Planning Programs Using Social Media: A Useful Window for Prospective Students

As readers of this blog will know I encourage people to find out about planning programs in multiple ways. Reading the work of faculty is a crucial first step as is reading the program’s web site. Visiting open houses or connecting with students (programs often set up some kind of chat space around admission time) are also options. Increasingly schools are using multiple forms of social media to reach current students and alums providing a useful window onto the programs for prospective students. This list highlights a few of these sources used specifically by planning programs.

Ann Forsyth | October 22, 2011, 9am PDT

As readers of this blog will know I encourage people to find out about planning programs in multiple ways. Reading the work of faculty is a crucial first step as is reading the program's web site. Visiting open houses or connecting with students (programs often set up some kind of chat space around admission time) are also options. Increasingly schools are using multiple forms of social media to reach current students and alums providing a useful window onto the programs for prospective students. This list highlights a few of these sources used specifically by planning programs. There are many more of course, and Jennifer Evans-Cowley has noted this in an interesting presentation as this year's planning administrator's conference: http://www.slideshare.net/cowley11/acsp-administrators-social-media-21611:

MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning's Alumni-Student group uses a public Facebook page to provide announcements, student profiles, and reports of events: http://www.facebook.com/pages/MIT-DUSP-Community/76181914232?sk=app_23798139265 and it also has a blog at http://duspmeetup.wordpress.com/.

Cornell's Department of City and Regional Planning (where I work) uses its blog to announce and report on events: http://cornellplanning.blogspot.com/. It also provides resource lists-on topics like diversity or support groups on campus. Fairly richly illustrated, it gives a sense of weekly activities on the department. Cornell CRP's facebook page is more specifically focused on alums but is also interesting: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cornell-CRP-Alumni/198498036836379.

The Ohio State University has produced some excellent online videos promoting planning and their program. "Be a Plannner" on the front page of their program site is very good http://knowlton.osu.edu/planning (or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynqbEumyqYQ&noredirect=1) but an earlier video in black and white, and now unavailable, blew me away and made me want to rush to Columbus to study planning!

Berkeley is an example of a program where social media seems to be organized at the college level. In the right menu of their main page at http://dcrp.ced.berkeley.edu/ one can click on icons for the college's Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr accounts. While these sources have a lot of material from other departments, the YouTube section has a number of interesting videos from planning.

As I prepared this it occurred to me that it would be useful to have a master list of such social media. Perhaps Planetizen can provide it in their next guide to graduate education.

This is my September blog, rather late due to travel.

Ann Forsyth

Trained in planning and architecture, Ann Forsyth is a professor of urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. From 2007-2012 she was a professor of city and regional planning at Cornell.