As we get closer and closer to graduation, we begin to see the future just over the horizon. I know I don’t speak only for myself when I say that I am very excited for college.  As we get closer and closer to graduation, we begin to see the future just over the horizon. I know I don’t speak only for myself when I say that I am very excited for college.

With our generation, we are very quick to put all of our new experiences on social media for all of our friends to see, but what you may not know is that your future employer might search for you and see these things too. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of tips to make sure that the party photos that you put on snapchat of you imbibing over and over again won’t stop you from getting that job you want in the near future.

The first tip is do not put your full name on any of your social media. Doing this will make it harder for anyone to find you, and those foolish pics you posted or someone tagged you in won’t be so easy to trace back to you. The next time you are online, try googling your name and see what comes up. Anyone can see what you can see on that web search. It is better to be safe than sorry when it comes to these things. If not having your full identity out there for the world to see is too much for you, you can always just make a whole different account or try to control what is posted more carefully.

The second tip is to promote positive behaviors in what you are doing. Post pictures of any volunteering that you do or, if you are in a club, show all the work that you do. This will add more positive things to your image/profile and hopefully drown out any negativity. Not only will this lighten up your social media footprint but also, when your future employer does look at your social media, he or she will find reasons to hire you and not behaviors that inspire him or her not to do so.

The third tip is to privatize your accounts. Privatizing your account is the way you can make sure that you are protecting anything that you post. When you privatize your account, you can pick and choose who is able to see the content you post. Although this will not fully protect you from anyone seeing what you post, it does provide, at least, extra step that may help you in the long run.

This last tip that is probably the easiest of all: Don’t post at all. Just because you don’t post about every party you go to doesn’t mean that you didn’t go or it wasn’t fun. Think about it; you worked hard to get into a good school, and now you are going to work really hard to make sure you are successful at this school. Do you want all of that to be for naught just because your future boss saw a video of a party you were at and you were behaving in a manner that s/he would rather not see?

Ultimately, the best idea is to use your head. Be smart about what you post on social media and think about what your online profile means because future employers sure are.