I learned some amusing little things over the last couple of weeks.
Some universities have staff who track blog and web comments about the institutions.
They seem primarily interested in comments by prospective students!
Secondary interest is comments, partiuclarly negative ones, by current faculty and staff.
A tertiary concern is any comments by current students.
This is an obvious development in retrospect, I just hadn't thought about it.
Universities obsessively track any mainstream media mention of themselves, web and blog tracking would follow. I am sure some universities also contract this to third party commercial services.
For what it is worth, I do not know if Penn State tracks blog comments, nor do I care.
Collision avoidance radar on cars is nifty, seems to work well, and I hope to have one on our next car.
You can't work on a laptop in economy class if the person in front of you decides to lean the seat back.
This makes it very hard to integrate new figures, that your co-author sent you at the very last minute, into your Keynote presentation. But it can be done, at the cost of some backache and no sleep.
Finally, if you have a couple of wee munchkins working on a painting project, then mentioning Jackson Pollock is a tactical error.
But it is amazing how quickly and efficiently they assimilate the concept.
Nice painting though.
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Any idea what kind of comments by prospective students they're looking for? Are the more worried about spotting comments that make a prospective student seem especially promising? Or just looking for "(institution) sucks but my girlfriend goes there so I guess I'll apply" comments and the like to rule out people?
(Is it a bad sign that I don't even consider that they'd be looking for potential problems being brought up that ought to be addressed?...)
I inferred that they were looking for "why did I get a bad impression on my visit", possibly even real problems, but realistically they are looking for what did our competitors do that gave good impressions and what did we do that flopped.
Universities are deadly serious about student recruitment, they'll work at figuring out how to make better impressions on prospectives.
This is based on incomplete, anecdotal information about third parties, but interesting.
I also gather that persistent and agressively negative comments by staff are noted, but not necessarily in a pro-active "ooh, lets fix that" kinda way.
Though to be fair, a lot of the people who whine on the web are a bit nutty, eh.
As an alumnus, I can confidently state that all PSU has to do to help their enrollment is to only schedule official campus tours during the first three weeks of fall semester and the last three weeks of spring semester (and over the summer, of course) since these are traditionally the only nice weather weeks in the entire school year. Any other time, and it's more likely to be no better than 50 deg F and raining with >10 klick winds coming through the valley...