Facebook/LinkedIn Rules for adding fellow applicants and current students after visits

[meh7623]

As the title states, what are the rules for adding people you come into contact with during school visit days? I am pretty comfortable sending requests to my peers who are going through the decision process but is it also okay to add some of the current students as well? Many of them I talked to at length and feel very friendly towards. Can current students be considered peers enough to add them prior to committing to a certain school?

[zabius]

It really depends on the person. I'm pretty conservative when it comes to adding people on social media (i.e. I usually wait until I've known the person for at least a month or two), so this isn't something that I would do personally. However, if I received a request from someone that I met at a visitation weekend, I'd think "hmm, that's a little fast" but probably still accept it. Other people will react in different ways... some will see nothing wrong with it and add you right away, others may not respond to the request. It all depends on how the person on the other end uses the website.

 

In general, I think this would probably be more acceptable on LinkedIn (which is for professional contacts) than it would be on Facebook (which some people only use for friends instead of casual acquaintances). But again, that's just my take on it... I might be in the minority here.

[JungWild&Free]

I got several FB requests from grad students after one of my visits.  I friended all of them because I didn't want to be rude but now I feel really weird about posting anything application related, especially if it isn't about that particular school.  That really has eliminated my ability to reach out to all of my friends with the specific issues I'm trying to decide on. 

 

I did become friends with one girl that I went on 2 recruitment weekends with and we are both the only admits at one of the programs.  I think friending other prospectives is fine if you think you made a good connection, or you want to discuss the visit/school in more detail, but I would probably not have friended the students at that one school if I had thought of a better way to leave them hanging.  I definitely have to think about the fact that stuff I post may get back to my POI there.

[TakeruK]

I don't usually use FB as a way to make academic connections but sometimes people I meet on a visit or conference will friend me. I like the ability to keep the contact, but I put them in a special FB group and I don't share everything with them (e.g. if you want to ask your other friends about application stuff, you can just exclude those new grad student friends!)

[barça]

I'm pretty sure the facebook/linkedin dynamic depends on field a little.  From my experience most people working in the humanities don't use linkedin, but I know a fair amount of people working in the social and natural sciences that do.  Academia.edu is another social networking option for grad students to keep in touch.

[CHagen]

I got several FB requests from grad students after one of my visits.  I friended all of them because I didn't want to be rude but now I feel really weird about posting anything application related, especially if it isn't about that particular school.  That really has eliminated my ability to reach out to all of my friends with the specific issues I'm trying to decide on. 

 

I did become friends with one girl that I went on 2 recruitment weekends with and we are both the only admits at one of the programs.  I think friending other prospectives is fine if you think you made a good connection, or you want to discuss the visit/school in more detail, but I would probably not have friended the students at that one school if I had thought of a better way to leave them hanging.  I definitely have to think about the fact that stuff I post may get back to my POI there.

 

I would use Facebook groups to manage this -- it's really handy for this kind of situation.