Reaching Out

One of the recent advances I've made in getting the word out about LGO is having my blog added to the MIT Sloan Student Blog (http://mitsloanblog.typepad.com/).  In our early New Student Recruiting Committee meetings (yes, I'm documenting my experience for my benefit AND yours), some current students had mentioned that LGO is hard to find from both the Sloan and Engineering pages, so my goal is to make it more visible than it was before, no matter how small that change may be.

A fun surprise from working on getting cross-posted on the Sloan blog was that I "met" (through the phone) my summer probability professor's wife!  Turns out, she works for Sloan admissions and is the person coordinating the blogs.  Hi Harriet!  Thanks for getting this coordination effort rolling.

Besides just getting rolling, the cool thing is that it looks like things are starting to take hold.  From looking at my 'Stats' page I've already started getting referral/link traffic from the Sloan blog page and have added a few more hits to my total.  A next step I'm looking at would be to approach the general MIT admissions blog (http://mitadmissions.org/blogs) and see if I could have even one guest post on their site.

I know quite a number of undergraduates post and read the MIT Admissions blog, but I don't know how much the blog interfaces with the incoming grad population since it is usually focused at applying to specific departments rather than learning about MIT as much in general.  Engineering departments here generally don't have student blogs, and you can't apply to LGO straight from undergrad, so it's hard to know how to best reach potential applicants (Hey applicants, if you're reading this and have some ideas, let me know!).

I seem to have a funny relationship with social media.  I have a Facebook page and I have a Linked In profile but I don't use twitter.  I haven't posted any of my own photos on Facebook and yet I write this publicly available blog.  Overall, I guess I like the casual prose of blogging versus the sentence or two that are status updates.  I took four writing classes while an undergrad at MIT and Writing ended up being my humanities concentration (all undergraduates need to have a humanities concentration, but it could be music or history or economics as much as it could be writing).  It's just something I like doing.

As a final aside, if you want to know anything about MIT in general, with a 95% service level, I probably know about it or can get you information on it.  Honestly the more fun and legend-like the better.  Having been an undergrad here for four years and then worked with alumni while I was employed out in Michigan there are a lot of things that have passed my ears in addition to the things we've been learning about as LGOs.  Feel free to ask me questions over email or come talk at Ambassador Day (11/7/11 - be there!).