Cornell now allows prospective students to apply to their MBA program using their LinkedIn profiles, but UF won’t follow in those footsteps.
The Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management announced on July 8 that its redesigned application for the MBA program in New York will allow applicants to fill parts of the application using LinkedIn, such as employment, education, demographic and contact information.
Applicants who use LinkedIn to fill out their application will give Cornell access to all other social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, to cross-check information and get a better feel for their applicants.
Director of the UF Masters of Arts in Mass Communication Social Media Program, Andrew Selepak, said he thinks what makes the whole concept interesting is that the school basically admits they look up applicants on social media, but sometimes have a hard time finding them.
By connecting applications to LinkedIn, Cornell is letting students do some of the work for them, he said.
It wouldn’t be a good idea to use LinkedIn for undergraduate applications because LinkedIn isn’t geared toward high school students, Selepak said.
But if you knew that you were applying to grad school using your social media, you’d spend a lot more time trying to spruce it up, he said.
“For students in our MAMC program, I don’t have to push LinkedIn on them because they already have one,” Selepak said. “LinkedIn is a great tool for networking, finding jobs, making contacts and building those professional connections necessary to thrive professionally.”
However, Steve Orlando, UF spokesman, wrote in an email that UF has no plans to do anything like this.
Nina Cusmano, a 19-year-old UF journalism sophomore, said she updates her LinkedIn profile once or twice a month to make sure her information is always accurate.
“I think it’s cool what Cornell is doing, but it’s a lot of pressure to have everything perfect on your LinkedIn,” Cusmano said. “Giving them access to my LinkedIn means they’ll have access to everything else.”
Cusmano said that her only concern would be the fact that Cornell will now be able to see applicants on all online platforms and is concerned with whether or not it’s an invasion of social privacy.
“I know that I have to work on creating a more professional online profile because I can’t be sure who is seeing my tweets nowadays, even when I think my profile might be on private,” she said.
[A version of this story ran on page 8 on 8/5/2014 under the headline "UF will not accept LinkedIn profiles as applications"]
