Perception Control & Boundary-Setting

We’re going to start some work on actively controlling how other people (in college admissions offices) initially see us and set some boundaries on how they can contact us (so they’re less able to stress us out).

Set Your Current Social Media Accounts to be Private

(You may have done this already.)

What to do: Most social media platforms leave accounts as public by default. Go into your profile settings (Instagram: “Settings and Activity”) and find the Privacy setting (Instagram: “Account Privacy”) and flip that switch to Private.

🚩 Warning: Bluesky doesn’t have private accounts. 🚩

Exception 1: If you have actively monetized your account such that the public account is already a monument of our achievements, then leave it public.

Exception 2: If your social media content already shows community engagement or political action that is more important to you than any specific college acceptance, than leave it public.

Why are we doing this? Because the threat to your reputation isn’t you, it’s the acquaintance that will come clowning you at an inopportune time and show that you have poor judgment in what sort of behavior and how much peer pressure you’ll continually subject yourself to. This is a problem because we know that this behavior will corrupt your behavior over time (Birhane, 2017). We also know that this is pretty normal (Broad, 2018) and that there are even legitimate rationalizations for it (boyd, 2014). But when I saw a student meekly demurring at her — presumably — friends’ demands to become a federal criminal for their amusement, my expectation that she would be able to maintain a semblance of integrity through the transitional period of college dropped sharply. 

Additional Reading:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Surveillance Self-Defense”
• EFF’s “Privacy for Students”
• Teen Vogue’s “How to Protect Your Online Privacy”

Start a Burner Email Account

(You might use your school email for this.)

What to do: You are going to make an email account that will receive the unending torrent of spam that colleges will be trying to send to you as soon as as they know you’re looking at colleges. This is the email address you will provide for any and all purposes related to college (to the extent allowed). Just a free account on any major provider (like Gmail) with a suitable handle (like juno_jenkins_classof2026@gmail.com) where marketing from the 3980 colleges you don’t care about can go to rot will be fine, that’s all we’re looking for here.

Exception: You may choose to use your school email address for this purpose. This reduces risk of accidental duplication while also actively demonstrating that you are a student, but if you’re actively using your school email to handle important notifications then getting it flooded by college spam will not meet our objective of moving that spam to a place where it’s not invading your consciousness all of the time. Additionally, your school policies govern how long you get to keep your email account for after you graduate regardless of how long you need access to it — this shouldn’t be a problem, but it could turn into one at the last minute.

Why are we doing this? This exercise serves to reduce stress and build your confidence. By keeping the bulk of bulk emails out of your actual inbox, you won’t be stressed out by the incessant neediness of all the colleges that want your attention. And by controlling when you look in this benighted inbox, you reduce your ability to second-guess the decisions that you’ve made of where to focus, apply, and (ultimately) go: this is good for your confidence in that decision, and your confidence in that decision is predictive of your satisfaction with that decision. And we can get these benefits without prematurely snubbing the many universities that we should be looking at in our initial investigation.

If you can use your school address without increasing your stress and doubts, then go ahead and do that. Otherwise: maybe don’t?

The final point of success for this exercise is: have an email address that you can delete and walk away from when you leave for college. The emails going to that address will never stop but you shouldn’t care about any of them.

Bonus Step: If you can get a person Google Voice or burner phone number for receiving texts from colleges (or political parties) to keep your actual phone number safe, that’s also a good step to take.

Establish Your New Public-Facing Presence

Start with the social media for professionals, LinkedIn. The basic process for getting a LinkedIn profile spun up is now available. The only two things you need from your LinkedIn profile at this point in time will be:

1. It’s clean in the minimalist sense of the word.
2. It demonstrates interest in the college(s) you are applying to by Following them.

If you’re not to the point where you’re sending applications to colleges, then you can wait on setting up a LinkedIn profile, especially if you don’t intend to use it until your college’s Career Center is helping you land an internship.