Living in the Internet age

We’re in college. Society almost expects us to go to parties, have a good time, and document it with pictures and video. Personally, my favorite part is seeing what silly pictures I’ve taken with my friends no matter what we were doing. Networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have made this very easy, but at what cost?

As I sit in my office at work, I tend to be overcome with boredom and, as many people do, I check out my friends on Facebook. Occasionally, co-workers will come into my office and ask me about school and what my friends and I do for fun. Naturally, I tell them about what clubs I’m in and the various opportunities that come up to join in things at Rose. However, today something different happened. An engineer came in as I was looking through an album of pictures from a party. The engineer saw what I was looking at and, without missing a beat, said that when he was doing hiring for a company he worked for, if he had seen pictures like that of the candidates he was interviewing, he would just toss their resume in the trash, not because he did not like knowing about that behavior but because the candidate was willing to plaster it all over the Internet.

Even if profiles are on private and pictures can only be viewed by your friends, you never know who will be standing there looking at the monitor. It could be a prospective employer, a current employer, a parent, or even a stalker. You could have the perfect resume and the perfect interview for your dream job. It is hard to imagine, but you could throw away four years of hard work in college by simply having pictures on the web of that night you went bar-hopping.

I’m not saying to become a hermit and refuse to socialize. I am simply saying use discretion with what you place on your websites. There have been several cases where students have been disciplined and people have lost jobs, simply because someone put a video on YouTube showing some inappropriate conduct. Do not throw away what you have worked hard for, simply for some pictures or a funny video.