TO: Mr. Steven Hammer
FROM: Ms. Brittany Taplin
DATE: March 11th, 2012
RE: English 326
Unit two was focused on shaping a professional image of you through digital media online. This was a great exercise to see how possible employers and other professionals may see you when they search your name on Google and go to your webpages.
The first part of unit two was to Google my name “Brittany Taplin” and see what sites appeared. A large problem I ran into is that there is another Brittany Taplin, from New York. Mostly her pages (MySpace, Facebook, etc) showed up in the first 10 hits. I had to go to the next page to see my information. After becoming more active on Twitter and WordPress I am now in the top 10, though my facebook is on a latter page. When I type “Brittany Taplin Mankato,” I have more relevant pages come up. My mother’s information shows up as well, which is not a problem in my eyes because she is a small business owner and firms may find that a good thing. When I type “Brittany Taplin NDSU,” the pages that come up are National Residence Hall Honorary and Residence Life. I am very happy with the Google search results.
Tweeting helped my Google searches a lot. And it is super easy to do. I frequently visit StumbleUpon and look at many Architecture articles, sometimes for 15 to 30 minutes on my iPod before I go to bed. On StumbleUpon there is a Twitter button. Twitter was also very easy to use, especially for me. I have to say I am quite technically savvy, and I struggled with posting WordPress articles. My issue was editing the post so it was laid out in the way I wanted. The interface of editing the post is different than the actual post page. This was quite frustrating to me. But I was able to edit them into a somewhat esthetically pleasing way. My favorite post is my Barbie blog entry. The graphics I found fit so perfectly with my article. In writing these blogs I enjoyed finding photographs to integrate into the text. I made sure to write about things that interest me and not find a boring article and try to work with it. Instead I came up with a topic and found multiple articles that were relevant. It was very easy to find what I needed.
On the other hand, finding a job posting was difficult. In the architectural profession most jobs are obtained by knowing someone who knows someone who can get you a job at a firm. Most firms do not post job openings anywhere online or in a newspaper. I was lucky enough to be on StumbleUpon and to find a website (Archinect) which has job postings. My goal was to find a post for a job that I would actually want. The one that I found was perfect. The style of their webpage matched my idea for a resume and cover letter perfectly. A page with clean and precise lines, but with a purpose.
In creating my resume I wanted a clean and precise feel. And in my portfolio (which is in the works), mixes those clean lines with a bit of whimsy, like my personality. Also in designing the layout and graphics for my resume I decided to tie it into my blog page design, which may or may not be apparent. I had a resume from this past summer, but it did not have much of the relevant information that the substitute teacher said a resume should have. So I went onto his WordPress site and looked at the student examples he had on his page. I found a few that I thought were quite effective and modeled my resume around theirs. Then in making the cover letter I took the job advertisement and tailored my general cover letter layout to fit their company.
The last assignment was to peer review work of a classmate you may not know as well. This was a bit more difficult that last time. I did not know if she would be extremely offended by my comments or not. So I made sure to compliment her more than I probably would with someone that I would have known better.
This unit helped me to realize the internet is an important tool for firms and I should take advantage of that. By tailoring my webpages to be more professional I think I am putting out a better image. I enjoyed creating a new resume and cover letter for future job opportunities.
brittanytaplin 