old defunct blog about a Labrador retriever puppy (not to discredit the other blogs, just to showcase my love of puppies)
• Interesting academic blogs (mostly now all abandoned) on projects like ethnographies of Islam in Egypt.
• A very cool art blog called Range of Vision, from Ken, technical director of the Yale center for Digital Media Center for Arts at Yale (I was afraid it was related to DMCA–digital millenium copyright act). Married to Beth, I think? Hasn’t been updated in a year.

… and a few more. But essentially, no one was home. There were a few official blogs for Yale institutions of one or another variety, but nothing really especially active. Does no one know about the blogs? Were all the bloggers abducted by aliens? Anyone with a NetID can make one. They are blocked from being indexed by search engines, which might stop some from getting involved: I know there would be opportunity for abuse, but it can be very limiting. Apparently “This service was developed in response to a number of requests from students, faculty, and staff for a publishing tool kit that would allow people to post and maintain blogs for a variety of topics.” — but I’m not sure where all these people requesting blogs went.

What doesn’t exactly make sense:

What you should know. Privacy, commenting, etc. All accounts on blogs.yale.edu are considered “personal space.” While many bloggers intend for their material to be widely distributed and easily accessible, we need to balance the ability to publish with the privacy of users. In line with this policy, we have disabled search engines from indexing the content of blogs.yale.edu, which means that a Google search will not find your blog. If you would like to publicize your blog you are free to do so. There is, however, an internal search engine that you can use to explore blogs.yale.edu

Why not make this a user-adjustable option? If the privacy is of the utmost concern, what’s the point of enabling an internal search which could turn up results? It just feels like a bit of a strange situation here, where there is clearly uncertainty with what to do with this pilot program.

Here’s the Yale Alumni Magazine’s take on them:

September/October 2005
It’s like traveling back in time to when only geeks knew how to navigate the Internet: in April, the university launched the pilot version of a tool that will host blogs for students, faculty, and staff. As of mid-August, though, the Yale University Weblogs site had not yet been publicized, and the early adopters were mostly IT types from around the campus. But not all the posts are about “OVID interface problems” or “Site e-mail aliases in Sakai”: you can also turn up some nice pictures of a Labrador puppy named Willie and speculation about the plot of the new Dukes of Hazzard movie.

Nothing seems to have changed, although there sadly haven’t been any updates about Willie for several years. Whatever happened to the development of the blogging project? The university needs to move forward in technology adoption. That’s part of why I applied to be on the library policy standing university committee. We’ll see how that goes.

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!)