Now is a difficult time to be a senior in college. By which I mean it is a terrible time to look for a job. The dreaded what are you doing after college question has now changed into “You’re going to try to get a job? NOW? Good luck.” While I envy my peers who are heading for graduate school, I, and many others, must brave the job market in a time when the President recently declared “Our entire economy is in danger.” Those words sent chills to our previously optimistic hearts.

I shouldn’t complain though, because at least I wasn’t planning on doing investment banking. I know too many friends who majored in econ because it would help them get well-paid i-banking jobs… not so much anymore. One of my friends was working on her cover letters for Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch when they ceased to exist. Now she’s not sure if there are any investment banking jobs left.

I recently met with my college advisor to discuss career options. I shared with him my desire to go into online marketing or business development in the Bay Area. He basically said I shouldn’t be choosy and should try to get any job available. His pessimism (hopefully not just realism) made me worry, and certainly I am not alone in this. Are these really the worst of times?

In July, Facebook revealed the “new Facebook.” Surprisingly, they made it optional. I tried it out, decided I didn’t like, and then went back to the old Facebook. According to Mashable, Facebook says only 40% of its users have even tried the new design, and some of those, like me, chose to go back to the old design after trying it. Facebook reported that “nearly 30 million” users had stuck with the new Facebook — but thats out of about 100 million total.

Now Facebook has decided that they are going to make the new design permanent. My Facebook was just forcibly switched today. It’s hard for me to pinpoint why I don’t like it. I miss the wall now that its integrated with everything else in the feed. It might just be general dislike of change. But my personal view of the new Facebook is not my point here.

I’m curious about their idea of a gradual changeover and whether its been a positive or negative influence over all. I suspect that by giving users the ability to stick to the old Facebook they increased their attachment to it. I wouldn’t have been that upset or surprised if Facebook has just suddenly shifted over in July. Now that I’ve decided to stick to the old design for so long, I’ve become even more against the new one. By giving users the choice and then taking it away they made a story of it — there are various groups against the new facebook and many users are petitioning them to change it. Of course, the same sort of hubbub was made about newsfeed, and now everyone seems okay with that, so I think this too will blow over. However, I think it would have been a better decision to just change all at once instead of pretending users had a choice in the matter. What do you think? Was the gradual change a good idea?

My grandmother had a problem. She liked where she lived, but there was a roundabout near her house where everyone would pile their garbage. It smelled; it looked bad. It needed to go. Since this was the 1970s in Mexico City she couldn’t rely on the government to clean up. A master of spin far ahead of her time, my grandmother had an idea. She went out and bought a four-foot-high statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe – the patron saint of Mexico) and she put it the roundabout in the midst of all the garbage along with a vase of flowers.

The next time she passed the roundabout she noticed that that no one was piling their garbage there anymore. The next week people started taking away the garbage that was still there. A few weeks after that she noticed that there were new vases with flowers joining hers. Someone was sweeping in front of the statute. By the time five years had passed the center of the roundabout had gone from a garbage dump to an open air chapel where informal services were held once a week. True story.

Now, this could be a story about the power of religion, but I think its more truly a story of spin. With one simple statue, my grandmother changed the connotations of the space. Instead of being “the garbage dump” it became a shrine — she made it taboo to put garbage there. There’s a lesson in that: cultural and social norms influence our actions more than we realize. She didn’t have to yell, call the police, or pay a lot of money to remove the garbage. Instead she figured out how she could get people to want to clean up the space. My grandmother was brilliant.

How should we judge a speech from our political candidates? We talk about their charisma, their talking points, their promises, and their gestures. What about simply looking at their words? In a recent article Wired posted word clouds of speeches from the Democratic and Republican conventions. Words that are said more frequently are bigger (color doesn’t matter). I’m not seriously suggesting we evaluate our candidates this way, but it is worth a look. Can we learn anything from these word clouds? In case you’re curious, these word clouds were generated from wordle.net.

First, Barack Obama’s speech:

Second, John McCain’s speech:

In my summer job I have become inmeshed in this new world of social media. Facebook, of course, is something all college students are familiar with. But now I Twitter, I’m LinkedIn, I read blogs (and write this one), I’ve created a Facebook page for the company, I watch what’s new on Digg and Reddit, and I’ve generally allowed the new media buzz to take over my summer.

Then I was gchatting to one of my friends and mentioned something about Digg. The response was “What’s that?” While my colleagues at work seem to think college students are at the pinnacle of the social media world, I realized we’ve fallen a bit behind. Facebook is no longer the darling of the blogging world. They’ve moved on to Twitter, micro blogging, and Google Chrome.

My advice to my fellow college seniors looking for jobs is to not get left behind. Create a LinkedIn profile and start connecting with work colleagues. Sign up for Digg and Redditt. Start tweeting. Read blogs. It certainly can’t hurt your prospects.

Crazy as that sounds, Freakonomics reported that Stanford University and Japan won the same number of Olympic medals in Beijing.  And perhaps more amazing, another interesting fact was pointed out by a commenter: “Stanford with a student body of 19K was able to generate almost 25% of the total US medal count, with less than 0.01% of the US population.” Wow. As a Stanford student myself, I am aware of our good althletic programs, but this is shocking even to me.  Are they putting something in the water?