Blogging for Owen
Student-Run Site Provides Unique Window into Owen Community
During their orientation week last August, Isaac Rogers, Sam Kale and Sharran Srivatsaa came to an unusual decision: They wanted to take on even more work than their first-year MBA studies would demand. They decided to start and maintain a blog about their experiences at Owen.
Now, four months later, owenbloggers.com receives hundreds of hits per day, from almost every state in the U.S. and dozens of other countries.
The site, which has expanded to include blogs from 17 different Owen students, was conceived as a means for prospective students to get an unfiltered, insider’s perspective on life and work at the school. “Students who can’t visit the campus have no sense of what it’s like,” says Srivatsaa, who came up with the idea for owenbloggers drawing on his experience as a consultant who helped luxury hotels set up similar “insider” blogs. “And even if you get to visit, that’s only one day. What’s it like the next day?”
The founding bloggers admit that blogging about Owen also provides more than a little cathartic release, an opportunity to record and share their thoughts and experiences.
“In my mind, owenbloggers is both catharsis and a service,” says Kale, who serves as editor-in-chief. “They’re inseparable for me. The catharsis is actually what people are looking for. They want to know we’re real people with the same issues as everyone else.”
The site isn’t limited to blogging about Owen. You’ll find musings on everything from politics to Google’s prospective mergers to a YouTube Daily Show interview segment on microlending with Nobel Peace Prize winner (and Vanderbilt graduate) Muhammed Yunus. But the focus is on daily life in business school, with blogs on time management, the rigors of preparing for Professor Steve Hoeffler’s final exam in Core Marketing (a “live case” involving the new PlayStation 3), kicking back on Thursday and Friday nights, eating healthy while in school and an array of other topics — all searchable through a feature on the site.
“You get a real picture of the school,” says second-year MBA student Susan Strayer, who had been active in the blogosphere before and joined the Owen bloggers this fall. “The blog is the next best thing to a visit. And it’s fun for us because people are reading what we write.”
Kale and José Paez, on the other hand, had never blogged before. “I didn’t even know what a blog was,” says Paez, a first-year MBA student from Caracas, Venezuela, whose blog appears in Spanish.
“It was a little scary to leave the security of a job and go to business school,” says Rogers. “I’m newly married, so balancing schoolwork and family was a concern, too. You can read schools’ glossy material, but you realize that it won’t be like a glossy brochure. You want to know more specifically how your life will change, what your day will look like. The blog is a way to show others what life is like here.”
For many of the Owen bloggers, the site has become something of a mission. “What we thought school would be like back in August was way off base,” says Rogers. “It’s so much better than we thought. We wanted to get the word out. The experiences we’re having here are incredible.”
Says Srivatsaa, “The blog gives a sense of transparency to everyday experiences here. A huge part of it is to help draw the students who will most want to be here. We have so many prospective students who email and ask to know more. We make sure one of our bloggers answers their questions.
“No other school handles a blog in the collaborative way that we do. It’s very similar to the way Owen works as a whole. It’s a supportive community, and the blog is a microcosm of that.”
Such praise comes unsolicited and unedited. That, all the bloggers agree, is one of the most appealing features of the site. Owenbloggers.com is not officially sponsored by the school. The bloggers are self-policing, but Owen imposes no editorial control.
“The administration has been very supportive and surprisingly adamant about us doing this ourselves,” says Kale. “They let us take it where we want it.” By contrast, university-sponsored student blogs at other schools “seemed contrived and canned,” says Rogers.
Among the several hundred hits per day (and 600-700 on weekends) visitors to the site have come from nearly every state and dozens of countries. According to the tracking system the students installed, prospective and current students each account for approximately one-third of the hits. Alumni (7%), recruiters (5%) and faculty (3%) are among the other visitors. About 30% of the traffic is from overseas.
Mostly, the bloggers say, people are finding out about the site through simple word of mouth. Now, says Srivatsaa, “a lot of other business schools are starting to reference our blog. I knew it would take off, but not that it would have this much support. The dean was skeptical at first and now has become a blogger himself.”
Will owenbloggers change the way other business schools handle their blogs? “I think it might,” responds Srivatsaa. “Gen-Y’ers are so tech-savvy, and the more honest the blog is, the more credibility it seems to have. But even if the project ended today, you’d have a phenomenal record of what Owen is like. And that was our goal all along.”
