Tag: grad student advice

Event Details:  UChicago Leadership Lab, October 15, 2014 [link to Eventbrite]

This week I’m returning to my old stomping grounds, the University of Chicago, to participate in the Emerging Leaders Initiative of the Social Sciences Division. I’ve been interested to see how my alma mater is thinking about how graduate students should be — in their words — “developing expertise in a variety of different areas.”

The areas in which I currently work, public and digital history, are not ones supported by my graduate training, but reflect work experience I brought with me to graduate school, and continued to do “on the side” while completing my doctorate. In order to keep up with those fields, and to make new contacts, I made a concerted effort to get online during the write-up phase of my (very analog) dissertation.

As part of Wednesday’s roundtable, I’ve been thinking about the choices I made (and continue to make) about building a web presence and sharing my work with a broader audience. The following links are a useful reading list for graduate students weighing similar decisions:

• Miriam Posner, Brian Croxall, and Stewart Varner for ProfHacker: “Creating Your Web Presence: A Primer for Academics“

• Jentery Sayers for ProfHacker: “Do You Need Your Own Website While on the Job Market?” 

• Ryan Cordell for ProfHacker: “How to Start Tweeting and Why You Might Want To“ and “Creating and Maintaining a Professional Presence Online: A Roundup and a Reflection“

• Menachem Wecker for Vitae: “Should You Share Your Research on Academia.edu?“

• Journal of Women’s History, “Roundtable: Women Gone Wild: Reflections on the Feminist Blogosphere” 

• Scott Jaschik for Inside Higher Ed: “Embargoes for Dissertations?” (and the AHA debate)

Finally, if you have lots of time to spare, a previous talk I gave on promoting your research in a digital age is online, here. Have any advice to add? Leave a reply in the comments!