"They loved your GPA, then they saw your Tweets" by Natasha Singer

"Perhaps she hadn’t realized that colleges keep track of their social media mentions." - Natasha Singer 

In this article, Natasha Singer talks about the controversial issue of colleges, schools, and employment offices tracking applicants' social media accounts. 

The quote at the beginning was a comment Singer made about a high school senior who was rejected from a college because of the condescending comments she made over social media about her peers.

Kaplan Test Prep ran a questionnaire where 31 percent of admission officers had checked an applicant's FaceBook or other social media account, and 30 percent of the officers had found things that had negatively affected that applicant.

But there is a problem in admission officers believing what they read online, because someone can make fake accounts about people and post false information and they may never know that it is untrue.

Singer then emailed 20 colleges across the nations, who then replied that they barely ever do extra research because of the amount of applicants and that the information they find may led to unfair treatment. She also called 10 admissions officers, who agreed to interviews. They said they have occasionally rejected applications because of things they have read, because those were not the kind of people they wanted in their community.

High schools are now trying to help their students avoid "self sabotage", like deleting alcohol related pictures or changing their usernames that could be viewed as offensive. Now, teenagers are becoming more aware of this.

Singer closed out the article with a quote from a high school junior, “If you’ve got stuff online you don’t want colleges to see, deleting it is kind of like joining two more clubs senior year to list on your application to try to make you seem more like the person they want at their schools.”

I really took a lot away from this article and I hope all teenaggers and young adults are able to get this kind of real world information. I am glad I read this because now I will be very careful of what I post online.

If you would like to read the original article, here is the link - They loved your GPA, then they saw your Tweets