Internet Blogs

High school students spend most of their senior year deciding where to go to college. The decision is so important that many enlist the aid of college advisors to help them find “the perfect fit” in a college. A new trend among prospective students is to search out “blogs” written by university students to gain a glimpse of the life of a typical student at a certain school.

The Internet has become a place where many share their stories, pictures and ramblings about life. Many users choose to share their lives through online weblogs, dubbed blogs. It has been easier for many to publish their work over the past few years with the advent of point and click form-driven sites that allow the users to focus on the content while the style and layout of the site is controlled by pre-written scripts. This means that a typical web user can have their own site, upload photos, and publish as often as they want with little to no programming skills.

The blogging community has been fueled by the popularity of free services such as Blogger and LiveJournal. Blogs have become so mainstreamed that even political candidates and Fortune 500 companies now keep their constituents and shareholders up to date with online journals.

“I think they are a cool concept, but I just don’t understand why some people use them to vent when they know that slews of random strangers can read them,” said Burim Gjidija ’05

Fairfield University has tried to tap this with the “Weekly Student Journal”, a piece on the admission’s website written by Katherine Petta. The site contains what is happening on campus, and tries to give a genuine look into student life while being presented in the best light possible.

“I would use them because I definitely think that it would give perspective students an inside look to what really goes on and how student’s actually spend their time. It also would show perspective students how students feel about everything at college,” Bridget Closter ’07 said.

Many students are familiar with online journals, but student opinions vary about their usefulness as a tool for selecting a college.

“It is kind of a weird voyeuristic view into people’s lives. Whenever I start reading them I just waste a long time looking at the person’s life. I don’t know if I would trust one person’s view of a whole college though,” Will Flanagan ’08 said.

“I think that I would have used blogs when looking at schools if they were more organized and you could get an overall feeling of student body opinion, not just selected snapshots,” Gjidija added.