College Diaries

This past week was the 8 th annual Social Media Workshop hosted by Ohio Northern University’s Public Relations Student Society of America. As a student with a social media minor, I was required to attend. The busy day started around 9:45 a.m. and was followed by an introduction from my professor. The keynote speaker was Caroline Schumacher from Give Kids the World, who presented a leader’s perspective on social media. One of the phrases that spoke to me during her presentation was that leadership is a decision. To be a leader, you have to take that initial step. She continued by explaining what your personal brand online is and what it isn’t. Your personal brand requires consistency and provides value over time. It is not a space for self-promotion, going viral or prioritizing an aesthetic feed. The biggest takeaway from Caroline’s presentation was to post with intention because one day, you realize people are watching. The next session I chose to attend was about organic and pa...

Have you ever wanted to create a vision board for your wedding? With Pinterest, you can! Users can create boards to plan their wedding or save ideas for their future home. Besides going on the app to change my boards when my interests change, I don’t use Pinterest for anything else. I am no Pinterest expert since my time on the app is about once a month. However, there are many ways to use Pinterest to your benefit! Pinterest was founded by three college friends to create a space for people to be creative and show off collections of what they’re interested in. Today, people know Pinterest as a place to create digital pinboards. With more than 537 million monthly users, Pinterest is the 13 th most used social media platform. To my surprise, the largest age group of users is college-aged students. I would’ve guessed the age to be slightly higher because of younger moms using Pinterest to find things such as recipes. What wasn’t a surprise was the number of women who use Pinterest over m...

Welcome to my side hustle, technically known as my on-campus job. When I came to Ohio Northern, I didn’t know much about the kinds of on-campus jobs ONU students have access to. I was sitting in class one day, and someone mentioned the Sport Information Department. At the time, my goal was to go to director and ask about managing the social media page for a specific sports team on campus. When I got there, my now boss asked, “why don’t you just work for me?” Now, I work as the sport information assistant.  I started my job back in January and have loved every minute of it. I would have started earlier but there were already enough people covering winter sports, so I wasn’t needed at the time. The indoor track season was just about underway, and I needed to wait until after winter break to see where I could fit in working. Being a dual major and student-athlete would have been enough for someone to turn down an on-campus job opportunity. However, I tend to enjoy the chaos of my bu...

 Week 8 of Principles of Social Media is Snapchat. Chapter 7 of Essentials of Social Media Marketing provides a chapter with information about Snapchat. College students like myself use Snapchat frequently as an easy way to communicate with friends. Snapchat has allowed users to stay in touch by creating the ability to send pictures and text messages to anyone added. I’ve learned that some people may be hesitant to give out their personal number but are more likely to give someone their Snapchat username instead. My mom was someone who wanted me to wait to get Snapchat for safety reasons. She was always concerned that I would accidentally add someone I didn’t know. It wasn’t until my freshman year of high school that I was able to download it. As I grow older, my use of Snapchat has declined each year. I use it more to stay in contact with friends rather than sending snaps. I’ve never really thought about the number side of Snapchat, but it’s important t...

 During spring break I went to Longboat Key, Florida! It was a much-needed reset and motivation builder to finish the semester strong. Second semester has drained me both physically and mentally so far. I made it a priority to finish all my homework before break, so I didn’t have to bring my computer. This alone gave me the chance to fully relax. As soon as practice finished on Friday, my boyfriend and I made the drive to Columbus. Our flight was at 5:20 a.m. on Saturday morning. We got up at 2:30 a.m. to be ready for the Uber to take us to the airport. I got a total of 2 hours of sleep. At that point I was running on pure adrenaline! I had never flown Southwest before, so here’s to another first! The flight to Sarasota, Florida was short and easy. Once we got off the plane, his parents were there to pick us up. We drove 30 minutes to the house his grandma rents in Longboat Key. Each day was full of new adventures that I was excited about! Some days were spent at the beach whil...

This past weekend was OAC Championships for track and field! Going into the meet, my coach entered me into the 60-meter hurdles, 200-meter dash and pole vault. These events were all ones I automatically qualified for. This meant that I was top 10 in the conference for each of the events. The long weekend started Friday at 8:30 a.m. with an hour to Heidelberg. Once I got there, I immediately started warming up for pole vault. While warmups were a little rocky, my competition jumps were much smoother. I placed 7 th in pole vault.   I had almost 3 hours to occupy before warming up for the 60-meter hurdles. I cheered on my teammates and did some recovery to get any lactic acid from pole vault out of my legs. I began warming up which always gets my adrenaline flowing. As I was setting my blocks to do a run out, I was met with a yellow card being waved in my face. It startled me to say the least. I had no idea what I did wrong. Apparently, the official was mad because I didn’t have ...