Leveraging Social Media: Hack your Facebook to make you a better engineer.

Social media sites are often associated with negative emotions to mature student veterans. Wall feeds are annoying, distasteful and generally distracting. We are in school for a common purpose: to earn a degree that allows us to solve bigger problems, make more money and contribute more to society. Here is how you, the engineering student veteran can maximize Facebook, Google+, Reddit and other social media sites to your advantage:

• You decide what comes on your feed. No more liking pages that will shoot commercials at you. Go ahead and "unlike" those things.
• "Like" pages that will keep you up to date in the world of engineering. For example: Goddard Space Center, DARPA, SAME, NASA, School clubs, US Dept of Energy, etc. These pages post things that actually stimulate your brain in a positive way and add value to your life
• Check credibility of postings. Especially if they don't cite scholarly articles or other credible sources. 
• Keep in mind that each page has a schema and often it is to sell something to you or influence you.
• Avoid extremist emotional groups that exploit your interests. They are disguised as military or patriotic pages, when in reality they post stuff that often is not true, there is nothing you can do about it, and they will piss you off until you are depressed from not being able to do anything about it.
• Join groups such as SAME SDSU and SVO SDSU.
• Manage your time. There are so many exciting things going on in the engineering world. Most of us could stay up for days reading articles and watching YouTube videos about technology.

Revamping your social media sites can add value to your life. In turn this will expand your knowledge and allow you to add more value to other's lives. Also it will give you something exciting to talk about with fellow engineers.