It’s hard to think of a more transformative time in a person’s life than college. Away from your parents, sequestered around a campus loaded with young adults just like you, all of you feeling out real freedom for the first time, like tadpoles that have just sprung legs and an appetite for Jell-O shots.

College is of different value to different people. And if I were counseling a soon-to-be high school grad on where she should spend the next four years of her life, I’d tell her to pick an institution that understands the importance of new media and social media in navigating life beyond college, both personally and professionally.

Ask your recruiter whether the college encourages students to tweet, to network on Facebook and LinkedIn as well as a school-specific social network; whether they encourage them to blog and produce videos; whether they, in short, facilitate student storytelling?

I recently came across a couple of student-made videos that speak well of new media adoption in American universities.

First, from the LJ World, comes Braves TV, a reality-TV-style student vid showing what life is like at Ottawa University in Kansas. Talk about transparency. The school basically set eight students loose with Flip Cams to make videos for the school’s official Facebook page. Check out the cool way they brought Facebook profiles into the video below.

Next, from Plog, on a less pedagogical but highly entertaining note comes these selections from a viral video Heisman campaign for University of Tennessee safety Eric Berry (who, incidentally, was the Kansas City Chiefs’ first round draft pick.) In fact, if you search Eric Berry on YouTube, you’ll find a wealth of content, both on the field and, like these vidoes, off.

The first is a professional-quality hip-hop video featuring Swiperboy, a rapper who has a side career as a Volunteers basketball player and student.

The next, from the same campaign, is a hilarious powerpop video with overtones of Blink 182 and Weezer tomfoolery.

Pretty mindblowing, huh? Especially for those of us who went to college back when mobile phones were new and Yahoo e-mail was about as sexy as it got.

What other colleges do you know of that are embracing new media?