The Graduate Baruchian

Whether you attend full-time or part-time, we tend to find themselves in a rush just taking care of the basics. Registration, tuition, career development, readings, reports, presentations… The bureaucracy helps us accommodate our large, diverse student body, but it might leave you feeling more like a product than a person. You might be forgiven for getting lost in the crowd. Don’t let it get that far.

Lost in the Crowd (Photo credit: Thomas Hawk)

You can be the greatest performer in your field, and it’ll do you no good if you remain invisible. One secret to being seen is to (wait for it…) show up. Unfortunately, no one is going to sit you down to tell you when and where. With a new development this year, there’s hope that you’ll need a lot less time and effort to figure it out.

In the past it was nearly impossible to stay current on the community’s latest. There was no single community. Most of the open places on campus are filled with people in a hurry to get somewhere.

Where are they all going? Why weren’t you invited? Quick, look for something interesting in those hallway flyers. Now the next floor. And the next one? I’ll check that Facebook group’s page. No. What about that one? Didn’t I see something in that email last week?

With so many separate programs and interest groups on campus, there was no forum that could bring everyone together. Clubs and college offices maintained separate campaigns across email, social, and other media. If you were serious about participating in campus events, you paid a high time cost reading through updates from every club and school office, each with a different coverage and format.

The Graduate Baruchian was created to fill a communication gap. Just not this one. We always stayed away from announcements and listings (except for research surveys) and still feel that an independent blog like ours is better for long-term content shared by individuals. Keeping up on the latest from campus groups day-to-day? You’re out of luck.

Last spring, many student leaders attended an info meeting on the development of our college’s blogging platform. Now it is here: BaruchConnect has grown into the most accessible place for students to browse announcements. This official blog network is great for fast-changing content from groups. Newly added is the graduate section, grad.baruchconnect.com. This section recently opened to host our mini-blogs separately from undergraduates, who adopted it en masse last year.

Looking for something to do between classes? Now you can check online and see what’s been announced recently. Interested in that special interest club? Now you can look up the next meeting time and place.

A social network diagram (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Terrific potential, sure. Yet there’s a chicken-and-egg problem, in that clubs may not take the trouble to post on BaruchConnect before the majority of students start checking it regularly. The GSA and Student Life are leading the charge to make sure the most important graduate life announcements do make it onto the platform. The Ticker has a whole section, too.

In my humble opinion, more student leaders should take responsibility to improve messaging using BaruchConnect. It’s a gesture that shows your club’s commitment to the whole community, and a great way to reduce the fatigue many of us experience finding information from shot in the dark emails and Facebook groups. If you [post] it, they will come. It’s not just new students who need to make sure they are forging smart connections. And you may even get thanks from a few people who aren’t on your email list.