Back-to-School Blogging

Web logs help new students prepare for campus life

Transcripts: Samples of comments on the Davidson College blogBy BROCK READ

Like almost any student preparing to move into a freshman dormitory, Nora Goldberger spent much of the summer batting around questions about college life: Would she struggle to make friends? Which courses should she take, and which ones should she avoid? How would she get her laundry done?

Such concerns are the stuff that precollege apprehension is made of. But Ms. Goldberger, a Philadelphia native who is beginning her studies at Davidson College, says she feels more at ease than most of her friends. Credit for that, she says, goes to her computer.

Throughout the summer she joined her peers in posting questions on a Web log, or blog, for students at the North Carolina college. Using the informal discussion forum, maintained by students at Davidson, she chatted with her soon-to-be-classmates and hit up wizened upperclassmen for advice on the coming year.

When Ms. Goldberger wondered if she could trust the university’s laundry service -- which collects students’ dirty clothes and washes them at no cost -- she asked her fellow bloggers. Within a day, several upperclassmen had given her a consensus opinion: Don’t be afraid to use the service, but wash delicate items yourself.

When she wanted to know how much she should expect to pay for a semester’s worth of textbooks, she quickly got a number of estimates. And after she mentioned offhandedly that she’d been listening to a song by the band Sister Hazel, she compared notes with two other students who owned all of the cult group’s albums.

The popularity of blogs is helping students across the country meet their dorm mates, form study groups, and make friends before they set foot on their new campuses.

Free, Web-based tools like Xanga and LiveJournal, which allow users to easily create their own blogs, have attracted a large following among high-school and college students. At institutions like Davidson, enterprising students have used the popularity of the medium to create thriving communities in which incoming freshmen meet to exchange practical questions, personal information, movie recommendations, and jokes.

Administrators say the sites constitute an important new trend: Students who grow up using the Web as a social tool can now ask their peers, instead of college officials, for counseling on the process of preparing for college. The colleges aren’t about to get rid of their orientation sessions, but officials say freshmen who use the Internet for college planning may become more self-reliant students.

Meanwhile, students like Ms. Goldberger relish the chance to get a head start on college socializing. “This has definitely made me feel more excited and better about coming here,” she says. “I have friendly faces and people to look out for, and I’m just a little bit better informed.”

Flood of Questions

The success of the Davidson students’ Web log (http://www.livejournal.com/community/davidsoncollege) has exceeded the expectations of its creator, Emily McRae, a sophomore.

Ms. McRae started the site -- a group journal that allows anyone to post comments -- this summer after speaking to an incoming freshman who found her own blog inundated with questions about Davidson from people she’d never met.

The flood of questions, Ms. McRae says, proves that first-year students are eager to touch base with their peers -- and that information travels quickly among bloggers. A Web log, she reasoned, would let incoming freshmen share questions about Davidson among a broad pool of college-age bloggers.

The blog is hosted on LiveJournal, a free service. Anyone can see the postings, but only those who have signed up with the service can contribute. On pages that resemble discussion boards, users with pseudonymous screen names like “onenoisygirl” and “atrain14" post questions or comments, and others respond.

At first the site was popular with freshmen who logged on to do little more than introduce themselves and post their course schedules. But soon upperclassmen happened onto the Web log and made their presence known. Students began asking about cafeteria food, required courses, dorm-room accouterments, and other concerns of campus life, and the community took off.

“I think freshmen became really interested when there were upperclassmen giving sage advice on classes, orientation, and living in Davidson,” says Peter Benbow, a sophomore who regularly contributes to the site as “crazydcwildcat7.”

“We know what it’s like to come wide-eyed and mystified onto a college campus,” he says.

The site now has almost 80 users, including alumni and prospective students. “The alumni get to reconnect, the freshmen get to ask advice, the upperclassmen get to consult one another, and the prospectives get lots of answers for ‘Why did you come to Davidson?’” says Ms. McRae.

The site has a generally earnest tone, with posts that range from informational to motivational. During the week before freshmen headed to campus for orientation activities in August, students sought tips for decorating their rooms and updated classmates on their packing progress. One first-year student tried to set up a knitting party, a sophomore offered an inspirational poem, another student asked her classmates for help in choosing a gym class, and an alumnus reminded frantic packers to bring cold medicine.

The site has caught on with upperclassmen and alumni because they remember how daunting the transition to dormitory life can be, says Rachel Andoga, a sophomore who helps run the LiveJournal blog and posts regularly under the name “rachigurl5.” “I imagine that if I’d had something like this when I came to college, I wouldn’t have been as insanely nervous about starting out,” she says. “Everyone’s so friendly on the site.”

Ms. Andoga hopes that the blog will survive the start of the academic year and become an informal bulletin board where first-year students can organize study sessions and publicize extracurricular activities. The bonds that students have formed on the site are real, she says. She expects to drop in on several freshman bloggers to see how they are adjusting to college, and she is helping to plan a party for all the Davidson students who joined the LiveJournal community.

Lurking Administrators

Davidson administrators, too, have been tuning in to the blog -- even though they had no part in its creation -- in an effort to determine what issues freshmen are most worried about.

“I think I’ve spent as much time on the site as the students have,” jokes Leslie Marsicano, director of residence life at the college. “It’s been riveting and addicting for me.”

She has recommended the site to students and parents who called her office with niggling questions about bedsheets and laundry arrangements. Some students have speculated that she had recruited upperclassmen to log on and serve as mentors to incoming students.

To the contrary, she says:She’s strictly a watcher of the blog. “I think if we tried to encourage the site we’d spoil it,” she says. “It works so much better because it comes from the grass roots, and there’s no administration figures for students to be suspicious of.”

But Davidson officials do have a vested interest in the online gathering. For many prospective students, Ms. Marsicano says, the Web log may be a more effective form of advertisement than a glossy brochure or even a college visit. High-school students choosing between Davidson and its competitors are adept at tracking down student Web logs and are likely to trust them to provide an unfiltered view of college life, she says.

Davidson is lucky: The blog has been consistently cheery and cordial. But Ms. Marsicano says she’d be unhappy if she felt that students were misrepresenting the institution. “When parents call me to ask how long the beds are, they’re really asking if there’s some nice person who will look after their baby,” she says. “I’d like to be able to keep pointing to this site to say, ‘The kids can take care of each other.’”

Bonding Online

Blogs are not the only online forums that have developed to help incoming students break the ice with classmates. Many students are using e-mail lists and social-networking sites like Friendster and Thefacebook to make bonds before arriving on the campus.

For Anna Dinndorf, a freshman at Washington University in St. Louis, a personal Web log and an online discussion group led to romance. Last spring she mentioned her early-admission acceptance in her online journal, a daily blog she maintains on the popular Web site Diaryland. Another blogger who had been admitted to Washington spotted the entry and invited Ms. Dinndorf to join a growing group of incoming students in a discussion forum that makes use of a free service by Yahoo, the popular search site.

“I had never spoken to her before, and I never spoke to her after that, but she clued me in, and for that I’m very thankful,” Ms. Dinndorf says.

In the Yahoo group, users not only post questions about courses and dorm preparations at Washington, but contribute to a database of students’ contact information, exchange screen names so they can chat on instant-messaging software, and create informal polls that ask their peers to comment on matters both political and personal. For example, almost none of the incoming freshmen approve of the Bush administration’s proposed Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. On a lighter note, most students said they order soft drinks by asking for “soda” instead of “pop” or “Coke.”

Chattier Comments

With more than 200 students registered, the discussion at Washington is chattier and less focused than the Davidson blog. It’s also a bit franker: Some students grouse about their housing assignments or other matters. But the incoming students, by and large, seem to have few quibbles with Washington, and administrators surfing the site would find little to worry about.

For most students, the site is more about socializing than it is for airing serious concerns. Ms. Dinndorf says she’s spent much of her time on the site just meeting people, including a fellow freshman whom she now calls her boyfriend. The pair, it turns out, have met only once in real life, but they’ve gotten to know each other through posts on the discussion board and on AOL Instant Messenger chats.

“We started out talking online and things developed, and then we met in person when I went to Washington for a weekend in July,” says Ms. Dinndorf. “It’s so great to be going down to school and already have all these connections.”

The connections, she says, are forged by jokes and gossip as much as by serious conversations. Some students took notice when a rumor popped up on the board that the radio “shock jock” Howard Stern’s daughter would be part of the Class of 2008 at Washington, but, ultimately, the claim was debunked.

For Ms. Dinndorf, that light touch is a welcome distraction from the often tense process of preparing to move away from home. “Basically, the site has been like a sounding board for all the precollege jitters and worries and questions and everything that everyone goes through at this point,” she says. “And I’m really addicted to it.”

CHEMISTRY 115, MIDNIGHT TREKS, AND KNITTING:
ONLINE REASSURANCE AT DAVIDSON COLLEGE

Users who post messages on Davidson College’s student-run Web log, or blog, discuss a wide range of topics, including course schedules, extracurricular activities, and their views of college life. A sampling of comments:

http://chronicle.com Section: Information Technology Volume 51, Issue 2, Page A35