The Office of International Student Services (OISS) recently introduced a way to help keep family and friends of international students up-to-date with what their students are doing at Elizabethtown College: social media platform Tumblr.
Because of the high number of events going on across campus, it can be hard to keep loved ones current without relying on technology, especially when they live several thousand miles away. The idea of the Tumblr page was sparked by a comment made to Kristi Syrdahl, director of OISS, at the Global Talent and Fashion show held last November during International Education week. One of the students who participated told Syrdahl how much she wished her parents could have seen her. The comment inspired the OISS director think of ways to remedy that problem.
Although the OISS cannot livestream every event they host, there had to be a way for them to more easily communicate what students were doing, she thought.
Tumblr has been growing steadily since launching in February 2007. It currently has more than 200 million active users with a collective 108 billion posts. The ability to post pictures is one of the reasons Syrdahl decided to go with Tumblr. Another reason is that unlike sites such as Facebook, users do not need to login to see what people post. This way anyone would have access to the information OISS wanted to share on the social media site.
The interest is growing slowly, said Syrdahl, though she said she hopes to have more student submissions for the page in the near future. Presently, it’s filled by a mix of material from students attending events and the office’s social media assistants. In the future the office, started in September 2014, hopes to integrate information about the OISS Tumblr page into orientations to show students how it works and encourage them to participate. By generating more buzz on the topic, Syrdahl thinks the natural popularity of social media sites like Tumblr will attract students to want to submit.
The OISS Tumblr page features stories about E-town’s international students and events in which they are involved. When a Chinese news station covered the lunar new year celebration on campus, OISS posted a link on Tumblr. E-town professional writing major and College Fashionista columnist, Emily Lidstone, has featured several from E-town’s international student population in her articles, which are then re-blogged on the OISS Tumblr. In addition, OISS teams up with groups such as Rice for Refugees, Global Beats and the U.S. Culture and Slang club to give both domestic and international student a chance to become involved.
Submissions to the page must be approved by either Syrdahl or the OISS’s student social media team; however, there are no major guidelines outside of being appropriate. Any type of photo can be submitted to the page even ones of students spending time together in the dorms because, in many countries, university life might not include residential living. Sharing an instant through photos not only captures that moment in time but will help students explain their daily life to people back home.
Syrdahl said the Tumblr page will help students to “cherish the small things.”