Online Presence

I was discussing online presence with my supervisor this weekend – she’s trying to up hers. It’s something that she’s actively thinking about, concerned about. I think it’s certainly something that you need to keep on top of. There are so many platforms available, twitter, linkedin, wordpress, piirus, academic.edu, researchgate, etc. Should you blanket them all or just pick a couple to concentrate on?

I personally spend a lot of time on twitter. Once I’d discovered hashtags like #phdchat #phdlife and #acwri, I felt like I’d found a proper community online. It was something that really helped me get through the isolated nature of the PhD. Conferences regularly use hashtags too –  you can keep up with all of the panels, and find the other people that you’re meeting there to talk to later. Building connections and a sense of community is so important when you’re in academia, I think, being the isolated office dwellers that we are, that it’s easy to get completely separated from the world.

I started this blog to help me keep track of what I was doing during my PhD – it’s easy to forget that you’ve made any progress when you’re stuck in a mire of deadlines and failed lines of thought. At the beginning, writing things down, keeping track of my weekly word count and holding myself accountable to the blog gave me the motivation I was lacking at the time. As I’ve gotten more in the swing of things, I’ve written on the blog less, but I find what I do write now is more useful. More about tracking achievements than berating myself for falling short.

People talk a lot about Linkedin, but to be honest, I’ve struggled to get to grips with it. I’ve had a profile on there for years and I update it semi-regularly; I add new people I meet. It hasn’t really seemed to do anything. Then someone told me that there are groups on there. Lo and behold, there are – groups about different areas of academia, about different theoretical interests. I’m beginning to see how it might actually be used for networking rather than just a static online mini-CV.

Things like academia.edu and researchgate are great for keeping track of what’s going on in your field, and for putting little bits of your research for other people to see what you’re up to. I probably don’t use them as much as I should, but I’ve also been concentrating on blasting my thesis, rather than writing papers.

Honestly though, twitter and facebook have been my main links to the outside world – I think they’re such important resources, both personally and professionally. I encourage everyone to find their online community.

Other useful online stuff:

This post on being an online academic – I took part in the online chat last year and it was pretty interesting.

My previous blog post on surviving the PhD – just in case you need a reminder that you’re not going crazy.