Prospective scholarship providers, interviewers and admissions officers who happen to be a shade more tech savvy have been known to look up candidates and applicants on Facebook, Google or Twitter.
They'll get an impression of you even before you meet them. If you've been up to no good, that's guilty until proven innocent.
Here's a couple of simple ways to keep yourself safe.
Set up Google Alerts for your name
Google has a service that automatically sends you an email when their search engine comes by a search term you specify.
What I like to do is set it to search specifically for my name and for common usernames I use. To do this I enclose my search term in quotes:
"John Doe"
"jdoe1992"
This tells Google to drop you an email telling you where your name turns up on the internet, so you can keep track of what others might see if they Googled you.
Facebook Privacy
Depending on how you've set up your Facebook profile, your prospective interviewer may just know that you've sounded the horn in Mousehunt or taken that quiz about "Which of your Facebook friends will you marry in future?". High School is inevitably full of embarrassing pictures, so unless you want to have to explain why you were doing something in a particular weird manner, it's a good idea to get yourself covered.
Make your profile private so that only people you allow can view your wall, notes, videos and photographs. As much as it may violate Facebook's privacy protocol to do so, I'll still say that if you wish to play games and use Facebook apps, create another account (that isn't related to your name) to do that.
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