Everyone knows getting into college is more competitive than ever, and your student’s online presence has become an important factor. Our panelists have great insider tips about what colleges are really looking for and the best ways for students to Shine Online.

Key takeaways:

Assume college admissions will look for your students online

Make sure you know what they’ll find. Help your kids take steps to make sure their accomplishments are discoverable and prominent (while scrubbing outdated or inappropriate materials).

Keep online content up-to-date

When you have a new project to add to your portfolio, or a new accomplishment you want to post, do it right away. Meanwhile, take time to go back and remove old, outdated or inappropriate information.

Don’t hesitate to share your accomplishments

Teens aren’t always the best judge of what will or won’t impressive college admissions or future employers, so when in doubt, ask for an objective opinion—but if it's worth sharing, don’t hide it.

Use sites like Google Sites to build your portfolio

Organizing your links and accomplishments in one place helps present you in a professional light and makes it easy for colleges to find what you want them to see.

What are admissions committees looking for in students?

Scrubbing content and keeping it up-to-date is vital [for the college admissions process]. —Chris Helvajian

It is a very competitive process. UCLA had over 100,000 applicants for their freshman class, so when we are reading applications in our office, we maybe spend a handful of minutes evaluating an application. If you are applying to a much smaller institution, maybe you are going to get a little bit more time. In that application process, many students include links to their work whether it is posted on YouTube or they are filling out a portfolio for a specific program. What I look for most when a student is sharing work with us online is that the link is not only active but that the information is being used and appropriate information being shared.

The things that I notice and love are real-world examples of things that the students are doing. Maybe they have set up their own retail website that is related to their interests. Or if they are auditioning for a dance program, they have videos on YouTube that show their dance recitals. If that is active and up-to-date, it shows us dedication to those activities. One pitfall I see in students is when they are spreading themselves too thin, across maybe 10 or 15 websites. When I search for a student and they are sharing content with me, it is not just the new thing that is popping up but all of their old stuff too. Scrubbing content and keeping it up-to-date is vital. —Chris Helvajian

How often do colleges and universities go online to search for students?

Encourage [students] to use social media platforms to post good things. —Dr. Devery J. Rodgers

I would counter that with, how often do you as a normal person go and search for other people online? When you apply to an institution, you should expect the same thing. They are going to be able to find you online, especially if the student is actively sharing content that they want to be seen—but you can't always separate the stuff that you want to be seen from the stuff that you don't want to be seen. If I am reading 30 applicants on a given day, I would probably look up anywhere between three and 10 of them depending on the content they have shared.

If they have said that they were given the key to the city or had some interesting fact like they won a swim meet or had the fastest time in their high school, I am going to look that information up because a) I want to fact check it and see if it is accurate or not, and b) I want to see it. If a counselor tells you that they are not looking up information about students, they are probably not being totally honest. —Chris Helvajian

‍Here’s an example of what can go wrong if students aren’t aware of the implications of what they post. A student had attended an info session for Bowdoin College, and she tweeted some inappropriate things about the college during the session. Based on that, the school denied her. It was a wakeup call for my high school students. It really is about cleaning up your social media—whether it’s Facebook, Instagram or Twitter—and making sure that if you are tagged in that party post with some underage activities happening, untag yourself. Google yourself and see what comes up. Don't just look at the top 10 hits, either.

Things that their friends are posting can come back to bite them five years later. So you have to talk to your students and your children about these things. Encourage them to use social media platforms to post good things—"What did you do on the soccer team that was a good thing?" or "What did you do for your community that was a good thing?" Not over-posting, but just updating people on what you are doing. Our students are good people, but they could be giving a different impression to admissions officers. —Dr. Devery J. Rodgers

‍There is a new movement—a very new application, with a launch date this summer—called Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success, and it has the potential to take the whole process and make it more open and interactive. There are about 90 members, which are all colleges and universities, including Ivy League and public colleges throughout the country. It represents a strong message to students that schools want a more dynamic application process. One of the really interesting things about this platform is something called The Locker, which is only for students, and students can file anything they want that pertains to their college admissions life. That includes media files or anything you want to highlight. College admissions counselors and high school counselors are encouraging students to put the link right there within their essay. —Sonja Montiel

How can we help kids whose parents might not be tech-savvy or know all about college applications stand out on social media?

We have to teach [students] how to hustle and develop the professional skills they need. —Leslie Aaronson

I work in South Los Angeles with low-income students. As first-generation students, they rarely have those helicopter parents that are doing all of the research for them to figure out how to navigate this process. They are on their own. So I try very hard to make everything that we do in our classroom relevant to college and career. Too often there is a disconnect, and students sort of hope that it will just work out or someone will take care of them. We have to teach them how to be savvy, to hustle and develop the social and professional skills they need.

As we know, just doing the work isn't what gets you into the school, the job, or whatever it may be. It's how you present and communicate that you have done the work. Meanwhile, we won't take on anything as a class project that cannot also live on their portfolio. We do Scratch projects, websites, videos, programming. I use a program that is able to host their work so that when you go, you can see it. Even if the teacher is not doing that, you as parents can try to find public platforms for where the schoolwork goes, so that it has relevancy that college admissions people can understand. —Leslie Aaronson

What should a student portfolio look like?

The college admissions process is about inspiring the stranger on the other side. —Sonja Montiel

I have fallen in love with Wix.com and Weebly.com because they are both free, professional looking and easy for anyone to use. You can pay between $30 and $50 to host it for two years, so if you have the money, it's not a bad way to spend that.

You pick your template, and it has a place for "About Me," "Resume," and under that, sub-pages for "Letters of Recommendation." We also have subpages for their work samples, which can include presentations and writing as well as the tech work, including YouTube videos. We always tell students to put up a reflection with their work so it says, "This is what I did, this is what I learned in the process, etc." to help encourage someone to press play—because if you see a million kids, what’s going to actually make you look at the work? —Leslie Aaronson

One thing I wanted to point out is that our teens do amazing work. The younger they are, the more brilliant they think they are, but eventually something happens where they no longer believe that they are brilliant. They start to doubt everything, and teens become their own worst enemy. I was working with one teen who developed an online computer science curriculum for the United States. She didn't think that was a big deal. I think they need to get that validation that maybe their peers didn’t think it was a big deal, but it really is a unique perspective. She was invited to do a TED talk and she didn't think that was a big deal, either. The college admissions process is about inspiring the stranger on the other side, because humans are part of the process, so don’t shy away from showcasing your strengths. Once you inspire the college admissions advisor, they will go the extra step to find out what else you can inspire them with. It's phenomenal. —Sonja Montiel

How hard is it to clean up problems students have left behind? Is it true that once it's online you really can't delete it.

Check your privacy settings. —Chloe Reid

Check your privacy settings. We had a student who had not looked at his privacy settings so we found out something very interesting about him and decided to Google him. We clicked on the web images, and there were a lot of negative photos, so sometimes students don't think that other people are going to see their images, but they will if privacy settings are not established. —Chloe Reid

‍I think it depends. I have done this when I was looking for jobs; I kind of did a scrub of all of my social media. I am not as active on some of the sites that I used to be on, but a lot of the sites have really easy explanations for how to delete your profile or go back and untag yourself from photos. "How to delete my profile" and "How to go back and untag yourself from photos." I think it depends on how far reaching your social activity is. For the most part, you can get pretty clean pretty quickly if you are using a handful of the major social media websites. —Chris Helvajian

‍Another way is to start adding more positive things to the profile. It's like a restaurant that gets bad reviews; the best thing is to outnumber them with positive reviews, because most people don't click page three or page 10. So new information spreads out the less desirable information and pushes it down the list. —Leslie Aaronson

This post is an excerpt from our Digital Citizenship Conference event in 2016. The conference was a rich environment for educators and parents to openly discuss issues and solutions for helping students in the digital world.

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