Clare Richardson spent a good portion of Intersession, her
first at Johns Hopkins, in the glow
of the big screen. Richardson flew out to Park City, Utah,
this
January to indulge her cinephile side at
the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
She attended 24 screenings and got to rub shoulders
with the
likes of Ashton Kutcher, Demi
Moore and The Office's John Krasinksi. She even met the
Sundance kid
himself, Robert Redford, who
gladly posed for a photo with the freshman Writing Seminars
and Film and
Media Studies major.
Richardson details her adventure in the most recent
guest
blog on Hopkins Interactive, a Web
site that is fast becoming an integral part of the
university's
admissions pitch.
The Office of
Undergraduate Admissions for the Homewood
schools launched Hopkins
Interactive in December 2005 to offer a view of JHU from
the inside
out. The centerpiece of the
site is a collection of blogs in which current Arts and
Sciences and
Engineering students document
their lives here, everything from the classroom experience
to the
weekend scene in Baltimore.
Currently, Hopkins Interactive publishes regularly updated
blogs
from 20 full-time students
representing each undergraduate class. The site also
features
message boards, student profiles and
videos.
The guest blog feature was added one month after the
site's
launch to provide a forum for
students to share — on a one-time basis — a
JHU-related experience
with prospective applicants.
To date, Admissions has published 120 guest blog
entries,
which often incorporate photos taken
by the author.
The site,
hopkins.typepad.com/guest, routinely gets
500 "hits" a week and has been
increasingly mentioned in applications, admission
interviews and
surveys as a reason why the high
school senior chose to apply to Johns Hopkins. The blog
proved so
popular, in fact, that the Admissions
Office created "The Blue Jay Buffet" page to let faculty,
staff and
alumni post entries to represent
more aspects of the Johns Hopkins experience.
Daniel Creasy, associate director of the Office of
Undergraduate Admissions and the
mastermind behind Hopkins Interactive, says that the blogs
offer an
immediate and inexpensive way
to market Johns Hopkins to a Web-savvy audience.
Creasy said that Richardson's story is a personal
favorite of his.
"Publishing a story about a freshman Film and Media
Studies
student who, in her first five
months here, got to attend the Sundance Film Festival as
part of an
independent study project is
better marketing than anything we can do," Creasy says. "We
want the
bloggers to tell others what
life is like here, and we're constantly on the lookout for
unique
and newsworthy experiences like
Clare's that we can share."
Richardson says that she was only too happy to
contribute to
Hopkins Interactive. She'd never
written a blog before but recalled how helpful the guest
blog was in
finding out more about Johns
Hopkins when she was applying to schools.
"I thought it was great that the school provided this
forum.
You get to see a personal side of
campus life and hear about the unique opportunities open to
undergraduates," Richardson says. "I
really enjoyed reading them."
A new guest blog, which is typically five to 10
paragraphs in
length, gets posted each Monday
during the academic year.
In addition to Richardson's story, other recent guest
blogs
have recounted stories of students
on archaeological digs in Egypt, volunteering for the Johns
Hopkins
Tutorial Project and participating
in 4K for Cancer, an annual 4,000-mile bicycle trek from
the
Homewood campus to the Golden Gate
Bridge in San Francisco.
Carolyn Purington, a junior biomedical engineering
major,
used the guest blog to recount her
experience in Ecuador for the Johns Hopkins chapter of
Engineers Without
Borders.
Purington traveled to the South American country this
summer
as part of an effort to design,
fund and construct a children's nursery in the small
village of
Santa Rosa de Ayora. Purington and
other Johns Hopkins students spent their first five days in
Quito,
Ecuador's capital city, to visit
several children's nurseries in order to observe floor
plans and
organizational setup. They also
traveled to Santa Rosa de Ayora itself to survey the site
and meet
with community members to
determine their exact needs for the nursery.
In the blog, Purington talks of her journey and
explains how
and why she got involved with
Engineers Without Borders during her freshman year.
"I had actually heard about Engineers Without Borders
before
I decided where I was going to
college," she writes. "And I was excited to realize that
Johns
Hopkins had an active chapter. I joined
the Ecuador team because I had an interest in improving my
Spanish
and experiencing Latin American
culture. Although I am studying biomedical engineering, I
enjoy
applying the basic engineering
principles, fundamental to any discipline of engineering,
to the project."
Purington, co-leader of the Ecuador team, says that
writing
the blog was both fun and easy.
"I just sat down and reflected on my trip," she says.
"I
thought it was a good way for people,
especially those interested in engineering, to know what
goes on here."
Creasy instructs the guest bloggers to write for an
outside
audience and to keep the tone
simple and personal.
"The form is very open-ended," he says. "They can
share the
good and the bad."
For The Blue Jay Buffet, more than 20 blogs have been
posted.
Parents have shared stories
about school searches, parents' weekend, empty nest
syndrome and
watching their child mature.
Alumni have reflected on their undergraduate days and how
the
experience led them to their current
job or graduate program. One recent alum wrote how Johns
Hopkins
helped land him his dream job at
Google.
The guest blog has featured only two faculty members
to date,
and Creasy is looking for more
to talk about what they do and why they like to work with
undergraduates.
"Not just faculty; we are actively trying to recruit
students, staff and alumni to submit guest
blogs to Hopkins Interactive," he says. "If you have a
story to
share, we'd love to hear from you."
When Hopkins Interactive was launched, only five to 10
universities nationwide hosted such a
page, Creasy says. Today, nearly 150 major universities
have a blog
feature on their admissions site.
"But only a handful have gone as far as we have," he
says.
Anecdotal evidence has told Creasy and others at the
Admissions Office that the blogs have
had a positive impact. In recent surveys of admitted
students, the
Hopkins Interactive site ranked
higher than the Office of Admissions home page and the JHU
main page
in helping them choose the
university.
"Several students have mentioned the blogs in their
application essays. I recall one student who
chose to major in neuroscience because of a blog entry," he
says.
"Admitted students have also told us
in person that the blogs made Hopkins feel real to
them."
John Latting, dean of Undergraduate Admissions, says
that
these blog entries are an important
way to inform prospective students and their parents about
life at
Hopkins. He says they truly reflect
the diversity of talent and ideas on the Homewood
campus.
"Hopkins Interactive focuses on our students and their
real
lives," Latting says. "Johns Hopkins
still has a hard-edged image in the world. People think
Hopkins is
all work and no play, all productivity
and no personality. That's not true, and we are using the
blogs to
help tell the real story."
What's the Admissions Office's next blog ambition? It
soon
plans to launch another blog page
that will feature a student entry representing each
undergraduate
major and minor. Students will be
able to talk about their program and why they chose to
study classics
or public health studies.
"That is my next big project," Creasy says. "I've
created a
blog monster."
To see all the blogs and contribute, go to apply.jhu.edu/hi.