Before I went to college, I was just getting into Facebook. That was back when you had to be invited by someone in college to join the site. By the time I finally understood how to use the site, it was the in the middle of the summer and I knew that I was going to attend Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I got online and saw a group on Facebook for incoming freshman. I joined and met some people, but this site is also how I communicated with my roommate before we actually met. Not only was it serving as my email, but it was also a window into who I would be meeting in my next four years.
After I arrived, and made it through my first couple of weeks of school, Facebook became my social calendar. This was back when every event that someone in the WKU network made showed up on a calendar. This made attending events easy. It also continued to be a distraction when I didn't want to do my homework. "Creeping on people" became a popular excuse to why papers weren’t written and why people knew more about you than you thought you had told them. In a way, it became an outlet for the quiet students to find their voice, and for different subgroups of students to find more people like them. In the days before Facebook and MySpace, people would have to go to socials on campus to get in a week’s worth of networking, while my generation could do it online in the matter of minutes.
Facebook is to the average college student as water is to fish; a necessity! College students still use Facebook as a distraction to homework as well as a connection to the outside world. The only difference between when I entered college 4 years ago and now is that there are more people sharing information online on a wide variety of social networks. If I were a college recruiter today, I would first look at what people are saying about you online before you start boasting about your school.
I started using Facebook before I entered college, but I did not use it as a means of networking until I got to the university. Before college, I only used Facebook to keep up with what all of my friends and classmates were saying and doing. Now, I'm able to keep up with friends that went to different colleges, family members, and to keep up with different local events. I also communicated with my roommate through Facebook before we actually met in person. One of my first college Facebook memories was when I was invited to my first exclusive "Facebook event". I was so excited, and now it's the main way I find out about anything going on. I agree that it's smart for college recruiters to analyze their social media presence on the web and figure out the best ways to recruit students based on this.
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