Do colleges look at tumblr and what kind of things may prevent me from accpetance?

[Gurkiran]

I'm really into tumblr and fashion and i made a blog about it. I want to know if anything will get me barred from acceptance. My blog is http://imemineing.tumblr.com/ and i dont post any personal things. I'm pretty sure this wont factor into my college as i dont really see what they will find is innappropriate for college but i just want to be sure. Also im looking at colleges such as Berkley and Stanford if that makes any difference in how they look at social media.

[Skylark ♥]

Many colleges do conduct routine internet searches on their applicants to see if anything unsavory or unusual comes up, but rarely does what they find have any impact on their decision. If they found an article about you assaulting a kindergartner or a Facebook post where you put up a hit list of the kids at your school, then yeah, that could have an impact. All other normal, teenage online activity, like your Tumblr account, is going to be of trivial importance. Consider how many applications colleges like Stanford and Berkeley receive every year, and the amount of time and effort it would require to comb through the contents of every social media page of every applicant.

I glanced at your blog and it has a similar tone to that of 93% of the Tumblr blogs by high school girls. You have nothing at all to be concerned about with your Tumblr; just relax and have fun with it. It's healthy and necessary to have hobbies and recreational pursuits outside of your life as a college applicant. What I mean by that is you should cultivate interests like fashion purely for enjoyment, and not just because they look good on your application.

As a precaution you might want to consider using a nickname or an alias for all of your social media sites, even if they're all perfectly innocent, purely for the sake of privacy. My blog, Facebook, and everything else is under a nickname and the initials for my last names (I have two), or an alias. If you enable the "find by email" feature then your friends can still easily find you. I didn't see a mention of your name of your Tumblr, but if it's there, you could easily delete your last name to give you an extra layer of privacy.

~ skylark : )