大学新生入学前必做功课：网络资料“大扫除”

前阵子哈佛大学以发布恶搞表情为由开除了10名新生，引来众人热议，但与此同时，这件事也给即将申请大学的高中生和家长敲响了警钟。为了避免被招生官抓住把柄，许多学生都采取了防范措施，比如删除自己的社交媒体账号，在网上采用假名等。一家公司也不失时机地推出新服务，帮助学生清扫有问题的网上信息和图片。 

When Kelsang Dolma began sending in her college applications, the first thing she did was lock down her Twitter account.
格桑•多玛提交大学申请时，她做的第一件事就是锁定自己的推特账户。

"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."
多玛如今已经是耶鲁大学大三的学生，她说：“我当时申请了大概10个学校，我知道每一点信息都可能很关键。我的推特绝对没有什么冒犯的内容，但我担心任何小玩笑都可能坏事。我申请的大多数学校的录取率都很低，所以我宁愿安全也不要后悔。”

Dolma’s story turned out safe. Others have turned out sorry.
多玛最后安全了。但其他一些学生却后悔了。

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.
网上简介资料如今和高中平均成绩点数或课外活动一样，成了学生背景资料的一个组成部分。大学招生人员通常都会查看社交媒体内容，经卡普兰考试培训学校调查，有35%的受访招生人员表示他们都会查看申请人在社交媒体上发的帖子。其中有42%的招生人员称，他们发现的内容对学生的大学申请产生了负面影响。

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.
后果可能很严重。最近，哈佛大学撤销了10名新生的入学资格，原因是发现他们在私聊小组中发布冒犯的表情。这一事件和其他类似事件让许多学生和家长心生恐惧——而他们的担心是有理由的。

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.
删除社交媒体账号——或者事先做好准备，让他人无法追踪到自己的网上信息——已经成为2017年高年级高中生的普遍做法。许多青少年早在初中的时候就有社交媒体账号，他们很担心几年前某个言语有失的帖子或被标记的照片会突然冒出来把自己害惨。

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，在清理网络痕迹方面，还是有许多学生没有采取必要的防范措施。

"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.
为学生服务的在线名誉管理公司BrandYourself的首席执行官帕特里克•安布罗恩说：“哈佛案例所凸显的一个事实是许多孩子在网上做过的事可能会回来反咬他们一口。这种事的发生比以前频繁得多，意识到这点很重要。”

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.
这个时代，网络伴随着我们成长，很难不在网上留下点什么会让大学招生官生疑的东西。这就是BrandYourself大显身手的时候。

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.
这家公司最近针对忧心忡忡的高中生父母推出了一款 “学生形象塑造”产品。据公司网站的信息，这项号称“完美毕业礼物”的服务承诺将找出并删除学生在网上所有和性、酒、毒品、政治、宗教相关的有风险的信息，要价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，学生必须授予BrandYourself系统访问自己脸书和推特账户的权限。公司的软件将会梳理成千上万条旧帖子，并用机器学习算法将有问题的帖子都挑出来。学生和父母可以对这些旧帖子进行评估，自行选择是否删除这些内容。

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.
该服务还能找出与学生名字相关的可能引起麻烦的搜索结果，并提供整体名誉评估分，这一分数显示出这些搜索结果将从多大程度上对学生的事业或学业前途产生负面影响。

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的这款形象塑造产品是新产品，但过去这些年，学生们一直用土办法来避免被招生官抓住把柄。对许多人而言，使用“高年级名字”是隐藏自己真实身份的第一步。

"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.
“高年级名字”是许多学生在升入高三前的那个夏末或在高三开学之初采用的假名。他们在整个高三时期都会在脸书上使用这个假名，有的人在高三结束后还会继续使用。这些假名理论上是用来隐藏一个学生的真实身份，不让招生官或暑期实习招聘经理用真名搜索网络的时候找到自己的信息。

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.
虽然“高年级名字”是重要的第一步，许多高中生还会采取更广泛的措施来保护自己的身份，比如删除旧账号，或者创建迷惑性的假身份在网上分享有问题的内容。