You may know that prospective employers and college admissions officers visit their applicants’ social networking sites, but did you know how severely some profiles affect the admissions’ decision? A survey by test preparation center Kaplan asked 320 officers from the nation’s top 500 schools and discovered that one in every ten colleges looked into these profiles.
The good news is that 25 percent of the schools said their perspective of applicants improved after what they saw. The bad news: 38 percent reported that profiles had a “negative impact on their admissions evaluation,” oftentimes negative enough to end with a rejection letter.
Even though Facebook users can restrict access to their pages using privacy settings, most people don’t bother to upgrade past the default levels, which release more information than one might expect. Check out how default profile settings have changed over time here. Past that, who knows if one of the addicting Facebook games you allow full access to your profile actually has your top school behind it? Now those admissions officers have unrestricted access to anything you've ever written or posted. Yikes.
You've put a lot of hard work and effort into countless tests, papers, clubs and sports, so don’t let your online profile negate all those years of effort. This doesn’t mean deleting your Facebook, MySpace or Twitter all together. I love Facebook. It’s a great tool to connect with people, especially in helping to meet people from colleges you're looking into.
Instead of completely disconnecting from the world wide web, we have another suggestion: log on to your page right now, raise your privacy settings, delete any offensive language or photos, don’t join any groups or fan pages that could reflect negatively on you and next time you’re about to hit the “post” button, take a second to ask yourself, “What would Harvard think about this?”
