I am sure everyone has heard by now that at least 10 admitted Harvard students in the Class of 2021 had their admissions offers rescinded after a group exchange of racist and sexually offensive Facebook messages.
Once again, everyone is checking you out – everyone! This includes any student applying to a club or organization, college bound students, job and internship seekers, athletes and others seeking any sort of college scholarship.
More than 92 percent of employers and nearly 50 percent of college admissions officers will look at your social media profiles before making a hiring or admissions decision.
When I present The Student Success Project, the one topic that is guaranteed to leave students in tears is the one titled: Be Very Smart With Social Media. You can see their thought bubbles processing all their social media posts and trying to figure out the ones that can do them in. However, it inevitably leads to the next unbelievable question: “What is appropriate?” I tell them to ask their parents.
I repeat and repeat and repeat that what they have done throughout their school career can be deemed worthless with one ill-advised post.
I find some students genuinely naïve, even oblivious, about how their social media personas can swamp everything good they’ve ever done.
As teens document their lives and create their online social ecosystems, they are not simply sharing with a discreet group – they are broadcasting to a wide audience, sharing private details and, in the process, building or ruining their personal brands. Students are posting the good, bad and the ugly. They’re being judged for it and left to deal with the consequences.
You need to look for everything. Whether it’s drinking, drugs, sexually explicit content, profanity, or other character-tarnishing behaviors, you have to delete it. There are even companies on line which tout their social media scrubbing services.
Likewise, high school students seem to be growing shrewder, changing their searchable names on Facebook or untagging themselves in pictures to obscure their digital footprints during the college admission process.
There are tons of inappropriate illegal content that should never see the light of day on the internet. However, here are some of the not so obvious, which will deliver complete disastrous results.
Trash your teachers.
Bullying doesn’t just apply to student-to-student interactions. Students who speak poorly of their teachers (or post embarrassing photos of them) run a huge risk.
Post objectionable content from school computers or networks.
Many schools prohibit all computer activity on campus not directly related to coursework. That almost always includes social media use, especially that which is objectionable. And don’t assume you can get away with a tweet here and a status update there — many schools have implemented systems that track logins and IP addresses. In other words, you’re on the clock.
Lie/cheat/plagiarize.
Picture this: You convinced your teacher to give you an extension on your term paper so you can visit an ill relative. Only instead, you blow off the paper to attend the Rolling Loud Festival — and you post a status update to Facebook, sent a videoSnap, and upload a photo of the concert to Instagram. Don’t be surprised to come back to academic investigation/probation.
Ignore school-specific policies.
School policies vary widely, according to religious affiliation, type of school (public vs. private), geographical location, district, gender (co-ed vs. single-gender), etc. Therefore, technology and social media policies are different for nearly every school. Behavior that may fly at one school is reason for expulsion at another.
I usually close my column with some words of wisdom. This time around I simply do not know what to say that I haven’t said before, and before and before.
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder of The Student Success Project and Think Factory Marketing. He can be reached at 305-788-4105 or via email ritchie@thinkfactory.com and on Facebook and You Tube as The Student Success Project.
