The Many Faces of Online Video

A friend of mine in a graduate program at Tufts sent me an amazing YouTube video the other day with the warning “Tufts is now accepting video submissions as part of their application process.”

As a “video professional,” I watched it immediately and thought: what an interesting new frontier for video to tackle! In this video, an eager student combines her two favorite things (“being a nerd and dancing”) and creates dances to demonstrate different types of graphs.  Let me remind you that this is an optional part of the application, so I was pretty impressed to see such a huge following (already 67,000 hits on YouTube!) It’s by no means flashy, HD and picture perfect, but it is concise and creative.  We all saw Elle Woods’ video submission for admission to Harvard in Legally Blonde, and I think since then this tactic has been generally considered comical, ridiculous and perhaps even a tad futuristic. But how exciting to think that online video will now have a place in the dreaded college admissions discussion! “For Tufts,” says a New York Times article that followed the video submissions, “the videos have been a delightful way to get to know the applicants.” In a sea of test scores, essays, short answers, GPA’s, and transcripts, video has become a legitimate tool for students to better showcase their personality. Lee Coffin, the director of undergraduate admissions at Tufts University, said “We have a lot of information about applicants, but the videos let them share their voice.”

It’s my theory that the prevalence of online video clearly and directly benefits the work we do at Good Eye Video, and I can’t think of a better way to demonstrate that point than this Tufts example. Video is no longer something unattainable or futuristic. It is quickly becoming a fundamental part of the both the online and “real world” dialogue. Whether you make videos on your cell phone or re-tweet about a new YouTube video, you encourage the widespread acceptance of video as a medium for communication. So, props to Tufts for trying something new and including video in that experiment!