Tweeting and College Admissions

Tweeting and College Admissions November 8, 2013 Dont write anything on Twitter that you dont want college admissions officers to read. Because they may well read your Tweets. Theres a terrific piece in The New York Times entitled They Loved Your G.P.A. Then They Saw Your Tweets by Natasha Singer that we wanted to discuss with the loyal readers of our college admissions blog. In the piece, Singer writes about a student who attended an information session last year at the admissions office of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Apparently, the student felt it wise to live Tweet during the info session and these Tweets included disparaging remarks about other people in attendance (i.e., fellow applicants). Needless to say, Bowdoin monitors their social media presence. They see when youre writing about Bowdoin. This student did not end up gaining admission and, apparently, it was because her academic record wasnt good enough for Bowdoin. But even if her academic record was superb, the chances are highly unlikely that this applicant ever would have gained admission. Singer also writes about a college student at Pitzer who became Friends with a prospective applicant on Facebook. When the student noticed that the prospective applicant was posting disparaging remarks about a teacher on Facebook, he alerted the Pitzer admissions office. As you can imagine, that student didnt gain admission to Pitzer. And, as the article in The New York Times states, while Pitzer doesnt let applicants know if your candidacy was dashed because of non-academic reasons, at some schools theyll tell you. Such is the case at Colgate University. The moral of the story on Tweeting and college admissions is, dont write anything on social media and that includes dont post any videos or photos that you would not want college admissions officers to read. Because there is always a chance that they will find these posts. And that can very easily derail your candidacy. No matter your grades. No matter your test scores. All of that work down the tube.