The Story Of @MITStudents by Chris Peterson SM '13
as told by the person behind it
Our office is not on Twitter (although our bot is), but 89 other offices at MIT are. Among them is @MITStudents, an account maintained by Kellen Manning, Communications Coordinator for MIT’s Division of Student Life (he also oversees their Instagram and tumblr).
Kellen and I are usually at the gym at the same time, and the other day we were talking about @MITStudents, which I myself follow and often interact with. He offered to send me an explanation of what DSL is trying to do with it (and, for that matter, what DSL is), which I wanted to post here.
What do you know about the Division of Student Life (DSL) at MIT? Essentially DSL promotes the idea that learning doesn’t just happen in the classroom. Learning happens through making connections, exploring opportunities, and discovering who you are. That’s all well and good, but you are probably still wondering, “What is DSL?” Well, we are comprised of numerous departments and special programs meant to support and enhance students’ lives outside of the classroom. These include the Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation (DAPER), Religious Life, Residential Life and Dining, Student Activities, Campus Activities Complex, the Hobby Shop, the Public Service Center, Student Development, and Student Outreach and Support. Through their activities, DSL offers students and the MIT community many opportunities to learn about and experience a multitude of things. To complement their work, we want to start highlighting the experiences that you create. So we rethought our social media efforts and decided to focus more on you! Through our social media accounts we want to hear about and highlight events that you are excited about. We want to know about your projects. We want to help our growing base of followers experience MIT through your eyes. To put it simply, we want MIT students to help us communicate what life is like for MIT students: the good, the bad, and the meh. We also plan on following your experience a lot like we did during commencement last year when we followed Andrea Nickerson ’14 through her last month as an MIT student. We also are following a crop of incoming freshmen this summer. Whether students were part of dance performances, enjoying a concert, or just slack lining in North Court, if we see it we pushed it out. So feel free to tweet at us, email us pictures and captions, link us to videos and tag us in Instagram photos. If you have questions that you want to ask the community, send them to us or tweet at us and we’ll push them back out to the best of our ability. If your student group is hosting an event or performance, or you’re recruiting new members, please let us know. Basically we want to highlight your journeys, interests, and causes. We hope to hear from you!