Advice for Baruch

Baruch College has implemented a significant number of new media to increase peer-to-peer communication, student to teacher communication, and to wholly enrich the academic experience. While there are some projects that have seen or are notorious for its lack of effective utilization Baruch has had moderate success with Blackboard, their own website, and the many organizations within Baruch that have created their own web sites, blogs, and forums to help garner awareness and camaraderie within the student body. Of course, students using established networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have almost always . These tried-and-true methods combined with the online projects Baruch spearheads (Starr Search's "Job Maven" blog, Baruch's organization hub website) give Baruch a colorful, yet successful win-lose ratio. Since Baruch has taken the initiative to be online as much as possible my personal advice to Baruch would be to continue to implement different types of media to serve the student body on either general or specific issues and topics.
The key for establishing new media communication is using a system that starts off as simple to use and mostly "undefined". There needs to be less parameters, obstacles, and rules to deal with when using a new medium whether it be a blog, a forum, or something completely avant-garde. As the new network progresses in popularity new issues will unfold and become prevalent in the use. Users will complain notify the admin about the problems or issues needed to be resolved. As long as the communication between the administration and the students are clear the medium will not only hold as another effective way of publicizing issues at Baruch it will help galvanize an effective means of communicating between the students and the administration themselves. Over the years, Facebook has not kept its format. I don't think a year has gone by where it hasn't changed at least twice per year. Just tonight, Facebook decreased the total font size of the news feed probably to fit in more per page. However, Facebook
I would give one last piece of advice to Baruch from my own experience here: create a dedicated transfer students page FOR TRANSFER STUDENTS! The Transfer Student Organization is a great addition to Baruch and their contributions have been more than helpful. However, there were some things that the administration just happened to forget to mention to me when I first came here. The administration here mostly assumes that you know most of everything when your first walk through the glass doors. This web site should be separate from Baruch, preferably done as a freelance project. The collective information from frustrated transfers would definitely the incomers who have no idea what they would be getting into. Hopefully, someone will read this post and get the idea to start one up.