Like or not: Professionals expected to be role models

If you’re going to be a professional, you have to reflect the standards of your public. And if you’re a doctor or educator, your standards should be higher than the aggregate values of the community.

Yes, it’s your life, so why should you care what anyone else thinks? Because even if you don’t set yourself on a pedestal, others do, and like it or not, with the mantle of being a teaching or medical professional comes public expectations.

And now, social media are teaching more and more professionals hard lessons of life.

For example, resumes display your best side, so human resources professionals are now going to Facebook and other social media to get a truer picture of applicants. They fear that someone with one or more Facebook pictures showing alcohol consumption may have a drinking problem that could affect their work, or someone with sexuality-focused photos on Facebook might make inappropriate contact with patients or students. Questionable photos and text could keep professionals from getting jobs or could get them fired.

The case of a mortuary student at the University of Minnesota makes a poignant point.

She threatened her ex-boyfriend with a sharp instrument on Facebook, presumably so he’d leave her alone, and she was the one who got suspended from school and who became the object of a police investigation. Authorities take these things seriously. In the wake of Columbine and many other school killings since then, how could they not take threats seriously? And doing so on Facebook is the same as buying an ad in the newspaper or signing a confession.

What’s a professional to do?

Glori Hinck, a 2010 M.E.T. grad and an associate professor of chiropractic education at Northwestern Health Sciences University in Bloomington, Minnesota, suggests six remedies for potentially career-killing social media faux pas.
• Don’t make your personal Facebook site public.
• Further, understand that nothing on the internet is truly private.
• The new timeline function in Facebook allows anyone to see what you did in any given year, so old photos are no longer buried.
• Patrol your social media sites. There are ways to view how your site looks to others.
• Consider how many friends you have on Facebook. Most users have 533 friends, which is the size of a small town and, she says, they can’t all be friends in the traditional sense, so be careful what you share with these people.
• Don’t be friends with patients or students on personal FB sites.