Social media seems like fun and games, posting jokes and fun pictures but what some students fail to realize is that colleges look at such posts and judge them based on their profile.

For years, colleges have been looking at the social media profiles of students they’re interested in to see if their online personality fits in with the school standards.

The most common social media today is Facebook and this website can be easily manipulated to fit the needs of its user. Think of setting up your Facebook profile as a job application. Leave out the troublesome things, such as unprofessional photos and statuses with bad language.

The pages an individual likes on their Facebook are also able to be seen if put on “public” or “friends only” mode. In case you have inappropriate pages liked, unliking them or setting it to “only me” can easily fix the problem.

Social media is used as an outlet for some students so they can vent about the things that have gone wrong in their day. In the future however, people often go back to the posts and say to themselves “What was I thinking?”

In order to prevent this, setting such posts to “only me” on Facebook would al- low you to post the status, but without the risk of someone else seeing it. For Tumblr and Twitter on the other hand, it’s not so easy. Twitter and Tumblr are more complex in their profile settings, tags from photos and statuses can be easily viewed from anyone using the site. Any given profile is also public, allowing anyone to view.

Sophomore Hailey Pohevitz started fixing her Twitter feed four months ago and is still polishing it. She is going through her tags and removing any posts that may make her seem unprofessional or childish so she’s prepared when she applies for colleges in a year and a half.

“I heard from a few people that colleges can judge you based on your profile once they’ve decided that they would consider accepting you into their school. That’s what made me start going through my Twitter and taking out anything I wouldn’t want my parents to see,” Pohevitz said.

Most social media sites have “hashtagging” which allows the search engine to give you endless posts on what you’ve searched up. Because of this, a student’s own hashtag will show up when someone else searches that tag. In order to seem professional, making sure that you use appropriate tags will lower the odds of being judged wrongfully. Applying for college is complicated enough, so why add another thing to worry about? Fixing your own profile has no downsides and it makes you feel at ease when you know that profiling is the last of your worries.