Social Networking affects College Applicants

The Wall Street Journal recently released an article about the affect of social networking sites on college admissions. After surveying 500 of the top, most competitive colleges around the US, they found that a good 10% of admissions staff will use social networking sites in order to further evaluate their prospective students. The two most frequented social networking sites they are said to look at are Myspace and Facebook. Most often, colleges that use these sites for evaluation end up with a negative impression of the applicant, because not everyone shows of the best of their personality.

If you are a senior in High School, applying to college, and you have anything negative on your profile, be it language, pictures, etc. then you could very well hurt your chances at acceptance.

Most of the colleges surveyed claim to use this method only in special circumstances; for instance, if an application raises suspicion, or if another applicant hinted at a character flaw. While I understand their reasoning, the fact that this year there will be a record number of applicants, and it will be hard to decide who to accept and who to reject, I still don’t believe this is right.

Since these sites are public, it’s not exactly a breach of privacy, but I don’t feel that this is the best way to investigate a person’s character. Just because these sites are a place to openly express yourself, doesn’t mean that everyone represents themselves accurately. Most of us are still teenagers, still searching for who we really are. We need to be able to feel like we fit in, to make sure that people will like us. So many people will go to whatever means necessary to do that, and that is what leads to the negative impression. I know many people who are hard workers, wonderful students, and overall amazing people, but their Myspace pages are full of things that don’t relate to who they are at all.

Personally, I don’t think I have anything to worry about, however, I think this is a horrible way to judge character. The only way to truly judge someone is to get to know them personally. That’s the only level on which the connection is deep enough to truly view one’s character.

Google 10^100

Wednesday September 24th, 2008 Google announced their new project 10^100, which will be used to survey the general public for new ideas that help people around the world. They want the project to benefit as many people as possible all around the world. In February 2009, Google will select judges to choose five winning ideas from the plethora of ideas. The winning ideas will then be given an equal amount of money from a pool of 10 million dollars in order to begin implementation.

I think this is a wonderful idea. This will give millions of people around the world the chance to give their ideas a try. So many people have great ideas that will never be put into effect for lack of funding, and this project will give them a chance to make their dream a reality.

With this, the possibilities are endless. Google’s spokesperson said that they don’t want to limit people, they want ideas from every background, from every walk of life. Since this is so open ended, any idea is more than welcome. I think this is such an amazing opportunity, that everybody should contribute an idea. It couldn’t hurt. Just think, every little contribution has some potential, even if the idea isn’t one of the final choices, entering it into a competition such as this would give it life, and possibly start the ball rolling. All you need is a little bit of determination, and a creative mind. Everyone has some sort of impact, now lets get out there and change the world!

First Week of School

Today is the last day of the first week of school here at Tech High. It is going to take a while to get used to the new block schedule, but overall I enjoy it. My schedule is pretty laid back, which works really well with my work schedule. I think our Contemporary Literature class will be very interesting this year. Since we're trying to go paperless, and doing much of our work online, we will be making use of our new laptops. Overall I'm excited for my Senior year of High School. Luckily I've got quite a ways to go...