Networking to College

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-35520722_ITM

This social networking website called "Zinch"was born in March of 2007, which helps prospective students get in contact with current students at a certain university and even talk directly to office admissions personnell for advice and suggestions. This is a great way to really get to know about the college's enviornment and if it is a good fit for students with their personality (saves those air travels most of us have went through).

I wish I had this resource personally since I didn't really know anyone from my school who has ever went to, for example, NU, so I didn't know before hand what it would truely be like to be a student here before I got here. The only resource I had was the admissions office people...which weren't that helpful at all...

This would be a good way to implement a student-college matching, like we were talking about in class with the "romance market" algorithm. Maybe this type of two way communication in the future could help to optimize better fits for both colleges and students. But the question is: who should get the better choice (pick first). With the current system, students choose, so they end up with their best stable match. I guess that's how it should be though... or should it?

This has the potential to be a great tool in the college search. I visited over a dozen different colleges all across the country as a high school junior, and the things you can learn on a tour of a college campus are very limited. More often than not, the vast majority of what you learn in a college visit is academic, financial and logistic information. You'll find out how many student groups there are, how diverse the student body is, and probably see the inside of a few buildings. But what you typically don't learn is if you'll be able to fit in and find friends there. That's where something like Zinch can fill the gaps. Facebook can't do it; where would you start? Randomly friending people at different schools?

If Zinch can enable prospective students to have an interpersonal link to a school instead of just an academic one, I think they'll have a very successful business.

Zinch seems like a site that will have important advantages to prospective college students in the future. Once a student enters a social network, the rate at which that student connects to newer nodes in the network can be a good indication of how well he or she will most likely fit in to that school. For example, when a student starts talking to another student at a university, and enjoys talking to that students so much that he or she expands her network to more students within that school, it is likely that he or she will like socializing at that universiy. However, if the student has a difficult time finding other interesting 'nodes' within the university network, it is less likely that they will enjoy the social scene there.
However, it is important to note that for a system like this to work, all included universities must have about an equal number of participating college students.
In addition, the high school student must start initializig conversations with as many people as possible within a university. It is not the number of students that he or she initializes conversations with, but the number of additional students that he or she exands to that will indicate the likeliness of liking that university.
I think this is yet another example of how the internet can be used to affectively form useful social networks that make long distance information exchange significantly easier.