big brother...

don't know if any of my schoolmates ever read the career services office's weekly newsletter or not. i don't. but in light of one of the conversation topics at dinner friday night with certain faculty members and 3 of my fantastic brunette client counseling colleagues, i was directed to this week's edition because of the following:

As you are probably aware, recently there have been numerous news reports regarding privacy in the era of blogging and e-mailing. Who is not familiar with the now infamous exchange between the recent Suffolk Law School graduate and a potential employer at a Boston firm? That newly-minted lawyer's "bla bla bla" e-mail made her the source of humor from Boston to Berlin.

That e-mail exchange, as well as the blogging explosion, prompted the CSO to explore this important topic. Many of the articles we have read relate to blogs and the potentially negative effect they may have on employers' hiring decisions. Employers are now quite savvy in their research of potential candidates, and you should operate under the assumption that anything on the web written by or about you will be discovered by a potential employer (this includes information posted on websites such as Friendster, MySpace.com, and Facebook). More specifically, a student whose MySpace Favorite Phrase is "Party with your pants off!" (no, we didn’t make that up) may short-circuit her job search with traditional employers.

Now, blogging has a flip side too: blogs can add to the "portfolio" of students who are outside of the upper echelons of the class. But these blogs should demonstrate that the writer is a great, interesting, motivated emerging lawyer. Here’s the bottom line: You are find-able on the web--and you have a choice whether it is for "good," or not.

As such, our office urges you to use common sense when blogging, posting personal information on the web, and even e-mailing. If there is information about you on the web, and you are concerned about the manner in which a potential employer may view this material, please do not hesitate to discuss the matter with a CSO Counselor.

so there you go, friends, right from CSO's mouth. i've got seriously mixed feelings about this, but given that this blog started as a chronicle of a whole bunch of health-related stuff, i can't say i'm not concerned. i don't ever write anything here that i'm ashamed of or that i would consider to be incriminating. but if potential employers are out there lurking on the internet like the human resources equivalents of online pedophiles, i can't say that makes me feel at all at ease. and this isn't even me wanting to declare my free speech rights -- it's more me wanting to say, "jesus, people! it's just a stupid blog!"

i dunno. i've got tracking code in this blog that tells me the IP addresses and city/state of who reads these posts. i'm not about to stop writing at this point. maybe if i start to get a bunch of visits from ISPs at places where i'm sending my resume, i'll rethink that strategy. but for now, well, jesus, people! it's just a stupid blog!

xo.