Negativity

For the majority of my graduate program, I’ve relied on finding other people (via both social interactions and the internet) who are struggling with graduate school to help me cope. Reading the web comic strip “Piled Higher and Deeper” often seemed to help, and commiserating with my fellow grad students in a private Facebook group were my mainstays. But then, a few months ago, I realized that these things weren’t making me feel better; they were allowing me to wallow in my own misery.

Turn that frown upside down may be the best advice anyone’s ever given! (Image Credit:http://birdonthestreet.com/2011/09/evolution/)

Sometimes, going through difficult things makes you want to be incredibly negative about the experience. In a lot of cases, those around you will empathize. But there are definite downsides to all this negativity. First of all, without you even realizing it, you may be gaining a bad reputation among your colleagues, friends, family members, or graduate cohort. Nobody likes to hang out with somebody who complains all the time. Even if the people you complain to seem to complain back all the time, they probably turn around and then complain to other people about how you complain all the time. Sounds complicated? Welcome to social interactions. Secondly, while there’s certainly nothing wrong with discussing your feelings and being open, sometimes by constantly talking about how miserable you are you get caught in a cycle. If you feel miserable, and then say you feel miserable, you’ll feel miserable. It’s a sort of Catch-22. Eventually, you have to break the negativity cycle. Sometimes, just putting on a positive act while still feeling negative can work to change your mood. Finally, you become obsessed by your own negative feelings. Even when I’ve had the brief and rare opportunity to be at home and away from school for a while, my negativity overwhelms my interactions with my family members. I’m tense, uptight, and irritable, which means that nobody wants to hang out with me. In addition to my bad moods, I also sometimes can’t seem to stop talking about how much I want to get out of grad school.

So my advice? Fake it until you make it. Put on a happy face and work towards feeling the way you actually want to feel. Gain perspective on your problem rather than wallowing in its difficulty. This is not to suggest that if you’re having real problems you shouldn’t seek help. Even if you suspect that your anxiety, negativity, or emotions are being influenced by factors out of your control, seek counseling or professional help.

 

(Don’t) Put It In Writing

My brother recently went through a bad break-up, and the first thing I did when I heard about it was happily defriend his ex-girlfriend on Facebook. I recommended that he do the same. While there may be some people who remain friends with their exes both in real-life and in social media, my policy has always been more of the cut your losses and run. Rather than run the risk of jealousy or misplaced drama, I prefer to keep things as cordial as possible by keeping them as distant as possible. Of course, there’s another reason for my reluctance to remain friends with exes of any kind on Facebook, and that’s the possibility of social media disasters.

Talk to your child about how to appropriately use social media, and consider how you use it yourself! (Image Credit:http://www.kidonthebus.com/2010/08/your-child-on-facebook.html)

Now, a social media disaster can come in a lot of forms, but for those of us with fewer than 10,000 followers on Twitter and a meager 400 friends on Facebook, most social media disasters come from relationships gone sour. The one thing almost all social media disasters have in common is that somebody puts in writing something that they shouldn’t have been saying in the first place. Offensive or even mildly offensive comments on Facebook or Twitter, whether they are in private messages or available for anyone to read, can become a serious liability. Maybe you’re upset with your girlfriend and so you post a sexist comment on Facebook, which then gets around to not only your cousins and friends, but also to your coworkers and your classmates. The thing is, by putting comments in writing, even if they’re intended as jokes, you’re opening yourself up to problems. You may lose a friend or a job, start a family feud, or even get the police involved (depending on the level of the comment you’ve made). Part of social media is controlling your image, and so you need to be aware of the things you’re putting in writing. Just because you might say something to a friend doesn’t mean you should post it on your Facebook. I pretend that I now have potential future employers reading every post, which helps me weed out what I should and shouldn’t say.

Instead of posting something on Facebook, why not use the site to set up a meeting with some of your friends? Saying something in person is a lot less serious (or verifiable) than saying something in writing…just make sure that nobody’s wearing a wire at your table!

Social Media Mayhem

I joined social media a little bit later than most of my peers, around the time that MySpace was on its way out and Facebook was on its way in. Initially, I resisted. When I started college, however, it quickly became clear that Facebook was a necessity. I don’t use the term lightly, and my assertion is backed up by a recent Pew Survey that found Facebook users have more real-life friends than non-Facebook users. Shortly after I joined Facebook, it seemed like social media exploded. Blogs, Twitter accounts, Pinterest…the list goes on. And on. And on. Obviously it’s almost impossible to totally keep up with all the new trends. At a recent department speaker series on finding jobs after a graduate degree, one presenter said her best piece of advice was to make a LinkedIn account, a Twitter account, and get a significant professional online presence.

Facebook status update: I feel like somebody's WATCHING me. Weird, right? (Image Credit:http://owni.eu/2011/05/12/e-spying-state-sponsored-intrusion/)

 

I cringed. As much as I like using social media for business purposes (after all, I maintain this blog and a Twitter account, which is admittedly not very active as I’m still trying to figure out the appeal), I hate using it for social purposes. And perhaps my fears are becoming more relevant. A friend who was recently interviewing for a position was asked for his Facebook username and PASSWORD, so that his potential employer could log on to his account and check out what kinds of things he was posting, liking, and what kinds of things his friends were posting and liking. This isn’t an isolated incident, either. More and more employers are requesting this information as part of a standard interview process. While in the past social media users were told to keep accounts private, giving a potential employer free access to your account negates any privacy settings.

It’s enough to make anyone who might ever consider getting any kind of a job cringe. So what do you do? It’s no longer enough to tell people to set privacy settings to their maximum, and it may not be realistic to ask people to disconnect from social media entirely. My friend, luckily, got the job without a problem. While I may have started this post out with the intention of giving some solid advice for social media management, I’ve ended more uncertainly than I began. The only rule I now try to follow is the idea that nothing on my social media sites are private, not matter how strictly my privacy settings are set.

How do you manage your social media presence as monitoring becomes more invasive and pervasive?

10 Things I’d Do If I Could Do College Again

Take a Cool Class

I always wanted to take a pottery class in college, but I never did because I was afraid it would lower my GPA or conflict with other classes that were more relevant to my procedure. You can always take a class you want to take Pass/Fail, which takes off a lot of the pressure and lets you have more fun with it.

Make More than Facebook Friends

There were so many nights I passed up going to a lecture on campus or a performance because I wanted to do work. I’m not saying I shouldn’t have done my work, but I missed out on a lot of opportunities to bond with new people and have fun with friends. College has to be a balance between academic and social activities, and often the two can be combined!

Stay Up Later…and Sleep In Longer

The closer you get to adulthood, the more regulated your sleeping hours get. What I wouldn’t give to sleep in to the early hours of the afternoon again.

Say What You Mean To Say

A lot of times I shut up in class and didn’t get involved in a discussion because I was too nervous about saying something stupid. Next time around, I’m going to speak up when I feel like I have something worthwhile to say.

Professors Are People Too!

Those professors who always seemed inapproachable? I’d approach them. The bonds I finally managed to create with professors in my final year would have been so much stronger if I’d started earlier.

Make It Interesting

Rather than writing papers I thought would get great grades and stuck strictly to the letter of the assignment, I would try being a little more creative and molding assignments to my interests. After all, professors say they value creativity, so I would put it to the test.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

Those pesky grades I spent so many nights getting worked up over? Forget them. I would still try to do as well as possible, but I would focus more on my learning rather than on simply spewing back information for a grade.

Give a Little

Dealing with roommates was never easy, but this time around I’d learn to let it go a little more. Rather than bottling up my frustrations and letting every tiny thing get to me, I would be a more open communicator and a better roommate myself.

Opportunities

I would do more internships, take more field trips, attend more conferences…you name it. I would really suck the marrow out of my college experience, and utilize all the resources around me. I would get help on my resume from the career services department, join more clubs that I was interested in joining, and study abroad. Okay, so maybe I did the whole study abroad thing my first time around, but I would definitely repeat the experience!

Cherish It

Everyone says four years goes by incredibly quickly…but you can’t understand that until it’s happened. Four years fly by. You will change and grow and learn about yourself along the way. Take lots of pictures of your friends, enjoy the dorm culture, thrive on your classes, because before you know it you’ll be walking the stage at graduation.

What are the things you would do if you got a chance to go back to college?