anonymousername said:
on here who have over 1K posts, are donors, mods, "life members"....and have been members for such a short amount of time?
Well, I wouldn't call going on six years of membership a short time, but like others have said, I joined SDN because I needed advice, and I didn't have an advisor. Since I did well on the MCAT, I got involved with the MCAT forum and began giving MCAT advice. Other people read my PS when I was applying, so I read other people's PSes after I got accepted. Other people gave me med school survival advice, and later I gave med school survival advice to underclassmen. People are now giving me residency app advice, and I will hopefully be giving other people residency app advice when I'm an intern.
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Those are some pretty good reasons. btw, mods, what are your responsibilities exactly (besides moderating the forum) and how much of your day is spent doing "work" on here?
As Caesar said, the job description of SDN mods depends on their forum and also their level. Green mods have limited administrative functions, and admins obviously have a lot.
As a blue mod, I mainly keep tabs on my assigned forums (Nontrad and Physician Scientists). Since these forums target narrower audiences than this forum does, they tend to have fewer administrative issues, and I usually spend the bulk of my time answering user questions. I also look in on some of the busier forums like this one and MCAT when I have the time, and I help mods in other forums if they need it. Other mod jobs are to help direct users to appropriate resources, move misplaced threads, delete spam and ban spammers, deal with user TOS violations, remove posted material that violates copyrights, give input to the admins about running the site, select new mods and train them, deal with the reported posts (that's one of the more time-consuming parts of the job), and otherwise do what we can to make SDN as helpful and useful as possible.
Many of the long-time members have met other long-time members in real life, so there is a signficant social aspect of SDN as well. In fact, there are multiple people who met their significant others on SDN, and at least a few SDN couples who ultimately got married. I seem to remember someone referring to this site once as the Student Dating Network....
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