A new student-run blog is now live on the John V. Roach Honors College website.

“Inside JVR” launched in December 2011 and aimed to connect with current TCU students and students who might attend the university, New Media Specialist Amy Peterson said.

“My hope is that this becomes a place where students interested in TCU can gain a sense of what life is like at TCU,” J. Vaughn & Evelyn H. Wilson Honors Fellow Ron Pitcock said.

Internal Communications Manager Sandra Record said the idea started after a casual conversation she had with Pitcock in November 2011 about how to connect with prospective students.

Pitcock said the blog launched five weeks after the conversation.

Record said the blog was based on a similar concept used at Johns Hopkins University.

According to the Johns Hopkins University student blog, “Hopkins Interactive” is “a social media website designed to enable prospective and admitted students to Johns Hopkins to connect with the university”.

Record said she found the fact that real students wrote for the website appealing. It would be good for people who might attend TCU to talk to university students, she said.

Pitcock said the blog targeted students who were considering attending the university in the future, providing those tentative students with an inside look at life at TCU.

“Inside JVR” has attracted 1,200 page views since its launch in December 2011, he said. That number came with almost no advertising.

Freshman general business major and blog contributor Jimmy Sweeney said the blog was a great opportunity to indirectly talk to prospective students about what went on at TCU.

“There’s so many cool things that I get to do that people outside the school wouldn’t know about,” Sweeney said.

Pitcock said the posts on the blog would only be written by students. However, the possibility of guest bloggers had been discussed.

Peterson said the posts would be a “slice of life” from students at the university. The experiences they posted should help to connect with prospective students, she said.

Freshman writing and art history double major Leanne O’Donnell said the content could be “whatever you want it be” and the posts tended to be informal.

For example, O’Donnell wrote a post about having class with a student from China, and Sweeney said he wrote a post about how the university campus feels like home to him.

O’Donnell said she hoped to get writing experience from the blog and also hoped to connect with prospective students.

For more information on “Inside JVR” go to Honorsblog.tcu.edu.