All tagged northeastern university
When I was a freshman at Northeastern University, I didn't have a clue as to what I wanted to do career wise. I thought about going into business and being an entrepreneur. Then I came face to face with accounting and decided that business wasn't for me. The only aspect that stuck with me was being creative, marketing and writing.
After a convo with my counselor, he convinced me to give journalism a shot. At that point, I was headed to co-op (cooperative education where you get real-world experience). My first "class" in journalism was in the middle of the Boston Globe newsroom. Four years later, I stuck with the Globe and was on staff for a period of time after school as a contributing writer. The experience was incredible and really set the tone for the rest of my career (you can read the gory details here).
Back in 2007, I was lucky enough to get hired by a former colleague of mine who was leading the Boston office of Manning Selvage and Lee (now known as the MSLGROUP). I was hired as a vice president and with the explosion of social media, became the director of Digital Communications for the office.
I was at a Northeastern University event recently where the audience was a mix bag of administrators, faculty, staff and students. It's always interesting to watch an audience of one brand mix and interact. I've working in education before - both at the college level and the prep school level - and the distance between each group is pretty much the same. The faculty is always riffing with the administrators. The students enjoy the buffer between them and the teachers. And so on and so on.
It was interesting to hear the groups interact with each other and talk about university issues. One of the common topics was social media and its use. A lot of the talk was about the fun aspect of it and connecting with old friends. One small conversation I was part of evolved around Twitter. To my surprise (though I'm not sure why it really shocked me) was that no one really seemed to get it. What can we, as a university use it for; how should we use it; who should be using it, etc. The biggest message I received from the group was that all the stories about teens not using Twitter is absolutely true.