Laura Bergus

UPDATE
I’ll admit I get a thrill out of seeing the gears of a giant bureaucracy turn. And on my crusade to push our law school to get real about social networking, which started as shaming them into admitting that even people who post beer bong pictures on Facebook might deserve a chance, I am starting to feel such a thrill. My law school’s career placement office has drafted a survey for students about how the use social media, and they’re happy to let me help put together information for students, staff and employers on the subject. If you would be willing to critique this survey, please email me for the link. Thank you!

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After whaling on my career placement office in my last post, I realized that whining does nothing to fix the problem of law students being advised to limit their online identity. But instead of offering help for developing something that might educate students on the strength and beauty of online networking, I kept my mouth shut. Why? Because I’m in law school. And that means I am competing with my peers in a way that I’ve never competed with anyone. I am in training to participate in the great “adversarial system” that we call the exercise of justice. My instinct was not to help, because then these same people that I’m competing with for grades and for summer jobs will have just as much advantage as me. And as I recently learned in my negotiations class, those who take the high road in the legal profession often get run over by the Mack truck of borderline ethics.

Then I had a good conversation with a career placement counselor, and his goodwill convinced me to try to change things, success be damned. So now is the interesting part of this experiment, where I get to find out how the bureaucracy responds to what might be, to them, a crazy and dangerous proposal. Stay tuned.

Once again, the career placement office at my law school is there for me. This time, it’s to remind me how bad the internet is when you are looking for a job. Their weekly email newsletter sent to all students included a “REMINDER RE USE OF FACEBOOK AND OTHER SITES WHILE JOB SEEKING.” Ah-ha! I thought: perhaps they are catching on to the value of fb as a professional tool. Maybe they now see that 150,000,000 people can’t all be wrong.

If only. Here’s what they had to say:

For those students seeking employment, please remember that it is now a common practice for employers to check Facebook, MySpace and blogs when considering prospective hires. Remember it may not even be your entry, but that you appear somewhere else in what an employer may feel is a “lack of good judgment” situation. Make any deletions/corrections now…..it is not always as easy as one may think to delete something or have it taken down. We have in the past two years had students lose offers because of the above and have heard from employers last fall that in searching several of our students, they found information that entered into their hiring decisions. Please be cautious. What you post should be professional.

This narrow view does nothing more than illustrate how little the people espousing it know about the internet, let alone about the power of social media. They forget that most students have grown up using online tools to meet people and share information. Students today have far and away a better understanding than administrators and faculty of what it means to put themselves online. We know who might be looking, from our grandparents to federal agents. We know that once something is online, it never goes away. We know how easy and assumed it is that our name will be googled the instant a potential employer finds us even remotely interesting or hirable.

And most of all, we know that things we post on facebook in an album entitled “Let’s pretend it’s undergrad!!” or “Never again: New Year’s Ughhhh” will for the most part be taken for what they are: windows into the real lives of real adults. If a potential employer can’t deal with pictures of beer bongs and lingerie, they probably shouldn’t be conducting research about recent college grads on, well, facebook.

Imagine how dull the world would be if all you could gleam about someone from the internet was “professional.” No pictures of grandkids, no sharing recipes or hobbies. Just where you’ve worked, your GPA and a laundry list of carefully sanitized “interests.” That’s not the world I want to participate in. I trust someone who finds me on LinkedIn to know its purpose, and the same of facebook or twitter.

Let’s have a conversation about the value of getting to know people, and the internet as a vehicle to meet. Career services should understand this: they’re willing to send me off to BigLaw cocktail parties to network, but shudder to think if the photos therefrom ever see the light of day…