After numerous college visits and submitting 12 applications, senior Lauren Baumert has decided to share her experiences and advice on her blog, Love Her to Bits. Although the intended purpose of the blog was to keep people informed on her life at college next year, she also uses it to share what she has learned while exploring colleges.

Baumert said she created her blog at the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year to keep her family informed on her life when she’s in college. She said she began writing posts a year before beginning college partially so she could discover how to use different tools on the website before she left.

“My blog is a collection of things that if I was reading a blog, I would find interesting,” Baumert said. “Right now, I’m in the process of figuring out what college I’m going to go to, so I post stuff about that. I also post about fashion or spring break or things like that.”

Laura Baumert, Baumert’s mom, said one of her daughter’s first blog posts was about college. She said Baumert wrote college posts on her blog because she began writing during the time of visiting and applying to colleges.

“[Her college posts share] advice that she thinks (of),” Laura said. “Some of the advice that she shared was the fact of visiting colleges, for kids to start asking questions and looking at colleges earlier than late.”

Baumert said she learned information for her college blog posts through her experiences from applying to and visiting multiple colleges. She said it was easy to write about that topic because it is currently one of the biggest things in her life.

“I think that there are a lot of interesting aspects to [college],” Baumert said. “I think it’s one of my favorite things to write about, but I like to mix it up too.”

Laura said inspiration for her daughter’s posts came from other blogs and sometimes her friends.

“She followed a lot of other people that blog and she’s always enjoyed following those blogs,” Laura said. “I think she just got the idea that ‘Oh, I have something to share also,’ and the college stuff spurred that and now it’s been an ongoing thing.”

Baumert said her family and friends’ biggest involvement with her blog is reading it. She said this is a good thing because it gets views on her page.

“I would love to have some of my friends write a guest post,” Baumert said. “[My friends] offer me story ideas every so often.”

According to Baumert, a guest post is a post written by a different blogger or a person in the blogger’s life about something that interests that person.

Sophomore Emily Layt said she is one of Baumert’s readers. Layt said she discovered the blog when Baumert posted a link to Facebook, and when Layt read her post about college visits, she enjoyed it.

“[Baumert’s] blog is much more personal than other blogs,” Layt said. “She also gives way more advice than I feel like other blogs give…She talks a lot about her high school career and how she’s enjoyed it and how she hasn’t enjoyed it.”

Layt said she recommends reading the blog to anyone looking into colleges, because it offers a lot of advice.

Baumert said her goal with her blog is to help people understand things that confused her, such as writing the common application. She said she hopes to reach out to other bloggers not only to find inspiration, but to find a community in the online world in addition to her offline one.

“I would love to continue writing for as long as I can,” Baumert said. “I think I’ll have a lot of really cool experiences in college that I can write about.”