the Sam Jackson College Experience

Headlines don’t lie–so what’s the quick payout from student blogging?

Why, awesome video game kitsch, what else!

Christian Montoya of Cornell had a photo contest on his student blog I Have Senioritis a few weeks ago, and on the spur of the moment I decided to enter it. As it turned out, I won, and will soon be the proud owner of a playable atari keychain! I’m pretty excited. I’m linking back so that in the future, other people will participate in his photo contests a little bit more. My caption was pretty good, but I have the sinking suspicion I didn’t all too much competition. I’ll put the word out next time he runs one, but his blog is pretty awesome anyways (I’ve linked before) so… another excuse to read it, I suppose.

Christian is affiliated with the very excellent Cblogs network, which should be a must-read for anyone looking for high-quality student blogging.

For the photo and my brilliant winning caption, take this link: We Have Our First Winner!

And of course my fantabulous prize: ThinkGeek Yar’s Revenge / Centipede Keychain

Let me begin this post by thanking Morgan Davis of Erelevant for a very insightful comment which has once again conjured a response from me which I am reappropriating for the front page. I love the discussions I have with readers, which is why I would encourage more of you to interact a little bit! You might learn something from each other, too. In the past three days, I’ve had visitors from 150+ colleges and universities across the USA and Canada: I see you! Embrace the new web and share your thoughts! I respond to everything.

Now, moving on to the content again… here is the comment Morgan made, excerpted from my recent post”Cornell Student Blogs Crashing and Burning.” The comment is on student blogging generally and why, despite my begging, the world won’t see too many truly honest student blogs blessed and promoted by colleges anytime soon.

“authenticity is more important for good PR than anything else”

Amen.

Authenticity is still really scary for a lot of Admission and PR folks. We don’t use blogs at my school precisely because we know they would have to be *real.* We go out and look at our students MySpace and LiveJournal writings and imagine them with the college logo blazoned across the top. More often than not, we come away scared.

Sure, there’s lots of good stuff too [on MySpace], and even the bad stuff is RELEVANT and AUTHENTIC, but I don’t think many institutions are ready to invite real-life, open discussion of the good and bad in campus culture to their official namespace. And, honestly, the reason is not to fool or deny prospective students at all–it’s parental, donor, administrator, and media opinions that drive these decisions (sad but true).

So the best bet for learning about colleges via blogging will probably remain third-party and personal sites. Officially sanctioned blogs are most likely going to read like viewbooks in first person and without the glossy photos.

I read this and was sad to realize how true it was. So, through my tears of naiveté, I typed up an e-mail response. Here’s that response, lightly edited:

Thanks for the inspiration! I started thinking again about the looming danger of too much of the wrong kind of information about a school. Certainly photos of bong collections and voyeur shots are in vogue when it comes to social networking, but would absolutely not do for a visible school-affiliated blog.

A polished admissions blog might pretend to target the same audience as these great unofficial ones (prospective students, others) but we’re not lambs to the PR slaughter here. High pageviews and visit counts will be a consequence of high profile links to the blogs; plaster them on the main site and all those applicants are going to look at them, whether they derive any value from them or not. If a school was seeking to fill its ranks with witless dupes, then these might be fantastic recruitment paths. To the best of my knowledge, they’re not.

Read the rest of this entry »

Usual promotional fare of school-sponsored admissions blogs, one might expect. We’ll have to look forward to what Cornell students can put out in terms of blog content… The school seems particularly well-intentioned with these blogs. Here are the mission objectives:

The student voice is largely missing from Cornell’s web site and, in this project, we have a golden opportunity to bring it to the forefront

• Draw attention to Cornell in the “blogosphere” and bring us up to par with our peers in academia
• Supplement the work of Undergraduate Admissions and Campus Relations by sharing information about life at Cornell with potential students and their parents.
• Share the Cornell story with the world.

They are, as usual, compensated:

Assuming that each student makes a minimum of two blog entries per week (one entry per week during breaks), they are eligible for a total of $50 in gift cards per month. These cards may be distributed in either $50 or $25 increments and must be chosen from the list of approved retailers below. Students will receive their cards no earlier than the last Monday of the month.

They can use these gift cards at College Town Bagels, iTunes, the school bookstore, etc. The “man” in this admissions-sponsored blogging setup purports to allow free reign in terms of content; that remains to be seen. Certainly there will be a certain level of professional self-censorship. For this reason, though I do look forward to these blogs as a valuable source of cornell-related information from a fresh perspective, unofficial Cornell blogs–namely, The Unofficial Cornell Blog, which tipped me off to these–will still have their place in my heart.

Niche? Or was it Nietzsche? the two can be slung about so interchangeably when talking about specialized college departments, really. I was reading the internets earlier today when I came upon this article in the Tahoe Daily Tribune:

College to offer firefighting academy

http://www.tahoedailytribune.com/article/20060725/NEWS/107250024

Once considered an idea as fleeting as a puff of smoke, an academy to train aspiring firefighters has turned into a reality. The Lake Tahoe Basin Fire Academy will be part of Lake Tahoe Community College’s 2006-’07 schedule and will aim to be the hiring pool for fire agencies in the area. “It is probably the most inquired-about program that I have under my management,” said Virginia Boyar, director of vocational education at the college. “People always want to know about a fire academy, when we’re going to get one, all that kind of good stuff, because they want to get some training in the hills so they don’t have to commute to the closest fire academy, which is in Sacramento.”

Now, this isn’t particularly remarkable, it’s just something that I never really thought about. First, because I usually don’t go perusing the local community college course catalogs, I’d never know what dearth of firefighting programs there might be. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the greater Boston area is not made of dry brush and kindling, as the Lake Tahoe region would appear to be. Even so, I won’t deny that there are some really out-there departments and schools across the nation. Duly noted during my recent visit to Cornell University was its department of Aegean Dendochronology. Describing the experience to a friend later, I said “there are trees in the region of Greece etc. near the Aegean, so it only stands to reason that there must be dendochronologists to study them. And at what better place than Cornell?” So, I’m no stranger to the weirdness that inhabits the hallowed halls of higher education across America.

Let me cut to my little chase here. When a lot of kids (not me) were little, they said something to the effect of “when I [sic] gwrow up I want to be a firefighter!” Eventually these five year olds familiarize themselves with the dangers of smoke inhalation and fire in general and dissuade themselves of any fire-fighting related dreams. But, seeing as we have firefighters (both volunteer and professional) someone does end up following through. The difference between the classic “get good high school grades, go to a good college, good grad school, make mad moneys, be happy forever” logic and the firefighter one is that we never imagine anything between. “Wish to become a firefighter…..become firefighter!” It’s as simple as that? No–firefighters go to firefighting school. It’s the same way that kids who want to run away to the circus change their minds when they learn about clown school.

update: Even better, according to some of the adsense ads running alongside this post, you can now get an online firefighting degree. Firefighting always seemed like one of those fields that required a little bit of hands-on experience, but good enough for me!