Bloggers Beware: Adcom's Watching You [Edit 1]

As suggested in my post on how to write an MBA blog, I believe that the admissions committees and alumni interviewers of various schools are reading our blogs. Not only reading! Judging, perhaps. Weighing the merits of. Jotting notes on applications because of.

What evidence have I? Well, the secret society of MBA Bloggers were sitting in the tomb the other day and sharing some information about their logfiles when one of them looked up from the Indian skull he was drinking from and noted the following (small details changed to protect privacy):

i clicked on my stats counter to check out where my hits were coming from etc, .... it was sheer luck of timing but i saw that there was one access from [Selective Business School (SBS)] this morning. But, what was interesting is where exactly it was from. the 'sent from' link says that the hit came from [Top Dawg's] exchange server inbox! [Top Dawg] is the admissions top gun at [SBS]. The link also had part of the subject of the email and it reads: "Fw: [items of interest]".

That's pretty good evidence right there. Remember too that Alex Brown (Wharton adcom) is known to leave comments on many of the blogs, so it's no secret that he certainly reads them.

Therefore, I share the following thoughts with those who would blog about their MBA admissions experiences:

• Admissions committee members at schools that you are applying to can and will read your blog at some point.
• If you give enough detail (a GMAT score, your sex, your geographic location, and perhaps your alma mater) your identity can be discovered. (This is not to say that they're out there trying to actively figure out who the bloggers are, merely that it would not take much effort to do so.)
• Readers will take a favorable or unfavorable opinion of you based on what you write.
• Combine the second and third items above and it's feasible that admissions committee members (or alumni interviewers) might allow their judgment to be influenced by something you wrote in your blog. This can be good or bad. If you apply ED to Columbia and write in your blog, "LOLZ Columbia's my safety school. I applied ED just to have security going into my Harvard app" I can imagine that Columbia--as concerned as they reputedly are about yield--might be particularly motivated to figure out who you are and ding you.
• Your blog's edit button will not save you. For example, one blogger wrote an emotional response to her Stanford interview that made her sound (frankly) like an entitled bitch rather than the overconfident but harmless 20-something she really is. Here are some quotes from the initial post (dated December 12th) prior to her edits. You won't find these quotes anywhere in the post-edit version, yet I still have them thanks to the wonders of RSS.

  I expected great things from a Stanford person. I expected him to be warm, friendly, charming, intelligent of course, but I expected more of a fuzzy, comforting feeling from Stanford people.

  The blogger implies that her interviewer was not warm, friendly, charming or intelligent when really all she meant to say was that the person was not warm.

  [The interviewer] made me drive to his office rather than meet me at a location I suggested which would have been much more convenient for me.

  The blogger implies that she was put out by having to come to the interviewer--the nerve of that guy to request that SHE drive to HIM! The horror! There's more where that came from, but the point should be obvious now: once you click "publish" you must assume it's out there for good and that the target of your blogging affections will read it in the worst possible light.
• Conceal your identity. For many of the current crop of bloggers, it's too late (unless you want to scuttle your blogs and re-emerge under a new identity). To get personal for a moment: I may or may not actually live in NYC (though I know enough of the city to write about it). I may or may not even be male. I'm blogging as an everyman where only a few things are certain: (1) I'm a R1 Wharton admit, (2) I'm going to be at Wharton this fall, (3) I'm desperately horny. (I'll make a separate post on "how to remain anonymous as an MBA Blogger".)

In sum, I'd suggest that if you want to share interesting observations on your MBA life as it happens, you need to be specific and honest. If you want to be specific and honest, you need to be anonymous. If you want to be anonymous, you need to be paranoid. Therefore, interesting = paranoid. Q.E.D.

Comedians, critics, pundits and shock jocks are exempt from this rule because they (unlike you and I) are not lowly peons to be crushed when a Person in Power takes umbrage at something they say or write.

And though I hate to write disclaimers, I should say that I believe most adcoms would respond to this along these lines, "In order to give every applicant a fair chance, we evaluate only the materials submitted via the official application. We cannot allow ourselves to be biased by other materials, and we certainly do not Google applicants to learn about them. Your application will be judged on the merits of what you submit and nothing more." However, I guarantee that if your name were splashed across the front page of the WSJ tomorrow, they'd take note of it and it would influence your application one way or the other.

Edit 1: Minor grammatical fixes