SoMe Week.

At the beginning of social media week I thought that the assignment of 20 tweets wasn't going to be a big deal. Turns out, I was wrong! I had a really rough time trying to tweet 20 solid, meaningful tweets because I just don't tweet as much as I thought I did. Although the tweeting aspect was rough I did thoroughly enjoy following accounts within my field of interests. Being involved in the lives of the big shots in my field allowed me to feel as though I was in the know on all of the issues currently being discussed/faced in my career. From this week I really gained the knowledge of how Twitter can actually be beneficial instead of another trash talking social media site being abused by teenagers.

Not only did I learn how beneficial it can be, but at the same time I also learned the importance of having a professional internet profile no matter what the site is. I have found that I am now looking at other's tweets from a professional stand point and I can't help but thinking, "what were they thinking?" I'm sure that I have had some questionable tweets and posts from back in my " I can post whatever I want I'm in college now" days but recently I have been trying to go back through to clean up those SoMe sites, profiles, and posts.

I think that as we are trying to express the importance of our social media accounts to our mentees that they might not understand the purpose or listen just because of the new to college and I can do what I want phase. It definitely takes some time to mature and realize the amount of hurt or awesomeness that can be given by such sites and that even though we will try our best to help, it might be something that they have to experience on their own to fully understand. Speaking from personal experience I know that I did LinkedIn because I thought that I didn't want any Hixsons seeing my twitter profile. There was seriously nothing wrong (that I can remember) with it but it just felt like I was being judged by what I was saying. It took until this year to realize that if I am uncomfortable with this group of 100 students and 3 directors reading my tweets why am I not concerned about the billions of people in the world that can read my tweets? It definitely took me becoming more serious about my career and future internships and jobs before the maturity sank in on my social media accounts.

Technology is a huge part of today's society and there is no way that we can stop it. Instead of being intimidated by the future and technology we need to embrace what it can provide us with in order to help better ourselves and the world around us. This being said, we also need to be careful because with so much technology every aspect of our lives is more vulnerable as it is thrown out there into the cyber world. I think it is a super important lesson to teach our mentees about as they are being introduced to a new world and lifestyle.

I almost forgot to talk about how much I thoroughly enjoyed Angie and Kira's lesson on group processes. I thought that the Lego activity was a great way for us to fully understand the essential parts to a group. It was definitely hard putting us into roles that we might not normally go into, but this is what made us learn so much from the activity. I hope that I can utilize this activity if not a similar one with my mentees next fall! Excellent job!