Facebook: The New Flyer

Facebook.com is a website well known by most all college students. It seems to be becoming a better form of communication between students than actually talking. With just 10 minutes spent on facebook you can learn just about anything you want to know about your “facebook friends”. You can view photos, see relationship statuses, read what your friends are writing to others, and many more social things. Facebook.com is definitely the answer to Piedmont College’s communication problem.

As a commuter I often feel left out of what is going on at the college, but after talking with residents I see that the lack of communication has nothing to do with being a commuting student. The most recent problem occurred when a snowstorm hit Northeast Georgia on January 16th and 17th. Some colleges closed for the day, others stayed opened, and a few delayed classes. Piedmont chose to delay opening two hours. Finding this out was not the problem, but understanding it proved to be a different story. I arrived at Piedmont at 1:00pm for my 11:00am class, assuming that each class throughout the day would be pushed back two hours. I was quick to learn that this was not the case, rather any class before 10:00am was just canceled. Matt Curtis, along with many other students in his 8:00am English class, also encountered this problem as they arrived at 10:00am to find their class had simply been canceled.

Another issue that occurred recently at Piedmont was that the Walker School of Business received national accreditation. Writing for the campus newspaper, I went out in search of business majors to get a good quote from one of them about how they felt about the award. The first business major I found, Andrew Beckett, responded, “I had no idea about this.” Unfortunately, I got the same response from about five more business majors before I found one that actually knew about it.

A number of events have come and gone without many students knowing about them, including myself. The events that I have known about have been brought to my attention through facebook. To improve the communication at Piedmont, I believe someone from each organization should be appointed to posting the event on facebook to everyone in the Piedmont network. I sent messages to five of my friends from high school, asking them to explain how word of events get out to students at their colleges. Within 24 hours I had responses from each of them, which shows how often college students check their facebook. Many of them said flyers and banners are posted and mass e-mails are sent out at their schools. They seem to all say these means of communication were only effective if you took the time to read the flyers, banners, and e-mails, but many students do not do this. I believe students spend much more time looking at facebook than they do flyers posted on the wall, therefore more students, whether commuting or not, would be better informed of events on campus.