Tag Archives: Facebook

Unplugged

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Social media is pretty much my life. I have a really hard time being away from Facebook for too long. I often prefer YouTube to Netflix, and I probably use Snapchat to check in on friends about as often as I use messenger or texting. I also have a pretty smokin’ Pinterest—my fashion board alone has close to 500 pins.

Pinterest

I do not kid around with Pinterest.

I’m also a very political person, and I love using social media to keep up with folks doing the political work I’m interested in. I take Twitter very seriously, and I do my best to post interesting (and intelligent-sounding) tweets and articles. Even more than Facebook and Pinterest keep me in touch with my friends and beautiful shoes, Twitter keeps me in touch with the world. I love having a public profile and getting to engage with all kinds of folks in a public forum.

So when I found out this summer that I need to be cautious about what I post and say online because whatever I do might be used against my lawmaker, I was a little crushed. I need to be particularly careful about posting things that contradict my lawmaker on social media, which makes sense. But I also know the most about certain political situations in LA county, and I worry sometimes that I might post something related to LA that might get construed to reflect badly on the Senator.

Ok, Em, you say, just give up social media for the summer. Or at least make your handles more private.

That made sense initially. Sure, I can scroll but just refrain from posting, right? Or restrict my followers to close family and friends.

But then I realized that it wasn’t so simple as that.

You see, I use my social media handles to market myself. I am all about LinkedIn. My profile errs on the side of too much information. My Twitter adds extra dimension to the image people have of me after searching my name quickly. In fact, my office’s previous intern told me that part of the reason they hired me was because they found my LinkedIn, and were glad that they could know more about me than just what was on my resume.

That, to me, makes it all worth it. But maybe it isn’t really my decision. I’m not the one who comes up for election in a year or two. And I’m also not the one who makes the rules in the office regarding intern behavior (or anyone’s behavior, really) online.

At any rate, here are my thoughts so far on how to use social media when you’re working for a high-profile person who may be harmed by what you post:

1. Assume anyone you’re working for could be hurt by what you post. Always.

2. It’s easy to stick to news items to tweet. Find someone who’s not a regular headline news source and retweet them. I like to find White House press reporters on Twitter and retweet the quotes they get from media briefings with the President and other officials. It’s an easy way to post something with a little more substance than CNN’s main profile. News = no opinions (just make sure the news doesn’t make your employer look bad) AND White House press team = ooh look how savvy you are.

Danny Concannon

Reason 2.5 to follow a White House reporter on Twitter.

3. Use your presence to hype up what your employer’s doing. This earns you brownie points with your employer and also might tell future employers that you’re loyal and enjoy the type of work you’re doing.

Still, do these benefits and good ideas outweigh the problems inherent to a public forum system?

So what do you think? Is social media too dangerous to do any good? Or is the leap of faith worthwhile and exciting? Let me know your thoughts on this! I could use a little advice.

A First-Hand Account of the Internship Search

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Now that the internship search is over, I finally have time to reflect on what I should have done better and what I should do in the future. If you’re thinking about applying for an internship grant in the future (or soon, because you can!), I hope you find this blog post helpful. I would have saved myself much time and energy if someone had told me these things.

1) Seek internship opportunities from your personal network.

I submitted my applications to organizations I had never heard of before and foolishly expected responses regarding the status of my application. This didn’t happen for most of the places I applied to. When I had less than two weeks to secure an internship (don’t put yourself in this kind of position, it’s really bad…), my amazing friend (and #1 fan of my blogs 😉 ) suggested that I reach out to a senior that we both knew through a 5C club who had done internships in areas I was also interested in. A casual, semi-desperate Facebook IM turned into me receiving two internship offers from organizations that our mutual friend had interned with. During the last two weeks, I also reached out to two people I had met at CP&R’s wonderful networking panel during Family Weekend. I found out that one of the parents I contacted was good friends with two members in Congress and would help me set up an internship. Though I didn’t end up taking his offer, he was tremendously helpful and offered to help me again next year if I wanted an internship.

2) Be very clear about your deadlines

This is actually really simple. Last week, I sent my interviewer a thank you email and included a few (very important) sentences about the internship grant deadline that was only three days away. She never responded to this email, but I was sure that she had read it. The night before the grant was due, I sent her a reminder email but changed the subject line to “Status of Internship Application” instead of “Thank You” as I had previously written. My interviewer responded the next morning apologizing for missing what I had written in the previous email and immediately offered me a position.

tl;dr: Subject lines in emails can make a huge difference! Something like “Action Requested: [………….]” would be effective.

3) Learn how to make a realistic budget

I will admit that I didn’t take this section of the internship grant as seriously as I could have. Now that I’m forced to think about travel, housing, transportation, and food, I’m realizing that certain areas (HOUSING) are significantly more expensive than other areas. If you’re currently writing a grant, make sure you know the cost of living of where you’re planning to intern. Fun fact: If you live in a home stay in Spain for the summer, you can actually save much more than if you intern in Washington, D.C.

4) Double and triple check all cover letters and resumes for minor errors!

5) Always express your gratitude and write hand-written thank you notes to anyone that went out of their way to help you!

6) Don’t wait until the last minute to do things! I literally got my two offers the day before and the day of the internship grant deadline. This was a extremely stressful.

7) Remember to do your research about your organization! Tips from an article I read recently: In a phone interview, print out everything you’re going to plan on looking at; i.e. your resume, the “About Us” section of the website, the job description, etc. so you’re not switching between screens. This helps!

I think this is longest post I’ve written this semester. I hope this information is useful to you in the future!

Good luck on finding an internship! 🙂

Must… Get… Job…

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This week will forever be referred to as The Week of Application Domination. After a few sad months of getting my hopes up as I applied for one job at a time, I decided to go for it and apply for all of them at once. Because, it’s March. Then it’s April. Then it’s May. And I’m starting to get terrified that I won’t have a job by the time Scripps asks me to move out. However, Application Domination came with a few interesting consequences. I’ve included a checklist to help you know if you’re life is being consumed by your job search. I’d love to provide suggestions for how to escape this domination, but I’m pretty sure the only escape is getting the job. So if this list describes you, congrats! And my fingers are crossed for you, because that’s the only thing left to do…

  • You have at least 5 different versions of your resume: I have HR operations, HR recruiting, Communications, Business, Business and Communications, Blogging, Social Media Expert… But really, they all look the same. (Though I’m convinced that one sentence change makes all the difference.)
  • Your desk is covered with company brochures and business cards.

    This isn't overwhelming...

    This isn’t overwhelming…

  • You try to apply for the same job for the second time because you forgot that you already applied for it. (Yes. This really happened.)
  • You already know what jobs you’ll apply for during senior year because you’ve come across them as you desperately search for something you can do THIS summer.
  • You could write a networking-email in your sleep.
  • You spend what little downtime you have searching through your favorite companies’ career page to make sure you haven’t missed anything.
  • The rest of your downtime is filled with the most mindless of activities:
    • You’ve taken every Buzzfeed Quiz. Even the weird ones.
    • There’s nothing on your Facebook newsfeed that you haven’t already seen.
    • For that matter, there’s nothing on your LinkedIn newsfeed or Tumblr dashboard that you haven’t already seen.
  • You daydream about getting the call or email saying you got the job.
  • You only want to talk about jobs and the companies/internships/ideas you’re in love with.
  • Your friends are forced to take drastic measures to attempt to get you to talk about something else… “Did I tell you about the new technology they created to make the process more efficient?” – Me. “Yeah, it is surprisingly warm out today…” – Everyone who is sick of hearing me rant about the companies I love.
  • You’re able to recommend jobs for other people because you’ve come across so many during your search: “Oh, you want to be a project manager?! Have you tried A, B, or C? I know D and F have internship openings as project managers!”
  • You know how to find any program director, recruiter, CEO, etc. by using a combination of LinkedIn and Google.
  • You jump every time you get an email. “WHAT IF IT’S AN ACCEPTANCE?!”
  • You feel kind of lost once you’ve applied to everything on your list because you’re not sure what to do when there are no applications to send. Because now you’re supposed to just… wait?!?!?!
  • You search again. You try new sites. You refresh ClaremontConnect. You continue this until you find another job, then you choose 1 of the 5 resumes, and start again.

 

I’d continue to make the list, but I’m going to scroll through ClaremontConnect again. New jobs could’ve been added since I checked this morning. Here’s hoping one of those emails is an acceptance so this madness can end soon!

“It’s Complicated” with my Students on Facebook

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Right now I have 36 Facebook friend requests pending from my students. I haven’t quite decided what to do with them.

According to socialbakers.com, Milka is the second most popular brand for Bulgarians on Facebook… I totally understand why!

About one-third of Bulgaria’s population is on Facebook, which includes nearly all of my students. On the first day of school I told my students plainly, “I won’t be your Facebook friend until after this year is over.” Hello, boundaries!

Instead, I tried to engage my students through Facebook groups– one for each grade level I teach.  After I had set these groups up, I told each of my classes about them, expecting they would use the search function and join. For one grade level where all my students had Facebook accounts, I even assigned Facebook “homework” asking them to join the group and make three comments on the photos I would post.

No takers. On Facebook homework.

Really?!?

In the last few weeks I have had more students join the groups, thanks to the help of one of my colleagues. The teachers at my school (who I am friends with on Facebook) have few qualms about befriending their students online. One such teacher joined the groups to help me invite and add students. Even so, most students do not post or participate in the discussions. I wonder if befriending students on Facebook would give them more contact with American culture/media, and help my understanding of Bulgaria by forming “friendships” and getting more perspectives on life in Smolyan. Many Fulbright English Teaching Assistants here are friending their students and getting a lot out of that bond. It makes it easier to learn names at the very least.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that student-teacher relationships and social media don’t always mix well. During the first few weeks, a Fulbright friend of mine here posted about her frustrations with classroom discipline and student conduct on her personal tumblr. They were things that many of us Fulbrighters were thinking/feeling, but said in excessively strong language (read: like a sailor). Bulgarian students are a tech-savvy bunch, and it wasn’t long before her students read her post. Hours later she had an anonymous and threatening message sent by someone claiming to represent a group of her students. The conflict eventually resolved itself, but it was unnecessary drama that might have been prevented through self-censorship or distancing online and real-life identities.

So, should I break my own rule and friend my students early? If I did, would it mean I would have to stop sharing snarky, aggressively liberal Jezebel articles on my Facebook timeline? Or should I wait until the end of the year and possibly miss out on legitimate cross-cultural friendships?

Networking at the Acapocalypse

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This past Saturday, my a cappella group, the After School Specials, packed up and headed south to San Diego for a regional collegiate a cappella invitational. Besides the fact that the concert was extremely fun and our group totally rocked it, the whole event was a great lesson in networking.

The event was called the Acapocalypse and was hosted by the a cappella group Pointless at Point Loma Nazarene University, which has a beautiful campus literally on the ocean. Seven groups from around Southern California performed in all, and the show also included a beat boxing battle. Here’s our beat boxer, Pomona freshman Pranay Yeturu, wowing the crowd with his 30 second piece (he won, if you were wondering). As the group’s Event Coordinator, I’ve been interested in increasing our presence off of the 5C campus. We perform on campus very often, whether for school sponsored or student run events, but haven’t spent much time touring other campuses or performing at invitationals alongside other groups from the area. In an attempt to change this, we’ve been carefully cultivating our Facebook and YoutTube page and were delighted to have been invited to the Acapocalypse, especially when the student organizing the event told us he had found out about us through Facebook and by watching our videos. Online presence and how you portray yourself in different online communities can really make a difference in how a group is perceived in the a cappella world, and I anticipate the same being true for me personally and my forthcoming career search.

Daniel, Aleina, and I during vocal warmups for our performance at the Acapocalypse

Throughout the event and afterwards at the get together Pointless hosted few were able to mingle and get to know groups from other schools (including USC and SDSU). This was fantastic because we were able to connect with groups that we hope to host here at the 5Cs and possibly travel to perform with at their colleges or universities. Members of different groups were able to bond over a shared love of music and interest in getting to know others involved in collegiate a cappella. Just as I’ve found in situations that allow for networking related to personal career, finding commonalities and shared interests can be a great entry point to making a connection with someone who you might benefit from knowing or who might benefit from knowing you in the future. It’s great to keep your options open and make contact with as many people as possible, plus it’s just fun to meet new people and hear about their life and career experiences. I think immediately of an event in Beirut that surprised me as being a fantastic networking opportunity: a homebrew festival at the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon. At this event, I was able to make a connection with someone who worked in the Foreign Service over how completely adorable I found his dog, pick his brains about the Foreign Service exam and his experience working for the State Department, and get his email for further questions and help. I also made connection with the CEO of one of the top brewing companies in Lebanon (961) over the fact that I work in a brewery when I’m home in Santa Cruz who after our chat offered me a job working for him whenever I’m back in Lebanon. Moving back to Beirut is an option for after graduation, so having some possibilities already set out should that happen is fantastic.

The group got to stop at the beach on our way to sing to enjoy some sun and stick our toes in the water

Back to a cappella—the trip also reminded me of how essential to life being able to take things in stride and problem solve can be. Continue reading →