大學新生入學前必做功課：網絡資料“大掃除”

前陣子哈佛大學以發佈惡搞表情爲由開除了10名新生，引來衆人熱議，但與此同時，這件事也給即將申請大學的高中生和家長敲響了警鐘。爲了避免被招生官抓住把柄，許多學生都採取了防範措施，比如刪除自己的社交媒體賬號，在網上採用假名等。一家公司也不失時機地推出新服務，幫助學生清掃有問題的網上信息和圖片。

When Kelsang Dolma began sending in her college applications, the first thing she did was lock down her Twitter account.
格桑•多瑪提交大學申請時，她做的第一件事就是鎖定自己的推特賬戶。

"I was applying to about 10 schools and I knew that every bit of information could be crucial," said Dolma, now a junior at Yale University. "My Twitter by no means was offensive, but I worried that any little joke could be a deal breaker. Most of the schools I applied to had razor thin admission rates, so I wanted to be safe rather than sorry."
多瑪如今已經是耶魯大學大三的學生，她說：“我當時申請了大概10個學校，我知道每一點信息都可能很關鍵。我的推特絕對沒有什麼冒犯的內容，但我擔心任何小玩笑都可能壞事。我申請的大多數學校的錄取率都很低，所以我寧願安全也不要後悔。”

Dolma’s story turned out safe. Others have turned out sorry.
多瑪最後安全了。但其他一些學生卻後悔了。

Online profiles are now just another part of a student's background like a GPA or extra-curricular activities. College admissions officers routinely check social media, with 35 percent of those surveyed by Kaplan Test Prep saying they have checked applicants' social media postings. Of those, 42 percent said that what they found had a negative impact on the student's application.
網上簡介資料如今和高中平均成績點數或課外活動一樣，成了學生背景資料的一個組成部分。大學招生人員通常都會查看社交媒體內容，經卡普蘭考試培訓學校調查，有35%的受訪招生人員表示他們都會查看申請人在社交媒體上發的帖子。其中有42%的招生人員稱，他們發現的內容對學生的大學申請產生了負面影響。

Consequences can be severe. Recently, Harvard revoked the acceptance letters of 10 students after discovering they had posted offensive memes to a Facebook group chat. The event and others like it have struck fear into the hearts of students and parents alike—and for good reason.
後果可能很嚴重。最近，哈佛大學撤銷了10名新生的入學資格，原因是發現他們在私聊小組中發佈冒犯的表情。這一事件和其他類似事件讓許多學生和家長心生恐懼——而他們的擔心是有理由的。

Scrubbing social media accounts—or preemptively making sure their online presences can’t be tracked—has become a common move for students entering their senior year of high school in 2017. Plenty of teens have had social media accounts since middle school and are terrified that an errant post or tagged photo from years ago could come back to haunt them.
刪除社交媒體賬號——或者事先做好準備，讓他人無法追蹤到自己的網上信息——已經成爲2017年高年級高中生的普遍做法。許多青少年早在初中的時候就有社交媒體賬號，他們很擔心幾年前某個言語有失的帖子或被標記的照片會突然冒出來把自己害慘。

Unfortunately, there are still lots of students who don't take necessary precautions when it comes to policing their own online presence.
不幸的是，在清理網絡痕跡方面，還是有許多學生沒有采取必要的防範措施。

"One of the things this Harvard example highlights is that a lot of kids do things online that can come back to bite them. It's important to realize that it happens on a much more regular level," said Patrick Ambron, CEO at BrandYourself, an online reputation management firm that works with students.
爲學生服務的在線名譽管理公司BrandYourself的首席執行官帕特里克•安布羅恩說：“哈佛案例所凸顯的一個事實是許多孩子在網上做過的事可能會回來反咬他們一口。這種事的發生比以前頻繁得多，意識到這點很重要。”

It's hard to grow up online these days and not leave behind something, anything, that might prove suspect in the eyes of a college admissions officer. That's where BrandYourself comes in.
這個時代，網絡伴隨着我們成長，很難不在網上留下點什麼會讓大學招生官生疑的東西。這就是BrandYourself大顯身手的時候。

The company recently launched a new "Student Makeover" product aimed at high schoolers' worried parents. Billed as "the perfect graduation gift," the service promises to surface and remove risky online references to sex, alcohol, drugs, politics, religion, and more for $99, according to the website.
這家公司最近針對憂心忡忡的高中生父母推出了一款 “學生形象塑造”產品。據公司網站的信息，這項號稱“完美畢業禮物”的服務承諾將找出並刪除學生在網上所有和性、酒、毒品、政治、宗教相關的有風險的信息，要價99美元。

To get started, students grant the BrandYourself system access to their Facebook and Twitter accounts. The software then scours thousands of old posts and uses a machine learning algorithm to pull up the ones that may be deemed problematic. Students and their parents can then evaluate the old posts and choose whether or not to delete the content.
首先，學生必須授予BrandYourself系統訪問自己臉書和推特賬戶的權限。公司的軟件將會梳理成千上萬條舊帖子，並用機器學習算法將有問題的帖子都挑出來。學生和父母可以對這些舊帖子進行評估，自行選擇是否刪除這些內容。

The program will also identify troubling search results for a student's name and provide an overall reputation score, which indicates how likely it is that a student's results will negatively affect their career or college prospects.
該服務還能找出與學生名字相關的可能引起麻煩的搜索結果，並提供整體名譽評估分，這一分數顯示出這些搜索結果將從多大程度上對學生的事業或學業前途產生負面影響。

BrandYourself's makeover product is new, but students have spent years been using home-grown methods to avoid admissions officers. For many, adopting a senior name is the first step they take to shield their real identity.
BrandYourself的這款形象塑造產品是新產品，但過去這些年，學生們一直用土辦法來避免被招生官抓住把柄。對許多人而言，使用“高年級名字”是隱藏自己真實身份的第一步。

"Senior names," which many students adopt at the end of summer or the beginning of senior year, are aliases used on Facebook throughout their senior year, and sometimes beyond. These aliases are theoretically meant to hide a student's real identity from admissions officers or summer internship hiring managers who search for their offline name.
“高年級名字”是許多學生在升入高三前的那個夏末或在高三開學之初採用的假名。他們在整個高三時期都會在臉書上使用這個假名，有的人在高三結束後還會繼續使用。這些假名理論上是用來隱藏一個學生的真實身份，不讓招生官或暑期實習招聘經理用真名搜索網絡的時候找到自己的信息。

While senior names are a great first step, other high schoolers take more extensive measures to protect their identity like deleting old accounts or creating duplicate "ghost" profiles that they use to share questionable material online.
雖然“高年級名字”是重要的第一步，許多高中生還會採取更廣泛的措施來保護自己的身份，比如刪除舊賬號，或者創建迷惑性的假身份在網上分享有問題的內容。