Building Engineers One Posting At A Time: Social Networking For Recruiting Engineering Majors

As social networking continues to gain in popularity, essential functions traditionally assigned to electronic mail, instant messaging and conventional websites are slowly being subsumed by, and coalesced within, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. These sites offer what are basically personalized and enhanced versions of both electronic mail and static content in a user-created digest form and thus represent a significant departure from the most familiar electronic information formats. During the recruiting season for a recent incoming class of civil and mechanical engineers, the authors made a significant effort to reduce the distance between information about our programs, the profession, members of the profession and students by creating a significant presence for the department on a popular social networking site. This paper presents the outreach goals of the initiative, the nuts-and-bolts of how it was executed, the effect on recruiting and student excitement and, lastly, the author’s observations and recommendations for similar efforts.