the Sam Jackson College Experience

Beloved readers, I will be away for a week on a Backroads trip with my mom to Bryce, Zion, and Grand Canyon national parks. I will be back on the 20th. If I am not responding to your e-mails during this time very promptly, now you know why.

Feel free to leave comments about things in general, future posts, past concerns, whatever you like, I’ll address it all on my return. I highly recommend checking out the Archives and nosing through the wealth of content there if you have some free time.

Also, in July I am going to be part of a really awesome webinar series about admissions blogging that Karine Joly is running through her new Higher Ed Experts site. You should go sign up, no matter who you are, because it’s a great set up–I’m July 31 and earlier that month you also get Nancy Prater, Ball State University Web Coordinator and Ben Jones, director of communications for the MIT admissions office. If you don’t read their blogs already, you should–they have a lot of great stuff to say and I’m excited to be involved in this endeavor.

Plus, you get the good feeling knowing that my portion of your ticket price goes towards supporting my college education…! To my higher ed marketers and institutional readers out there especially, check it out, and even if you are able to turn down this amazing value! then register anyways and check out what Karine has set up because it’s pretty cool. I’ll profile it fully when I get back, I’ve been meaning to do so for a while.

: )

Karine Joly, who writes the must-read CollegeWebEditor blog about higher education marketing and PR, interviewed me a few months ago about my experience with Facebook and other social networking sites for an April 2007 piece she wrote in University Business titled “Facebook, MySpace, and Co.” Karine and I were talking about my experience using social networking tools to socialize online with the other 2011 prefrosh early actions kids and that led into the interview where I formally answered some of her questions on the topic.

An excerpt from the e-mail interview:

1) As an early admit of the class of 2011 at Yale, you got a chance to interact with your peers as early as December. Why is it something important to you?

Some Yalies who had dabbled with online networking when they were pre-frosh stopped by the online groups and pointed out that they ended up awkwardly removing a lot of their mysterious online friends once they got to school and started to make connections in the flesh; all the same, everyone seemed to agree that communicating online was a worthwhile use of time. The allure here is not so much the possibility of making friends before the start of the school year as it is the opportunity to get a taste of your future classmates. These messages back and forth offer illuminating glimpses, however brief, into the character and composition of the future class.

If you want to see the rest, you’re going to have to click through to read the full interview on her site! Although the bulk of my response got left on the cutting room floor, don’t miss the article in UB and check out the other interviews on her site, where she has full responses from the other interviewees, all very interesting.

I hear she’s also got a neat new social networking site of her own, Higher Ed Experts, for higher education professionals. Not being one, I can’t report much on it, but check it out–sounded neat.

I know that wanton mass linking is a bad, evil thing which destroys the internet (and boosts my Technorati ranking!) but all the same I’m inclined to send out a quick pointer to Karine Joly’s website, CollegeWebEditor.com, since it is her birthday! Assuming that, like boats, we give feminine pronouns to blogs. Her blog celebrates its 2nd anniversary tomorrow, Monday, February 12th. And it gets a redesign as a present!

Andrew Careaga is already on top of it over at his Higher Ed. Marketing blog with pictures and run-through. By the way: I love orange.

Now, the site implosion? I upgraded to a new 3Column K2 install, got bored, tried to downgrade, and everything went to hell. K2 for WP 2.1 digs its claws in and doesn’t like to leave, even if it says it’s a good houseguest. So now I have to set everything up earlier than I expected, meaning that I might get a redesign at the same time Karine’s site does, for no particular reason! Hooray!

Which leads me to ask, any requests for anything around the site? Obviously things are a little in shambles right now, but that can’t be helped at the moment. It’s functional for now and isn’t bleeding SQL errors. But, while I’m fixing, I could be adding new fun things. Blech.

edit: as the studious reader might have noted I had initially tagged this post rather disapprovingly. An accident! I was originally referring to some negative qualities about my own web-design failure, the angst having nothing to do with Karine’s very nice implementation. Here, by the way, is a picture of her quite good-looking redesign. Sorry for the bad taxonomy, Karine! Careless blogging is bad blogging.

Karine Joly of College Web Editor interviewed me about the site last week; I would say I had some interesting responses! She asked three questions, and I took about 2000 words to answer. Lot’s of fun! Here were the questions:

1) Why did you decide to blog about this in the first place? Why did you create a new blog focused exclusively on the college admission process in July 2006?

2) What do you think about admission-sponsored student blogs that many institutions have launched recently? What about podcasts?

3) You seem to be very interested in how higher ed institutions market themselves to prospective students like you. Do you think your blogging could give you an edge with college admission officers? In other words, do you think your blog can help you with the whole college admission process?

Curious about the answers? Guess you’ll just have to go find out yourself…

The interview: 3 questions to a (soon-to-be) higher ed blogger: Sam Jackson, a 2007 senior at Phillips Exeter Academy, from “The Sam Jackson College Experience”

Obsessive-compulsive readers of my blog will have noticed that there is a link to Karine Joly’s blog on web, marketing, and PR in higher ed, collegewebeditor.com. She describes the site as “News, tips and, hopefully, some good ideas for people taking care of websites and online marketing in colleges and universities.” Why am I reading something most intended for college administrators and web marketers? Because simply put, I’m one of those people being marketed to (prospective students), and it pays to be savvy. Joly is my primary source for scintillating new university online marketing practices.

Joly wrote an article for University Business recently, titled License to Recruit? : Admissions-sponsored student blogging can get real results for your institution. As I have been developing this blog, I’ve stumbled upon the varied blogging efforts that many colleges have deployed to boost visibility and offer a quick glance into student life. These can be a little sanitized sometimes, though they’re still a head above the usual college-offered fare. The article quotes Bob Robertson-Boyd, web manager at Capital University, as saying “Interaction between these audiences is inevitable and already occurring elsewhere, so why not facilitate the conversations and take advantage of it on our own websites?” Obviously it is in the best interest of college administrators to leverage an online student presence to their marketing advantage.

Tying in to Joly’s article is a study from Noel-Levitz about e-recruiting which I think is also very interesting: E-Recruiting Practices Report. The report’s splash page has several “key facts” it lists, repeated here:

• Less than one-third of campuses have adopted cutting-edge tools for e-recruitment such as blogging space and chat rooms.
• Purchasing students’ e-mail addresses is common at four-year institutions (nearly 80% follow this practice) but not at two-year institutions (11%).
• Collecting e-mail addresses from parents is less common, with just 30 percent of institutions following this practice.
• Just over 40 percent of institutions collect applicants’ cell/mobile numbers.
• At four-year institutions, more than half of prospective students use electronic applications.
• A significant number of prospective students who use electronic applications had made no previous contact with the institution.
• The vast majority of institutions (90%) are spending less than $50K/year to maintain admissions-specific content and services on their institution’s Web site.

I think it is important for schools to be aware of every side of their online face, because if they don’t give students a branded outlet for their thoughts on their experience, someone else will–someplace where the school has less of an eye on things, less control, and less influence. Places like The U have student blogs which are not always as cheery as those the schools offer up. Our up-and-coming friends over at Real Ivy are in something of a similar boat. Personally, I regard those blogs differently from those “official” student blogs which I have found, because there is always the question of whether or not an apparition of an admissions officer is standing behind the student as they type away at those institution branded-portals. They are still useful resources, but they can sometimes lose some of their trustworthiness–just like tour guides–if their independence or motivation comes into question.

There are then also of course the blogs kept by admissions officers or admissions offices; I like these because since we know exactly what we’re dealing with, there is no need to filter anything. It’s just an interesting window into admissions.

Links to all of these sites can also be found on the sidebar, if you don’t mind doing a bit of scrolling.