Brittany Trinh returns to The Social Academic featured interview series. We talk about how her thinking on websites for professors, scientists, and researchers has changed. We also talk about how her life has changed now that she’s back in grad school (and what that means for her online presence). Plus, hear about our Team VIP Day service for research lab websites. Read Brittany’s bio.
In this interview
Meet Brittany
Jennifer: Hi everyone. It is Jennifer van Alstyne. Welcome to The Social Academic. I’m here today with my friend and one of my business partners, Brittany Trinh. We’re talking about personal academic websites, research lab websites, websites for academics. Brittany, would you say hi and introduce yourself? Or, reintroduce yourself since you’ve already been a guest on our show?
Brittany: Hi everyone. My name is Brittany Trinh. Yeah, I feel like the last time I was on your show was maybe in like 2020 or something like that. It was a while ago.
Jennifer: Oh my goodness. It’s been that long and we’ve been friends ever since. I mean, Brittany, you were at my wedding this summer. I can’t believe how time has flown by and your life has changed. You’re back in grad school. Tell me about that.
Brittany: Yeah, so I was working and running my side business as a website designer at the time when we’ve met. Since then, I had started grad school in 2021. I am now a PhD candidate in Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
Jennifer: Amazing. I really like how you reached out and introduced yourself to me in the very beginning. I felt like there wasn’t a need to be in competition with each other. It was so nice to be able to have someone to talk with about something that we both care about, which is having an online presence when you’re a scientist or someone who’s in academia. And also, we’ve been able to work together and partner together on some fun projects.
Brittany: When I first started getting in the online space and I heard about you. When I saw you at first, I was kind of thinking like, “Oh, we are kind of competitors in a sense that we have similar services” and things like that. But after I thought about it and kind of learned more about the space, I figured at that time we had slightly different audiences. You were still more targeting professors and people who were further along, whereas I was trying to target with graduate students and earlier career. But obviously since starting grad school, a lot of my side business web design stuff has kind of been put on the back burner. I’m still kind of working on it here and there, and I love collaborating with you as of late. So that has been a really good kind of easing back into the web design business.
Jennifer: That’s really fun. And I love hearing about your grad school experiences on social media. What was it like to start sharing that part of your new lifestyle in your online space that was kind of different from how you were showing up before?
Brittany: When I was showing up before, I was mostly just sharing a lot of tips and information on Twitter at the time. That worked for some time. But once I got to grad school, I thought, first of all, I don’t want to just be known for websites anymore. But I also had to take a break because I wasn’t really sure about my scientific identity yet because I just started grad school, and even though I had worked in industry for some time, starting grad school made me feel like a beginner again. And actually it took me probably the last three-ish years or so to finally feel a little bit more confident about posting things on social media regarding grad school.
Because for me personally, I just didn’t really want to be just a PhD influencer. There’s a lot of PhD influencers. I follow them too because I like their contents motivating and things like that, of course. But there’s just certain aspects of it that I didn’t really align with. And, I didn’t want to create that type of content. It took me a really long time up until maybe last year to finally figure out, “Oh, actually I still do want to talk about some things about grad school and about being a scientist, being in STEM and all that. But it just looks a little bit different than how a lot of people are currently doing it.” That’s because a lot of people are also science communicators, so they’re communicating their research, which is great. But for me personally, that wasn’t exactly something that I wanted to do.
Jennifer: Oh, that’s so interesting because the way that I see websites is part of science communication. At least for scientists, it’s a way to communicate who they are and what they’re doing. And that’s something you’re so great at. It’s totally okay that it’s not an interest of yours when it comes to the other areas of your life. That’s so interesting to me. I’m curious if you’re open to it, would you share with me what aspect of influencer life maybe didn’t appeal to you? Because there may be people who are listening to this who are considering the same thing and hearing your thoughts might be really helpful for them.
Brittany: Yeah, I guess for me, a lot of it was just hearing the over romanticizing the lifestyle was one thing that I wasn’t really a fan of, especially without context. I love the aesthetic. When I was in high school, I was obsessed with study aesthetic and everything. So, I get it. It’s very appealing to see that type of content. But I think that when you create that type of content and you share that without sharing the context in which a PhD program happens. I guess what goes on in a PhD program, it can be a bit deceiving to say the least, or just a little bit. I don’t know what the right word is, but I just didn’t feel like that’s something I wanted to do. I think that it’s a good thing that they’re inspiring younger people or anybody who wants to pursue a PhD. I think that’s good to be a source of inspiration. But I think that for me, I didn’t want it to just be an aesthetic look like a lifestyle.
Jennifer: Yeah, I absolutely understand that. And what’s interesting to me is that if I came across your channel and didn’t know that you didn’t want to be an influencer, I would think that you’re quite realist in what you share about your PhD life. And, you even have a podcast about what it’s like to be in grad school. I think that there’s a difference between influencer in terms of the intention of creating partnerships and brand deals and maybe even gaining a certain type of following for being an influencer in that space. And then also just having influence over a space because you are more open about sharing your story. And I think that your openness is really refreshing because you do share maybe some of the negative experiences too, some of the struggles and some of the highlights. It feels very real every time I check out your social media stories. Yeah, I don’t know. That’s so refreshing for me. What was that like for you to decide to actually start posting about these things?
Brittany: That was kind of hard, actually. For the first two years, I think the way I described it to people was that I felt like I was kind of ‘in a shell.’ I was very withdrawn because a lot of my PhD struggles took up a lot of my mental capacity. I just really didn’t have the desire at all to show up and to be seen, and honestly, to be that vulnerable to so many people online and to show them I’m struggling. Because a lot of people, again, like I mentioned, were set up the aesthetic. Everyone looks like, “Oh, they’re having such a good time in their PhD, they’re accomplishing so much. Why don’t I feel that way? Why am I not doing X, Y, Z?”
What I realized recently was that I guess I could go through those times, but I didn’t have to share it in real time. I can still share it now, which is what I’m learning to do right now, which is part of this project I’m working on for my podcast. I’m trying to write a series or make it episode, whatever series of episodes of all the different struggles I’ve kind of gone through. And sharing my thought process through that and what I did, what I wish I did differently, so that hopefully people who listen to the podcast or future people who encounter the podcast can learn from it. And can see, I wouldn’t say the bad side of things, but just these are things that people don’t want to openly talk about. And I think that it does take time to get over it so that you have fully processed it in a way that you can talk about it in a more meaningful way than just, I guess venting about it. Because I never really want to come off that way, even though in real life in the moment, I’m just like, “Oh my God, this was so stressful. Why are things like this?”
But when I talk to other people, younger students and things like that, I have to actively reframe it in my mind. How do I make this useful or helpful to them? Or what can I take away from it? How can I improve through this experience? Which has been happening a lot recently.
Jennifer: You’ve been doing more mentoring yourself, haven’t you?
Brittany: Yeah, a lot of mentoring in terms of in the lab. I’ve had four undergrads so far, and I have two right now. And then I also do some mentoring for first year students. So when they come in, they have a lot of questions about how do I join a group? How do I talk to a professor? Which group should I join and what are things I should look out for and stuff like that. Whenever I give advice, I always preface it with, this was my experience, because I never want to come off as I know everything. I’m just being like, I’m just sharing my experience, and you can take away what you want to take away from it. Honestly, I feel like that’s the same approach I have for my podcast as well.
Beyond Your Science, a podcast for grad students and early career scientists
Jennifer: So who should subscribe to your podcast? What’s it called, and where can people find it?
Brittany: My podcast is called Beyond Your Science. It’s available on Apple Podcast and Spotify. It’s really for any graduate student or early career scientist who wants to explore the intersection between science, creativity, and entrepreneurship. And so those are some of the core pillars I talk about on my podcast. Grad school is just a part of it for now just because I’m in it, but that’s not giving advice on how to get into grad school or anything. One thing I really would love to focus on more in the future is kind of small businesses in STEM, just because I think that’s a really niche area that we don’t really hear a lot about when we’re in grad school. In grad school, we hear about becoming a professor or going to industry, and we also actually hear a lot about people going into startups and entrepreneurship and stuff.
But at least on the grad school level, I haven’t really heard a lot about people choosing a small business route after grad school. But because of getting to know so many academics on online over the years and seeing where they’ve gone, a lot of them have started their own businesses and things like that because of the flexibility, the freedom to do what they would like to pursue their own ideas. I think those are all things that we as graduate students, we really value. And so I kind of want to show more people that this is a possibility for you if you could consider it. Yeah.
How Brittany’s thinking about academic websites has changed
Jennifer: Oh, that’s so cool. That’s really exciting for me to hear. And that’s kind of the first time I’m hearing about this too. So I love that you shared that. Now, I’m curious, how has your thinking about websites changed since our last interview? It’s been a while. I know we’ve worked on websites together. Overall, how has maybe your thinking changed over time?
Brittany: Oh my God, that’s such a good question because let me tell you, when I first started, I had just gotten out of undergrad and I was starting my job. I was trying to convince grad students to create websites for their work. And at the time when I started four years ago before coming to grad school, I was just really baffled. I was like, why don’t you want to create websites for your work? Why aren’t you proud of your work? Because you’re doing cool stuff and you’re super qualified. But no amount of me encouraging them could really get them to change anything. So I would just be like, “Oh, well, whenever you’re ready, this information is here for you.” But now that I became a grad student, I understand why.
Jennifer: Oh, wait, wait. Tell me a couple of reasons why. Because there’s definitely grad students listening to this that are like, ‘I think that might be me.’
Brittany: Yeah. Okay. Because I have my website and my website has all my website design stuff, my podcast stuff. But for the longest time, I didn’t really want to talk about my research at all. I didn’t want to share it with people.
Jennifer: What’s your research on?
Brittany: My research is focused on polymer chemistry specifically. Right now, I’m learning or developing a method to make more make up this polymerization more environmentally friendly. Before that, I was learning about how polymers can be made stronger and tougher for high impact materials, aerospace equipment, military equipment, things like that. So I’m just really interested in polymers and how their mechanical properties are useful. But now, right now I’m mostly focusing on how to synthesize polymers in a more eco-friendly way.
Jennifer: I love that! And I love the environment, so that’s my favorite. What about that felt like you wanted to hold it back or hold that part of yourself back from sharing on your website, and have you shared it?
Brittany: I think it was because I just didn’t really have the tangible result to show: because I didn’t have a paper. I still don’t have a paper. I’m a fourth year student PhD candidate. I have no papers. It just reminded me of that Pride and Prejudice quote, “I’m 27 years old and I have no prospects.”
Jennifer: I love it. We’re both readers. We both love classical music. Brittany and I are good friends, and there’s so many reasons why.
Brittany: But seriously, that’s the reason why I feel so, I don’t want to say ashamed, but just a little bit hesitant to be like, ‘This is my research.” I haven’t published anywhere. I maybe presented at a conference, but that work is unpublished and I don’t know if that will be published anytime soon. All those reasons combined. Plus, just the way that just by the nature of the PhD experience. I just naturally feel more inadequate than before. Imposter syndrome, right? All those reasons combined makes me not want to own up to it. I guess at least professionally, it’s easy for me to just say, “I’m a Graduate Research Assistant, because that’s what I am on paper. But to be like, “I’m a scientist.” I don’t really know about that.
Jennifer: It feels like a stretch, even though that’s not true. You’re mentoring future scientists already [laughing].
Brittany: I’m doing science, more science than a normal person does. Even if I don’t feel that that way, I am already doing it. That’s kind of what I had to tell myself. Yeah.
Jennifer: So did you put it on your website?
Brittany: I finally did put it on my website.
Jennifer: Oh my goodness.
Brittany: Yeah, because I was like, oh, my bio has nothing about chemistry. So it’s just in my bio, it’s like a little blurb. It says, Brittany is a PhD candidate in chemistry. Her research focuses on synthesizing high impact polymers in a more eco-friendly way and leveraging their tough mechanical properties into industrial applications.
It was really hard to condense what I do into a couple of words that are easy to understand. On one hand, it felt like I was oversimplifying, but on the other hand, I was like, I’m not going to go into the details. If someone was really interested, they could ask. But that was also really hard because I was like, it makes it sound like what I do sounds really, I don’t know, noble and great? But I don’t feel that way on the day to day. You know what I mean? At least I assume a lot of graduate students probably feel some type of way about their research.
Jennifer: Oh my goodness. Professors feel that kind of way about their research. Let me tell you, that feeling of being unsure about how you’re talking about your research and the things you care about most? That doesn’t go away when you become a mid-career researcher or a senior researcher, and you might even struggle to talk about it the way that you feel when you’re retired. So I think that it’s something many people struggle with it. And I love that you shared what you wrote with us because it sounded great.
Brittany: Yeah. I used your tips from a previous podcast interview, I think with Dr. Echo Rivera.
Jennifer: Ooh. For anyone who is listening, we do talk about how to write an amazing conference speaker bio. That’s great for academics writing any kind of bio. So I hope you’ll check that out.
Updating her personal website
Jennifer: Now, your online presence has changed as your new life experiences and goals have popped up. One of the things that you did was redoing your website, and you just talked about adding in that bio. What prompted you to want to redo your website? I know as a website designer myself, that’s a project I’ve been putting off for so long. I need to do it. So what prompted you to do it?
Brittany: Yeah. For the longest time, I had started with all my services about website design or workshops about website design. And then as I was realizing I don’t really have the capacity to do this anymore, I started making those pages hidden. I didn’t want to highlight that anymore. And then just throughout grad school, I realized I don’t really know if I want to just leave it open for website design right now. So I kind of want to just make it very clear that I’m trying to build my personal brand instead. That my personal brand still includes website design tips, but that I’m not actively soliciting new clients.
And I think that has really helped because now on my website, it’s just me featuring my podcast, which is my main mode of sharing and building my personal brand through the podcast and also LinkedIn newsletter. Then also kind of just repackaging some of the things I already had, some of the resources I had so that it’s still useful to people, but it’s more organized. I finally did that a couple months ago. And I also did a podcast episode where I talked about the process of me deciding to do that. But again, it was also something that I had put off for the longest time too. Because school, life, all the other things that come first.
Jennifer: Exactly. Sometimes we have to prioritize all the other things, and it’s okay to put off the thing with your online presence as long as you need to. I love that Brittany made that list because what she was ready, she knew what she wanted to do.
Best Personal Academic Websites Contest returns in 2025
Jennifer: Now we have done, since we last did our interview, two annual Best Personal Academic Website Contests. It was so fun to be able to share some amazing websites from grad students, postdocs, early career researchers, people who were in research labs. Oh my goodness. There were just so many people who were curious to submit to this contest. Would you be open to doing another one with me next year? What do you think?
Brittany: Yeah, I love doing it. I love seeing how people show their research, show themselves through their websites. It’s very interesting to see how people interpret also website tips and then implement it on their website too. And I think also because we do it with Owlstown. Owlstown is [a website builder] made for academics. I think it’s really fun to see how people still are able to customize it to their own needs.
Jennifer: Brittany and I are both designers, and so we’re thinking about every little detail, but for so many people, all you need is a website. And it is totally amazing that Dr. Ian Li has created Owlstown, a free academic website builder that you can easily make your website in. What is it? Like 15 minutes? I mean, it’s really fast. We did it on that call.
Brittany: Yeah, it’s very fill in the blank type of [website design]. That’s what I told this to the grad students in my department too. I was like, if you guys need a website, just use this. It’s so fast and easy. You don’t need to think about the design.
Jennifer: Even if you do eventually want that fully designed website in the future, if you know it’s not on your list this year or next, I mean make an Owlstown website, it will create a stronger online presence for you like today.
Brittany: Yeah. And I also met Ian, around the same time I met you or reached out to him around the same time. I also had to test it out for myself before I recommended it to people. When I tested it out, it was in its early stages, and even in its early stages, I was like, wow, this is really good. And then over time, he started developing more features and things and I was like, sold. This is so good now.
Jennifer: Right? I love how responsive he is. If you have a question about it or a suggestion, some kind of feature that you want to see, if he thinks it’ll help people, he’ll try and make that feature happen. It’s so cool.
Jennifer: Now, research lab and group websites, that is something we’ve been teaming up on for VIP days where professors get a done-for-you website in one day. I mean, seriously, we gather the materials in advance. We have a Planning Meeting. We talk about things like website aesthetics and colors and stuff and what you want. But then Brittany and I, and my husband, Matthew, we team up, we create the website for you in just one day. Oh my goodness. Brittany teaming up with you on this has been amazing. It’s been so transformative. I’m honestly shocked by how much we’ve been able to get done in one day.
Brittany: Yeah, me too. I think it’s really nice to work in a team like this because before I had just been working on my own. I think the workflow of gathering all the content beforehand helps so much. Because then you know what needs to go on the page, and it just makes everything go by so much faster.
Jennifer: Exactly. Now we can totally work together. If you’re looking for that bigger done-for-you research lab website [Strategic Website Design service]. Brittany, and I may still be able to help with that, but Team Website VIP days is what I recommend for most research labs, especially if this is going to be your first website. It’s not like a redesign. So we only have a couple days left in 2024, but please reach out about the new year. We would love to work with you and help your research lab or group. Brittany, what should people know about their research lab website or group website? Do they need one? Who should consider this kind of service?
Brittany: If you are a professor who’s actively recruiting students, you definitely need a website. I remember even when I was looking for groups and such, or even students now when they’re coming in and they’re looking at professors, they check the website. They go and see when was it last updated? Are students graduating? Is your group still active? Because the student is trying to prepare as much as they can to know about the professor so that when they meet the professor, they can talk about the research or ask about active projects and how they can get involved. Or, talk about what skills they bring to the table and things like that. But it’s going to be kind of hard for them to do that if there’s no website. Or, if you just have a very broad research statement on your faculty page or something.
The other thing is that students may be interested in the general area of research, but they may not know exactly what the research work entails. Maybe some people will be like, “Oh, just read the papers.” But in all honesty, a lot of students when they’re coming in, they’re very overwhelmed with enrolling in classes, teaching classes, looking for a group, acclimating to their new city. Trying to also parse out which papers are relevant to current projects at the moment is also very difficult. I really advocate for professors to have this on their website: a very clear or recently updated Projects page with publications that are most relevant or recent so that the student can easily pick out. “Okay, let me read the update on this and see where, what they’re doing right now, where could I fit in,” and things like that. So definitely professors of any age that wants to get students interested in their work. And, especially younger professors. I think now a lot of younger professors are, they’re trying to build a personal brand and everything in addition to the research.
Jennifer: This is a great use of startup funds. You can pay with your university monies. So please don’t hesitate to reach out if you are interested in having a VIP Day website for your research group or lab.
Jennifer: Brittany has been so much fun to have you back on The Social Academic podcast. Is there anything you’d like to chat about or add before we wrap up?
Brittany: No, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed working on the VIP days with you because it lets me still be a part of the helping academics with their websites, but kind of more on the back end of things. That just helps me as a graduate student right now because I’m just not able to do the front facing stuff at the moment.
Jennifer: Yeah, we’re perfect partners on this. And Dr. Makella Coudray, whose research lab website we did recently. We just had a workshop with her research group and she said that she now feels like her online presence is a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. It’s a 10, and her website is a huge part of that. It makes her feel really good about her research and it makes her lab really excited to help share it. So I’m just so proud of the work that we’ve been able to do together so far, and excited for all the work to come.
Brittany: Yeah, me too.
Jennifer: Brittany, thank you so much for coming on today’s show.
Brittany Trinh is a Vietnamese-American website designer and chemist. She helps enterprising scientists, science communicators, and academic entrepreneurs create a website that integrates your creativity and expertise. Brittany knows when your website reflects the awesome things you do within and beyond STEM, it helps you forge your own path.
She hosts the Beyond Your Science Podcast, where she talks about integrating science, entrepreneurship, and creativity within and beyond STEM, from her own experiences and interviews with other scientists and small-business owners. Listen to the Beyond Your Science Podcast.
Brittany is a PhD candidate in Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on synthesizing high-impact polymers in a more eco-friendly way and leveraging their tough mechanical properties into industrial applications. She received her BS in Chemistry with a minor in Psychology from the University of Houston. Follow her research on Google Scholar.
When she’s not in the lab, she’s probably playing piano or violin, watching slice-of-life anime, or cooking some kind of noodle.
Dr. Andrea Rexilius joins me on The Social Academic to talk about her new edited anthology, We Can See Into Another Place: Mile-High Writers on Social Justice (The Bookies Press and Bower House 2024). This innovative, multi-genre anthology brings together writers and faculty from the Mile-High MFA Program at Regis University in Colorado.
In this featured interview, Dr. Andrea Rexilius joins me to talk about social justice, radical imagination, and the power of storytelling. Read Andrea’s bio.
In this interview
Meet Andrea
Jennifer: Hello everyone. Welcome to The Social Academic. This is Jennifer van Alstyne and we are right after Election Day [USA]. So there are a lot of feelings and emotions out there. And even though this episode isn’t gonna air for a little while, the topic we are talking about today is social justice.
Andrea: Sure. Thank you Jennifer. Good to see you. I am a professor and writer living in Denver, Colorado, teaching at Regis University in the Mile-High MFA and Creative Writing Program. I think that’s all I’ll say.
Jennifer: Great. I’m curious because you’ve reached out to me about this episode and I’m wondering what prompted this anthology? What made you decide to bring together these faculty, these writers from the Mile-High program together into one collection?
Andrea: Well, they’re such interesting writers. They’re varied in terms of their genre, their aesthetic, which is also representative of the program that they were all teaching in. But a lot of them, there’s about 20, 21 of them in the anthology, and they don’t all always overlap. So I wanted to kind of, since they’re all part of that same conversation, teaching similar students working with the Mile-High MFA program at various times over the last nine years. I just wanted to put them a little bit more in conversation with each other, especially some of them that hadn’t crossed paths before, just to celebrate all of them together and share their work with, I think some of them probably looked each other up, but just to share their work with one another and with the public, with everybody else, because there’s just tremendous writing coming from all of them.
Jennifer: Yeah, the collection was tremendous and emotional and almost fraught with language that really pulls you in.
I’m curious, the anthology brings together a lot of genres, like multi-genre anthology. What made anthology and book the right format for sharing these stories?
Andrea: Yeah, I think in terms of anthology, it was kind of unusual to gather a kind of multi-genre format for an anthology. They’re traditionally fiction or their creative nonfiction or their poetry. A lot of writers only maybe read in one of those genres. A lot readers only read in one of those genres. We also have a graphic narrative, a comic strip in here. We have some playwriting.
And so all of those different ways of kind of conveying ideas seemed interesting to gather into one publication and to sort of begin to maybe break down some of those barriers across genre. There’s more and more interest in hybrid writing and reading hybrid materials, but something that actually celebrates genre distinctions and also genre overlap seems like an important thing to sort of add to the literary conversation.
Jennifer: I felt like your essay at the start, the introduction was so powerful in terms of shaping, the openness and the hope and the tenuousness that writers can achieve through storytelling. I found myself transported into each one of those writer’s forms. It felt like I was jumping from poetry to play to that, the graphic one, it was just overwhelming in the sense that I hadn’t really considered so many voices on this subject in the genre-bending kind of format. It was a different kind of experience to me compared to other things that I’ve read about social justice that I’ve watched about social justice this year. And it felt more powerful because of that. Like the collective of voices and the difference in genre made it more meaningful and impactful for me.
Did you find that when you were putting together, the different sections, and the layout for the book?
Andrea: Yeah, absolutely. It was really interesting because initially what kind of bound the writers together was their overlapping relationship with the MFA program. But I also just wanted to create an artifact of that kind of archive. All of those voices that were part of that community at the Mile-High, which is still continuing on, but that’s the first nine years of it. And I didn’t have the theme so much in mind when I first started gathering things. I wasn’t sure, is this something I’m just going to make as a kind of PDF that I make available to the community? Or, am I going to try to seek out a publisher, and put it into the larger world?
Pretty early on I had begun gathering some things and in the process of gathering them, I started shopping around some local presses in the Colorado area to see if it might be something they’d be interested in. And as sort of a long answer to what you asked me. But as I was shifting into, “Okay, it’s actually gonna be published by a press, it’s going to be a book that is available to anybody. It’s not just sort of in-house community. I started noticing patterns in the early submissions. And that’s where the theme began to develop from.
Also, seeing like how some of the poems communicated with the fiction, just the little overlaps and detail that were coming in were really interesting. That’s how the [Young Adult] interview got in there as well. ‘Cause there were so many writers, like Stephen Dunn’s piece, Addie Tsai’s piece, Lori Ostlund’s piece, where they’re talking about experiences in high school or as young adults and how writing impacted them, why they became writers and avid readers, and what their experiences to were with reading. They weren’t always delightful.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Andrea: So that started to kind of naturally grow out of the process of gathering those submissions.
Jennifer: I’m curious, who do you feel should really read this book? Who should go out and buy a copy or buy it for someone that they know or love?
Andrea: I mean, on the day that we’re recording this, I would say everybody should go read this book. I mean there’s many different representations and iterations of what we mean by social justice in the book, you know? It speaks to social economic stuff. It’s speaking to race relations, all kinds of different power dynamics speaking to neurological difference, the environments. It’s just a wide swath of what we think about when we are collectively, socially trying to enact justice for ourselves and our daily lives. But it also, like, the thing that I think about when I come to social justice is the idea of ‘radical imagination.’ And the idea that the mind, the interior, I quote Emily Dickinson at the beginning of the book, I love, I’m a poet, so I’m always referencing her, but she has a line, ‘The brain is wider than the sky.’ So this idea that like the mental space, the interior space is larger than this external world. It can imagine anything.
So when it feels like something, when possibilities are shutting down, I think the most powerful thing you can do is just remember that you have your own imagination. You can envision a different way forward. You can still be disappointed. You know we still have all of our emotions in relation to these things, but being able to maintain and hang onto that hope and awareness that like it’s always yours. It’s always in you. You always have that power of the interior and the mind to think differently than what the external world might be kind of crushing you into thinking and feeling and being.
Jennifer: Ooh, that was powerful. I needed to hear that too. I’m like crying. I’m like, what do I have tissues near me? And I don’t. But what I really gravitated toward from what you said is the word, ‘hope.’ Like the imagination can create hope. It can create futures that we haven’t experienced or thought of. It can be world opening. How do you hope this book can inform or provide an entrance into some kind of change or transformation?
Andrea: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I’m gonna quote a couple things and then talk about the final section of the book.
Jennifer: I love that
Andrea: My frameworks at Emily Dickinson again, “I dwell in possibility” because I think so much of diminishment of hope is feeling that the possibilities are becoming fewer and fewer. But again, that idea of radical imagination, if we can imagine something different than what we are being told must happen, or that there’s this kind of non-linearity, there’s always a possibility for something to shift or to swerve. And the more we think toward that possibility, I think the more empowered we stay.
And then this Toni Morrison quote was so important in thinking about putting together this book. She says, “Don’t let anybody convince you this is the world is, and therefore must be, it must be the way it ought to be.” That speaks similarly, I think to the Emily Dickinson piece about possibility that nothing has to be any particular way. Sometimes it’s that particular way.
But knowing that we still have so much inside of us that can speak out, that can share our experiences, that can voice things that the dissent from the powers that be, I mean, hopefully we retain that powers. I mean, people go underground, they make zines. We get the word out in whatever way we need to. And right now there’s this book, the last section, we move into questions for the reader that kind of bring you into this state of reflection and get you in touch with your own ideas and imagination.
So, what would you like to give voice to? How do you survive and thrive when everything feels like it is on fire? That’s a great question for today.
Jennifer: Today’s the day for that one. Woo.
Andrea: And probably in the coming days and first of the year, that’ll be a great one to speak to. What is your hope for re-imagining of our societal and cultural future? What actions would help us move individually and or collectively toward that re-imagined future? So finding ways to bring those spaces, those radical imagination and those imaginings into external action, to starting small, making it grow larger, finding people to share your voice with who, who have similar thoughts and feelings, putting it in a book form, reading something where other people speak to that.
Jennifer: A lot of professors, faculty members are listening to this podcast. And I’m curious, is this a book that would fit well in like a classroom discussion? Is this something that can or should be taught?
Andrea: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think it would be great for high school, for college or book clubs for all kinds of reading groups because they’re part of the multi-genre aspect too. There’s something in it for everybody. If you’re not super into reading essays, there’s a comic. If you don’t love poetry, there’s short stories. If you aren’t into any of that, there are some interviews with why young adults, authors at the end.
There’s places for you to do your own thinking and writing and responding to whatever was in the book. It’s meant to be engaging in that way, to invite people to participate in the conversation of the book, and to add their own voice if they think something’s missing from it, if there’s something, that they wanna add, all of those openings are are there. And it would be great.
I think too, just thinking about in a classroom setting, thinking about how the different genres and pieces in here speak to these topics as well. What unique things happen formally in short story or poetry or essay. So yeah, thanks for asking that.
Jennifer: Now, as editor, maybe you don’t have like favorites, but I’m curious if you have one or two pieces you could share with us that especially faculty members might find a spark, or something that really draws them in.
Andrea: Yeah, I mean, you mentioned Steven Dunn and I think his piece in here is just absolutely brilliant. And he is speaking about his experiences in English class and then feeling left out of that conversation, feeling like it’s a conversation just for white people. He’s only reading stories written by white authors and is being told that his voice is incorrect, that he needs to correct his grammar, his way of being, his way of speaking. And I think that’s another thing like that this book demonstrates to some extent, through the genre, but also part of what we were all trying to do in the program together with students was just let every let people know like, you can be who you are.
So in order to be a good writer, you have to speak, you have to get in touch with what, who you actually are and what you actually want to say. And that’s when the writing becomes the most powerful. You shouldn’t be trying to conform your voice to anybody else’s. And I hear that in Steven’s piece and Addie Tsai’s piece.
There’s a lot of interesting reflecting in a lot of the pieces too: David Heska, Wanbli Weiden is writing this essay about his grandmother who was in a Native American boarding school that are infamous for, cultural obliteration and all kinds of horrific things. And she has this nostalgia for the boarding school.
He’s kind of reckoning with that, and sort of wondering why, answering why she might have that nostalgia in really interesting, complicated ways. And the ending of that piece I think really speaks to that reckoning with his grandmother’s state of mind and why she might have had that nostalgia and what other of nostalgia she had. I don’t wanna spoil the ending, but that’s one of my favorites because it.
Jennifer: I loved that piece.
Andrea: Yeah.
Jennifer: I’d be happy if you’d be open to reading something. That sounds great.
Andrea: I’ll read maybe a little bit from Steven’s piece that I was talking about. More beige. All right. I dunno what happens. Okay. It’s a snow day here. I usually am wearing bright colors, but I’m engaged. So this book to, or the piece from Steve Dunn, it’s from a book that he is working on called Travel With Nas, and he is co-writing it with a bunch of his friends and family members, which is, so it’s a collaborative project. He recently published another book, Tannery Bay, which he co-wrote with Katie Jean Shinkle. So that idea of sort of conversational collaborative writing comes through in his work in general too.
Jennifer: I love that.
Andrea: This is Intro / An Excerpt from Travel with Nas by Steven Dunn.
“I grew up in a small town in West Virginia: Kimball (population 500). I read a lot before going to middle school, but outside of textbooks and newspapers, I read only one book from the ages of 12-21. I’m a novelist now, a Creative Writing professor, and I write book reviews.
Reading only one book was partly an institutional fault, and partly my fault:
Partly my fault because I cared more about math painting and maps.
Partly an institutional fault because of poverty. And we were assigned only one little funky ass book throughout middle and high school, The Old Man and The Sea. We watched Of Mice and Men,Grapes of Wrath and Little Women. I hated English classes because they were mostly about correcting our language by prescribing us with ways to speak. We learned that the generations of language we celebrated in, cried in, analyzed with and joked in was wrong. And the books were about white people and white problems and white triumphs and white hopes and white dreams. So I was like, ‘Fuck English and literature and all that white bullshit.’ I was right and I was wrong.
I was wrong about English and literature because of course Black people have been writing literature about us, I just didn’t know shit about it, And them white folks ain’t care enough to teach it. I was right because I was listening to rap. And I was wrong because I was listening to rap.”
—Steven Dunn
Jennifer: Oh, Steven Dunn’s words are so powerful. I love that he’s interested in collective writing and also that he posts about the writing that he does on Facebook. So even if you’re not, the book’s not out yet, but like, I feel like I know a little bit more about Nas and about his process of writing it because he’s open to sharing it.
Online presence as an author
Jennifer: Actually, that kind of brings me into my next question. I’m curious about your online presence as an author. What’s it like to be a faculty member and a writer, and just like a person who your personality is like quite vivacious in the sense that it’s so memorable. How do you craft all of that online and show kind of your personality when you are in online spaces?
Andrea: Oh, wow. That’s a great question. I’m pretty introverted. Pretty like, I feel like it’s hard to know how that comes across. But I think of my social media, the way I curate it, because we’re all sort of curating it to some extent. I’m trying to maybe express my academic self on there, posting about books, about readings, sharing events with students, trying to kind of build that community with the MFA students and everybody in the Front Range, bringing different communities that I’m part of together. I’m teaching at Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop, a community creative writing place, and also at a Regis University. So sort of colliding some of those folks at times. And then I have my sort of like more artsy poetic life where I am doing some volunteer classes at this farm in Lafayette [Colorado] that some of my friends run.
Jennifer: Really?
Andrea: They have a little, they have a farm share. It’s called Community Farm
Jennifer: That’s so cool.
Andrea: And there’s an art lab. So I had a former student of mine donated a bunch of arts supplies, and so it’s just overfilling with art supplies. So I’ve been hosting like collage and mask making parties there.
Jennifer: Ugh, that’s amazing. Mask making parties. I’m so jealous. So Dr. Rexilius and I know each other from Naropa University at the Jack Kerouac School back when I was in my MFA program. So I’m so excited we’re having this conversation now, but I am super jealous of these art classes. That sounds so fun. And I love What I see from you on social media is a lot of your artistic side. Like I remember your moth costume, your masks. Like I love seeing that part of who you are in online spaces for sure. What about as an author, we talked about like what you do for your community.
Andrea: Right. Right.
Jennifer: What’s it like talking about yourself as an author online? That one’s really fun [Andrea holds a mask to her face].
Andrea: Talking about myself as an author, I probably should do more of that because I tend to keep my process pretty low key. I don’t share about my writing process as much. I share more about the end result. I might share more about my creative process. I share more of the kind of masks and art making that I’m doing visual art making.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Andrea: But if I have something finished published, then I tend, I’ll share that.
Jennifer: Nice.
Andrea: Yeah. But I like to keep my process a little bit more to myself because I like to have it untouched by other opinions.
Jennifer: Oh, I’m so glad you shared that. That’s a really nice perspective. It’s not so much as private as protecting it almost.
Andrea: Yeah.
Jennifer: Like protecting your process. That’s beautiful. Oh, thank you for sharing that with me. I’m curious, is there anything you really dislike about social media or about being online?
Andrea: I don’t like social media.
Jennifer: You don’t like it at all? That’s totally fine.
Andrea: When you asked, I was like, ‘oh!’ I just panicked. I was like, do I have a presence? I do because I’m the Director of this program, I have a presence to be online for that. I do have different sort of pages that I manage. So different hats that I put on. I post more of the artsy personal stuff on my own page. That’s me. But it also, part of me is that community aspect. And then I have some program specific pages where, it’s maybe a little more professional or like posting, sharing work by the authors, in this collection sharing student work. As much as I know if people tell me about it, but it’s fine.
Jennifer: That’s always part of the process.
Andrea: Yeah. I don’t wanna… I try not to spend a lot of time scrolling on social media.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Andrea: But yeah, I guess I like, the part of it that I do like is it does connect so many aspects of my world over the years that otherwise would have, many of them I think would have, disappeared from my life entirely. Like friendships in high school, things like that. And it is really nice to sort of just see what people are up to. Even if I’m somebody that I was best friends with when I was 16 or something just to see, get a glimpse of their life.
Jennifer: I saw a childhood friend of mine who I haven’t talked to in, oh my gosh, a couple decades maybe, just had a child. And I was so touched for her, like we don’t talk, but it still felt meaningful to me. So you don’t like social media and you have actually a strong online presence compared to a lot of faculty members because you’re wanting to be part of that community and wanting to bring together communities as well. That’s really interesting.
Andrea: Yeah, I always think if I didn’t have this job, I would leave Facebook, but I’m still there.
Jennifer: Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. You’re still there. That’s true. Well, you gotta have somewhere to share your masks.
Andrea: That’s right. Yeah. I might keep it just to share the masks. I say I would leave, but I probably just share weirder things.
Jennifer: Right, a little bit leaning more into your personality. Exactly.
Jennifer: Now academics who I’d say don’t consider themselves writers are listening to this, and I want them to go out and buy your book. I’m also curious, like if they are interested in leaning into more social justice lenses or social justice audiences, even for their writing. Is there somewhere you recommend they start? Maybe if this is their first time leaning into that area? I’d say they’re academics who maybe don’t consider themselves writers, even though they do quite a bit of writing.
Andrea: Well, there’s lots of amazing literary conferences of all sizes and topics and themes. There’s a couple of things that I would note. Like in Denver, there’s a really great conference that The Word Storytelling, A Sanctuary runs. They have a conference called Margins. And so it’s an audience primarily of people of color who are writers. Talking about all types of different things. Some of that overlaps social justice. And I think that idea, radical imagination too, is this sort of holding equally everybody’s voice and making space for everybody’s voice to be heard. And maybe even making more space for the voices that are typically more marginalized. So that place would be a good place to start. There’s also a website called Writing the Other that is for writers and thinking about the publishing industry and how to, thinking about representation, appropriation, those kinds of issues, and how to navigate those as writers which I think also relates writers, academics, social justice, kind of entwines with all of those things. And then looking at this anthology has so many amazing authors in it. You can read any of them. Read interviews by them. They’re on podcasts. They’re doing online interviews. They have amazing things to say creatively, critically, academically. So there’s 20 people right there who have your back and can, who are also really open and friendly and up for answering questions. I shouldn’t speak for all of them, but reach out, see if they’re willing to engage. They definitely do a lot of them do classroom visits. They are used to sort of doing interviews and podcasts and things like that too.
Jennifer: Oh, that is so cool. I want everyone to go out and get your copy of We Can See Into Another Place. This is an important anthology, especially for academics like you. Oh, it made big difference when I read it, and I hope it does for you as well. Andrea, is there anything else that you’d like to touch on, talk about before we wrap up today?
Andrea: I think we got everything. Thank you so much for having me. It was really lovely to see you again and have this conversation with you.
Jennifer: Oh, I’m so excited to share your book with everyone and to feature you on The Social Academic. Thank you so much.
Dr. Andrea Rexilius is the author of Sister Urn (Sidebrow, 2019), New Organism: Essais (Letter Machine, 2014), Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine, 2012), and To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011), as well as the chapbooks, Séance (Coconut Books, 2014), To Be Human (Horseless Press, 2010), and Afterworld (above/ground press, 2020).
She earned an MFA in Poetry from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2005), and a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Denver (2010). Andrea is the program director for Regis University’s Mile-High MFA in Creative Writing. She also teaches in the Poetry Collective at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado.
Your online presence creates a legacy for your work and supports your professional goals for your research, teaching, and leadership. And yes, you probably have been putting it at the bottom of your to-do list… Join us and let’s change that!
This Q&A was hosted by Ana Pineda, PhD, of I Focus And Write on October 10, 2024.
Introduction
Ana: This happens a lot to me too. Just quickly for the rest of us watching the recording. I started the recording a bit late, but I was introducing you to Jennifer Van Alstyne, and she’s the expert on having an online presence, not only academic, but personal branding, especially for academics. Although I think your profile goes much further and you all should start following her, and I will send you some links later for her social media, her channels, her website.
I discovered [Jennifer] very early on in this business and something that I hope we are going to speak more about it, I was struggling with my, my online presence as an academic and also as a business. I thought, “Ah, Jennifer one day she, she should come and tell us more. I teach you, this is something I encourage you all when you want to connect with someone, send them an email, send them a message in social media, tell them what you would like to maybe have a coffee with them or organize something with them. And that’s it. This is how Jennifer and I contacted and now she’s here talking with all of you and I’m super excited. Thank you. Jennifer, do you want to tell us a bit about you to start?
Jennifer: Hi everyone. I’m so happy to be here and to talk with you all. Let’s see, I have been helping professors one-on-one with their online presence since 2018. And it really started off as, as thinking that I would help with websites specifically, but most of my clients needed help with more than just their website because being online isn’t just about having a website. You can actually be online without a website, too. And so really figuring out online presence wasn’t a one size fits all solution. A website wasn’t going to be the answer for everyone helped me evolve my business over time.
Now, it’s been like, what, six and a half years and I help people with websites, social media, and bio writing. And really I’d say our work is about confidence. Our work is about the confidence to be able to show up and to feel like you’re worthy enough, and that you deserve space online. I love getting to help people with that.
Ana: Oh, so nice. And I love that you linked to, to this, to the aspect of feeling confident because I was telling to Jennifer like, I think 90% of my audience, of you here, of our students suffer severe imposter syndrome, and this feeling that we are not good enough. And I see that for me, but also probably for many of you that here, this stops us from showing up online and sharing our words. We always feel, I sent an email today with some of those thoughts. The, “who am I to say this on LinkedIn,” or, “am I bragging if I’m sharing this paper that got published.” Something also like, “What is this person going to think when it says that I post this,” right? Something some of my students say is I think on that teacher I had once or something a supervisor said that you had 10 years ago. Sometimes you still have these thoughts of, “What is this specific person going to think? And this stops us. It truly stops us. I hope that also for all of you that you live with some ideas of how to stop these imposter thoughts when it comes to your online presence today. Love it. So for today, it’s a, Jennifer told me, I love interactive sessions and we need your help. Please, we need your help for the, of course I have questions here ready for Jennifer, but we would love to hear your questions.
Jennifer: I have a question if that’s okay for everyone who’s listening. This is one of the questions that I, I like to ask people when we start working together because it really is different for everyone, no matter where you are on feeling imposter syndrome, no matter where you are in your career.
How you feel about your online presence is, is very internal. It’s very personal. So I’m curious if 0 is like, “I don’t have an online presence at all,” and 10 is like, “I have a great online presence, I’m really confident in it. It’s the exact online presence I want.” Where are you on that range? From like zero of no online presence at all to 10, amazing online presence.
How would you rate yourself? 4, 2, 3. Yeah. Quite low. Good. This is very, very normal. Very normal to feel like maybe there’s a lot more you could do or maybe want to do to have a stronger online presence.
I’m curious, those of you who feel like you’re on the really lower end of the scale, 0, 1, 2, 3, I’m curious, have you done something for your online presence already or is this like, “There’s a bunch of things that I want to do that I know I’m not doing and I really don’t have an online presence at all.”
Where are you thinking when you’re at the lower numbers? Is it more about actions that I haven’t taken or actions that I’ve taken that don’t feel like enough?
‘I think I’ve tried a lot.’ Yeah. Oh my, ‘the university forces me to,’ I love that answer. For a lot of people that is perfect. Yeah. Okay.
I just wanted to show even though we’re all here and we’re all here together and there is a range for where people feel for your online presence, my hope is that by the end of this workshop you’ll feel like there’s at least one small step that you can take to improve that in a way that’s really meaningful to your life. If not more. My hope is for more, but at least one.
‘I haven’t done anything because I thought why do I have to be online?’ Well, we’ll chat about that. It’s different for different people. So, saying that you have to be online for your research, you have to be online for a job market or you have to be online for, you know, any specific reason. It’s not going to work for everyone. And finding the true reason (or reasons), it’s going to be helpful for you. Hopefully we can get closer to that today as well.
What are reasons scientists and academics should have an online presence?
Ana: Oh, I love that. And actually that is how I would like to start. So what are the main reasons, Jennifer, that you say why you should, everyone have an online presence? Maybe there are a few things that you think, oh this situation, these moments, you really need to, to work on this.
Jennifer: Well, I’ll tell you why I thought when I started people should have a stronger online presence. I really thought that if you put your publications online and you create a way to help people find them, that more people from your potentially really niche topic would be able to read them, engage with them, and share them.
And that’s true, but that’s not actually a motivating reason for the majority of people that I work with. I would say for most of the professors that I work with, they want to help more people.
They want to help more people. They want to invite opportunity for themselves, but not just any opportunity. They want to invite aligned opportunities aligned with their research, aligned with their values, aligned with what they want to be focusing their time on.
Attracting opportunities is all about finding the right people. It’s about making sure that people can see and engage with what you share. That can potentially lead to greater connection, collaboration, or a long-term working relationship. I would say it’s mostly about people and making sure that that connection is possible even when you’re not in the same space.
Ana: Oh, I love this. And actually, you know, I mainly started using as online presence, let’s say Twitter, on social media. And I don’t know if you, you also said this, but in the past there was some, they did some study and they saw that the more people tweeted about papers, than the more citations they have.
Jennifer: Yes, that is definitely true. It’s also a bit limited in how we think about it.
Ana: Yes.
Jennifer: Yes, more people will see your paper when you share it online. The question is, is it the right people? Is it the right timing? Are they still going to see it after your one post?
There’s so many ways that we can share publications, really thinking about who we want it to reach and how we want to be able to help people with the hard work we’ve already done makes a really big difference for how we show up online.
So yes, always sharing your work gets more citations, gets more readers, which is great. My hope is that it’s really engaged readers, aligned readers. Readers who could potentially cite and use your work.
Jennifer: So I’ve actually gotten more narrow in my focus for who I’m hoping to reach in my work with professors.
Ana: Yes, I love that. And actually, it was later on that I think there was another paper that also, like you said, it was like, “more citations, really, but what was then the impact of this effect?” But what they saw is that the big impact in the end, like you said in people, in networking, in collaborations, in relationships. And this is really beautiful.
Lenny says here, ‘they trying to build multidisciplinary approach of a problem, building a network is the only way and networks are so important, right?’ Networks of the right people, like you said. I love that. Yeah. So good.
Why do professors want a website, social media, or blog?
Ana: And continue with the why Jennifer. I would also like to know why your clients come to you. So do they come, do they want a website? Do they want social media? Do they want blog? What is it? Tell us more please.
Jennifer: I would say most people come to me because they want, or are thinking about a website. Oftentimes it’s something that they’ve wanted for a long time. Maybe they tried to do themselves or did do themselves, but it isn’t meeting their needs.
My most popular service is like a big website plan where we either redesign or create a website that really meets their long-term needs. That takes in-depth interviews, I mean we spent about five hours talking before I even start planning the website. That’s because for a lot of people, their needs are are so nuanced. And we really get to understand what’s going to be exciting for them, what’s going to be engaging for the people that they hope their research or their teaching research reaches.
And then some people also have different areas of their life that they want to be able to share on their website. A lot of people also come to me because they want to bring together multiple identities into one personal academic website.
Or, occasionally a website that works for both your personal website and your lab website.
The website that’s right for you doesn’t necessarily look like the website that was right for someone else. That’s why professors like to work with me, cause we find that together. They feel like they don’t have to do it alone and if they don’t want to. They don’t have to touch the website themselves, they can just have it done for them.
So especially the people a bit later in their career, like to be a little bit hands off. People who are early career researchers, we get more involved and do more things together. So yeah, it’s really fun. We customize it to what best meets the professors need.
Ana: Yes, I love that also that you said it. Every need will be different, right? And I think that’s the problem with university websites, that they are very standard first and you don’t have much there to say. So actually, if you have any questions about websites right now, please share it in the chat. So maybe we can go through there.
Holly has posted a a question, Jennifer. Maybe you can read it.
Professional website vs. Academic website vs. Lab website
Jennifer: [Holly]: ‘What are the main differences between a professional website vs. an academic website?’
I’d say there, there’s not really one. I mean it’s just the label that we’ve called the website that is meant to represent you. So, if you as a person feel like your professional identity is different from your academic identity, which is true for many people, sometimes those people actually prefer two websites.
Or they prefer to focus their website on just their professional identity vs. their academic identity. When I say that, it’s more about the audience that you hope comes to the website. If you’re hoping to mostly focus on other academics and researchers, you might have academic content there even if you have a separate professional life and maybe you’re picking and choosing what goes on there. But overall, they could be the exact same website. You could have the same label for it. It’s more how you think about your own identity, if that makes sense.
Ana: And yes, jumping in the to the effort example, I find something really useful of websites that you can attract like stakeholders, right? Like people more like maybe policy makers or companies who might be interested in applying what you are working on or, or the press, right? More for science communication. Do you then recommend to have like one single website but maybe with different sections or apps? How, how do you recommend people to deal with that?
Jennifer: I always recommend one website when possible. The websites I recommend separating out are if you have a research lab where you’re going to be highlighting your team, oftentimes the professional/academic website, the personal website version of that. It makes better sense when it’s separate.
That’s not to say that a research lab website can’t support a personal identity. It’s just that the website that you may want to build out for yourself, maybe as extensive as the research lab website, but highlighting different things. I often, often recommend separate personal website and research lab website.
In terms of consulting or like a professional identity that is separate from an academic one, I often don’t recommend dividing it. Now, if you have a business that is like officially registered, you may have to divide it for like legal reasons for. Maybe for a Terms and Conditions page or a Privacy Policy that is specific to your country.
But for most people I would say that that one website works. You can have two in one. Adding a Consulting page, adding a Services page to your academic website can really enhance how people who are at NGOs, at corporations, at other universities, at federal and foundation funders. All sorts of people like publishers, people that are outside of academia, or outside of your institution will be able to better understand you and your services and your consulting. How you approach those things from the academic pages on your website as well. I don’t typically recommend splitting your identities when possible.
It’s also easier to manage one website. So less less work overall.
Stories about opportunities from your online presence
Ana: Yeah. That’s great. And actually I was wondering, do you have any win story of people after making their websites for us? We love those.
Jennifer: I’ll be really honest and say that I’m bad at keeping up with professors that I’ve worked with after the fact. But when I have, I get really delightful stories. So one of them, this is just like a few weeks after we’d launched his website and we were adding something in. We were meeting again live. He told me this funny story that he was just at a conference in his field. This was someone who was on sabbatical this year, so he wasn’t engaging as much with the research community. He was working for the federal government at the time for the year so he hadn’t been super engaged in the research community.
When he was at this conference and someone came up to him, they recognized him, like they’d seen his photo. They said, ‘I’ve explored your whole website, I learned all about you. I would like to talk with you about a job offer.’ Now my client was not job searching, he was very happy in his position. He had his next few years very planned out. But just the fact that someone knew so much about him, about the things that he cared about and brought this actually quite aligned conversation into an actual meeting space in person so soon after the website was launched was shocking.
Also, a PhD student whose dissertation was requested by a national publication. Like they wanted them to do a writeup for a national publication just a week after launch. That’s another example of opportunities that can just come essentially as soon as you have a stronger online presence.
But those are really kind of short-term things. And the long-term things that I care more about are really about how you feel about sharing what you do.
Most of the professors that come to me, no matter where they are in their career, I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily imposter syndrome, but there is a feeling that people might not care. Like, you can know that your research is really good, you can know that you’re respected, you can know that you have people who care about you and still feel like there’s not someone who will care when you celebrate something that might feel small in comparison to other things. Or, that might feel big but almost too overwhelming to share.
What I like about working with professors is that by the end of our work together, there is this transformation of, “I deserve to have this space.” Like, “I deserve to take up this space and when I take up this space, it helps more people. It helps more of the people that I’m already trying to reach with my research. It helps more people and more students that I’m teaching,” find maybe the network or connection that they’re hoping to. There are ways to help far more people than just yourself with your website or with your online presence.
Ana: Yes. This is so nice. Connecting how you can help others is a big thing. And you just pointed also to the students, it is said that many of my colleagues, especially those that have websites, they’re also very popular with students who want to do their master thesis with them.
Jennifer: Yeah.
You can have a website for your teaching (even when research isn’t your focus)
Ana: And and that’s really nice, right? That you are also sharing your work and students can find their passions thanks to that too. Eh, love it. Oh, there are some questions.
Jennifer: Before we jump into questions, I just wanted to say that I’ve had clients who are very research focused with their website and I’ve had clients who are very teaching focused with their website.
And you can be both, but some people who are more teaching focused in life sometimes feel like they don’t deserve that same space online. But teaching resources are so valuable for students, for other faculty, for other graduate students or PhD students who might be starting to teach in your field.
Oftentimes when we get into those interviews about: What can we create with your website? How can it change and impact your life? We find really nuanced ways that it’s going to be meaningful for you. Whether it’s creating a Recruiting page or sharing a Student Internships list. There’s just so many options for how to talk with and connect with your students through your online presence. If you want to.
Having an online presence when your research is about sensitive topics
Ana: Yes. So nice. Yes. So there are some questions coming in. So, something that was asked, “How can we deal with being out there online when we research sensitive topics such as police violence?”
Jennifer: Ah, that’s a great question. Actually, one of the examples that we can look at today with Dr. Cheryl L. Johnson, she’s an early career researcher who works with violence and weapons and guns, especially juveniles who carry weapons.
Sensitive topics is something that makes a lot of people stop in whatever actions they’re taking to have a stronger online presence. Part of that is for self-protection. Part of that is also knowing the reactions that people might have based on what you share.
Whenever you have a sensitive topic, I really want you to think about the people that you want to help. Think about the people who really you do need to reach rather than thinking about all the people you want to avoid focusing on who needs to see your research to make that difference. That’s the introspective part that I recommend starting with.
For many of the professors I work with who have a sensitive topic, I would say that is another reason why people come to me to work together. We have found that sometimes posting on social media feels less safe. There are some spaces online that feel less safe and that maybe they don’t want to explore at this time.
Whereas having a stronger online presence, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessary to be on social media. And so we found what they felt and we felt together were safer options was through having their personal website and through having a LinkedIn profile that was filled out to a point where it would show up in Google quite easily and people would be able to find them based on that particular research topic online. But, they wouldn’t feel like they had to post about their topic specifically inviting potential negative reactions in order to help people find them.
If you’re someone who has a sensitive topic and you’d like to be talking about that online, I also want you to consider your safety, your personal safety, but also your emotional and mental safety and think about how you’d like to respond to things and come up with kind of like worse, like what you’re going to do in a worst case scenario. Like, let’s say you do post about a sensitive topic and it goes viral and you know, this is really bad. You’re getting, you know, messages and comments and it just feels so overwhelming. What are the steps you’re going to take at that time to make yourself feel safe to, to help yourself move past this hopefully momentary situation? Yeah.
Ana: Yes. And just for everyone also to realize that indeed in social media, people comment, but on your website you don’t need to activate any comments, eh?
Jennifer: Yes.
Ana: So that is, it’s a way of keeping yourself safe and it, so social media platforms, you can deactivate comments too, right? That nobody can comment on your posts.
Jennifer: You can, but I do want to say that deactivating comments, having, having a website, like not inviting comments doesn’t mean that you won’t get comments. People who feel really strongly about things may still email you.
Ana: Yes.
Jennifer: People will report you to your university. I just want you to know that anything you do or say online, it can be screenshotted, it can be shared, it may be reported.
This isn’t to create fear in you. It’s to let you know that universities typically do not do anything on the other end of that. They get reported to all the time and oftentimes, there’s not a lot that happens.
Ana: Okay, thank you. Thank you for that Jennifer.
When social media doesn’t feel authentic to your personal values
Ana: Now actually, you are making recommendations about social media. So indeed we have another question from Vidal: “What to do when our online presence does not feel authentic to our personal values, especially in social media, but our field is very much dependent on that?” Do you have any advice for this?
Jennifer: I wouldn’t recommend anyone be on social media unless they want to. There have been scientists and researchers for decades who have not used social media and still found connection.
But then you’d want to potentially be intentional about how you are connecting with people and keeping those long-term relationships in some other way.
I like social media because it means I can connect with those people and I can still message them or communicate with them at some point in the future, even if we haven’t talked in years. And so if you’re someone who’s open to being on social media but not posting, that could be a good way to still get that kind of interaction online.
But if it goes against your values, like I’m not going to ask you to change your values and your university shouldn’t ask you that either. In fact, universities sometimes come and ask me to do workshops and I have said no depending on what they’re asking because I won’t force any professor to accept the terms and conditions of a social media platform. You know, there are, there are some things that they just don’t agree with.
I’m also not going to force any professor to have a website if they don’t want one. I really think that it is a personal choice and there are other ways to create connection lasting networking in your field beyond social media, even if that’s the norm in your field.
Ana: Yes, thank you so much. And actually a couple of comments about that that I only realized later, right? That social media is a type of marketing, social media marketing, but it’s not the only one. Actually something very common with scientists is to do PR, public relations and speaking and going to conferences. This is also a powerful way of marketing that you are doing. I don’t know if in, if it is required for social media, but maybe what is required is to do more of this marketing. So you could also consider to, well go to conferences which are more scientific, but maybe also work more with the press in journals, interviews with the radio, maybe block platforms that publish blog posts. There are indeed, definitely there are other ways.
What is your online presence for professors and scientists?
Jennifer: Now when I say online presence, what I mean is that when someone goes to Google or another search engine, if they put in your name (or maybe your name + the area of your research), are you going to come up?
And when you do appear in search results, can they find what you hope for them to find quickly? What you hope for them to find is probably a bit about you, potentially a photo of you, contact information, your areas of research.
Now when you’re hoping to communicate with journalists in the press, you want to come up pretty high. Like you want to come up high in those search results. You want to make sure that they’re able to find you for topics that you actually want to speak about. You don’t have to have a website, you don’t have to have social media profiles in order to attract media attention. But you do have to, if you go to Google, you have to be findable with your name and also with your areas of research.
Ana: And actually I want to drop there a little tip for everyone. If you don’t have Google Scholar, activate it. Please do so because Google Scholar is from Google. So if you search your name in Google and you have a Google Scholar account, that will pop up, often quite high. And when we do this, actually if you, I hope you all know how to add Incognito window in your browser. Maybe just now do this exercise. Open an Incognito window if you know how to do it. Otherwise just open a browser window and Google your name and research and see where do you appear.
Tell us in the chat, I’m curious. Count the number of position and are you the number one, are you the number 10, you are not on the first page. We’d love to see how that is because if-
Jennifer: Yeah, let’s do that.
Ana: Yeah, if you are not high, definitely there is more there to do. But if not, indeed Google Scholar, please be sure everyone has it with a picture, it’s really with the papers that are yours because otherwise Google Scholar puts random papers. So have a, an updated Google Scholar profile. We would love to see that.
Ana: In the meantime Jennifer, we can see more of the questions that came in. Jacqueline asks, ‘Are there specific website hosts domain you can recommend? I’m always a bit concerned about hidden costs with publishing a website.’
Jennifer: Yeah. Easiest way to make a website for free or very low cost is Owlstown.
Ana: Love that.
Jennifer: Owlstown is run by my friend Dr. Ian Li. He wanted to help more professors and scientists be able to create a website with ease.
And when I tell you it can go up in as little as 15 minutes, like if you start it now, it could be done by the end of our workshop. That is true. We have done it together live on a demo. So I really recommend that for a lot of people.
If you don’t care deeply about how your website looks and feels in terms of having control over all of the parts of it, Owlstown is an excellent option for you. I recommend it to a lot of people.
For professors who do want more control over the look and feel of your website, you want to be able to change all of the colors and have different types of pages and formats and layouts. I love WordPress.com.
WordPress.com has great customer service. It’s more affordable than some of the other hosts and it has built-in security and protection. If something goes wrong with your website because someone’s trying to attack it, they have a whole office that will deal with that.
If your website goes down like mine has twice, they have resolved that for me within an hour. I really like WordPress.com. That’s what I set up most of my clients on.
I also like Squarespace.
I do not like Wix. Wix is very buggy and glitchy. In fact, most of the people who’ve come to me for website redesigns have been quite unhappy with their experience on Wix. And so we’re migrating their site to typically WordPress.com.
If you like WordPress, but you don’t want WordPress.com, you want more control over your WordPress, Reclaim Hosting has really great prices for academics and they focus on the academic community. Yeah, Reclaim Hosting is my recommendation for a managed WordPress host where you have full control.
WordPress.com is my number one recommendation.
No Wix, no Weebly.Does that answer your questions?
Oh, Google Sites. I should mention that because my friend Brittany Trinh, who does websites for scientists, she likes Google Sites for people who are just starting out.
But if you like that personalization, WordPress.com or Squarespace is probably going to be a better fit.
Oh, for people who are trying to decide between WordPress.com and Squarespace ’cause they’re both very trusted, highly recommended companies? Squarespace is a little bit more sleek, but its features are a little bit more geared towards ecommerce and selling products. So, in the future you’ll see that some of the changes are more geared towards that.
Whereas WordPress has been a blogging platform for so long that it’s never going to lose all of those capabilities and it’s going to continue to improve them. I like WordPress if you ever plan to have a blog, podcast, or YouTube channel in the future ’cause it’ll give you more, like backend options for the structure of your website that helps Google better understand it. So if you think, “I don’t want to blog now, but I want one in like six years,” start your website on a WordPress site.
Ana: I just want to add something really funny. I have your worst recommendation that is Wix.
Jennifer: Sorry, sorry, If you have a Wix website and you like it, please keep it. Don’t worry.
Ana: No, but I recognize if I were to start over for what I do, which indeed I need much more capabilities, I would definitely do WordPress.
But I always recommend also Owlstown for academics who wants a simple solution because you can also do quite a lot and they show examples and they are really nice actually. Maria Jose, yes. Did hers and really enjoyed the process. Yeah, she was very fast in making it. It was amazing. This also is great. How funny. Okay, so I see Jennifer a lot of people are ranking number one. Amazing! But they had a very nice point, which links to another question we had.
Website, LinkedIn, X, or ResearchGate for scientists?
Ana: Natalia actually was asking also, “What is the difference between the website being active in LinkedIn, X, or ResearchGate? Do they have similar impacts? What’s your opinion?
Jennifer: Academic social media platforms are mostly for academics. And by that I mean that if you’re hoping to reach people in policy, if you’re hoping to reach practitioners, if you’re hoping to reach maybe researchers outside of the academy, if you’re hoping to reach nonprofits, NGOs or foundation or fellowship funding, all of these people like may not have access to or may not regularly use those academic social media platforms.
And that’s one of the reasons why having Google Scholar set up, making sure that when you Google yourself people can find you is really beneficial because there’s so many people beyond the researchers who like to read peer reviewed research who would benefit from finding and connecting with you and who you would benefit from finding and connecting with as well.
Because of that, I really like LinkedIn profiles because it’s where most of those professionals outside of academia do at least have a presence, even if they’re not actively spending time there. Google Scholar because it helps you better show up in Google search results.
And having any of the places that show up at the top of those search results. So maybe your faculty profile, maybe you have a bio on another website of some kind. Making sure those places that do show up at the top of Google search results are updated when possible. That’s going to help.
Anything else you do is going to enhance that. So like if you create a website that’s then going to show up at the top of search results, so it’s going to be an even better and more engaging experience where people can learn even more. But if, when you Google your name, you’re finding the search results that you want, you probably don’t need to increase your online presence in that kind of way unless it’s something that you want for yourself. Did that make sense?
Ana: Yes. We have Natalia there. I also always recommend, in terms of social media, for those of you who want to do social media, to do either LinkedIn or X, Twitter, is through, you hear and see in Twitter and X that there’s quite some haters, but at least in my experience in the academic world, no. And again, not in my academic world, but maybe indeed if you work in sensitive topics, you might get more of these haters. In my world, not really.
Jennifer: I would also say if you are a minority, if you are a person of color, again, yeah, sensitive topics, if you identify as LGBTQ+, there are haters on every platform.
So it’s not like if you go to Instagram over X, it’s going to drastically improve your experience. The people that I’ve interviewed on The Social Academic who’ve experienced really negative reactions experience them everywhere they go.
So I just want you to know that it’s not like you can avoid everything just by being on one, you know, the, the one platform where that doesn’t happen. People thought that Mastodon was going to be like that and it wasn’t. There was just as much hate people thought that Bluesky was going to be like that and it wasn’t.
There’s just as much negative reaction everywhere you go. I just want to put that out there. Like if you are feeling unsafe, it may not be the platform. It may be how you’re interacting with it. It may be that how you feel means that you shouldn’t be there at all.
And as someone who survived domestic violence and had to escape an abusive ex-husband, there have been points in my life where being online was not the safe choice. Where I really wanted to hide. And so I just want to put that out there if something happens that makes you feel unsafe online, it’s okay to remove yourself.
Ana: Yes. Thank you so much for sharing Jennifer. Because there might be people here who also feel like that. And you shouldn’t feel like also guilty for not being online.
Jennifer: Right, that’s what I wanted.
Ana: Yeah. Yes, exactly. I love that you pointed to that. So good. Just to add something to this conversation that adds something that I also recommend when you’re trying to choose like, “Okay, I cannot be doing everything. What should I choose?”
I always say like, what do you enjoy the most? Right? Yeah, some people really have fun on Twitter, others is on LinkedIn, others is maybe in ResearchGate. So just also maybe put more effort on that platform that you enjoy the most.
You also said the key word that I always tell my students, like updated, that’s the key word. I wonder whatever you choose is updated. Not with that. The last paper that you are showing is from four years ago. Have that profile updated and be where you also enjoy it.
I don’t know if I told you all this story, but I started, I just wanted to be a lurker. I just wanted to be there and not interact with anyone and just see what people were doing. So first a colleague told me, ‘but you can create a fake account so nobody knows it’s you, nobody’s going to follow you.’ And I say, ‘oh great.’ But my fake account had a name that was a little bit similar to mine. So of course once I started following the people I knew, they started following me back and this was like, okay, this fake account is not working.
But for years I would not do anything, just look at post. And this was great to stay updated about research, new papers. And then later I did my next step, which was liking and reposting. That would be it. I would never write a comment, I would never write a post, that was it.
And then came the next level which will be commenting to things of my friends, right? Like celebrating with them, they got a new job, you know, they got this grant, this paper and that will be it. There was all these levels that for me at least, each level was more and more challenging. So you also gotta decide what is your level that you feel comfortable with.
Jennifer: Yeah, I’ve actually had professors come to me because maybe they were on Twitter and they’re like, I don’t want to be be on Twitter anymore. Like, ‘I don’t like Elon’ or something like that. And they want to learn Instagram. So then we talk about Instagram, we talk about what that might look like. There’s so many features on Instagram. How you use Instagram isn’t going to be the same way someone else uses Instagram.
But when we talk about it, like they’re like, “Oh, I don’t like that.” They’re like, “I don’t like images.” or “I don’t want to do video.” And, and you know, realizing that actually they like writing text, they like thinking about things in text.
Thinking about what you like, thinking about what you don’t like, thinking about what you want to try, or what you don’t want to explore. Do that before you start a platform or do it as you’re starting a platform.
Don’t feel like once you create your account you’re going to have to have that forever. You can delete anything that you’re feeling like isn’t really a good fit.
Ana: Yeah, so good. And, and actually people also were asking like also alternatives for example to X or Twitter. Well I think we covered this. Probably LinkedIn is a good idea in that case.
Do I have enough publications to set up my faculty profile?
Ana: And Sabrina also had a very nice question. “Hey, my university has a website where I can set up a profile yet I’m hesitant to set up a profile because I don’t have any publications yet. Any advice?”
Jennifer: If your university let’s you set up a profile, you should, even if you don’t have any publications. Having one or two sentences in that area that just says what your research is focused on and who you’re hoping to connect with about that research is going to be just as effective as listing publications.
I have seen thousands of faculty profiles and a huge portion of those wherever they are in their academic career don’t have publications listed. Oftentimes that’s because the person who the profile is about hasn’t updated it or hasn’t provided information. Or, the process to update it or provide information just doesn’t exist or isn’t being managed in a way that can actually facilitate updates happening on the website.
I just want to say if you feel the publications or what’s been holding you back, you don’t have to wait because there’s so many faculty profiles out there that don’t have any publications on them. So I really encourage you to do, make that profile.
Whereas if your university offers you a website space, I would actually recommend not using it and making an external website yourself. So profiles, definitely have on your university website. Websites, I don’t recommend quite as much and we can talk about that if you want. But yeah, generally WordPress.com, Squarespace is a better option, or Owlstown. Better options for you.
Ana: Yes, I love that. And I also always recommend that too because yeah, at the end of the day you might leave that university, right? And your, I see your web website, like your home-
Jennifer: Yeah, but also your university may just decide to stop posting websites, which I’ve seen happen at like six universities before. So your website could just be gone next week and you’ll get an email that’s like, “Oh, we’re discontinuing this service,” and it disappears. I don’t want that to happen to you. And that’s why I’m saying it more so than the potential of you moving universities.
Sometimes if you move universities, you can actually keep that website space. I’ve seen that from people too. So it’s not like if you have a space already that like you should delete it. I’m just saying if you’re starting a website project, I would recommend it being on WordPress.com or Squarespace or somewhere outside of your university server when possible.
Do I have to be online every day as an academic?
Ana: Yes. Lovely. And we have here a question also from Elaine. “Can an academic build an online presence by not being online every day?” And this, I love this because we can also connect be with the how what, what would you recommend, and I guess this means more for social media because of course once you have the website, there it is. So what would you say about, about being online in social media?
Jennifer: That’s a good question. So actually I have a question for you, [Elaine]. When you say you don’t want to be online, does that mean you don’t want to post on social media or does that mean you don’t want to check social media at all for an extended period of time? Both answers are totally fine. I’m just curious how using it less looks like for you, if you don’t mind answering in the in the channel, I would love that.
Ana: Maybe Elaine can answer that.
Jennifer: Yeah, or or unmute yourself if you prefer.
Elaine: I meant that I don’t want to post every day. You know, I don’t want spend so much of time there.
Jennifer: That’s totally, that totally makes sense.
Elaine: I think that the algorithm forget you.
Jennifer: Ah, the algorithm.
So yeah, a lot of people feel like the algorithm forgets you. But the people that you’ve connected with do not.
When you think about who you’re connecting with, it’s actually more important than you posting because when people decide to connect with you, it means that they’re choosing to potentially see your post in the future.
Now with Twitter, it makes it really feel like the algorithm is kind of like working against you because you only get that kind of 10 minute window to reach potential people. Maybe they have you in the For You section, so you show up towards the top. But Twitter is the one platform that sometimes feels like you might be more beholden to that. I would just say, post the same thing twice and call it a day.
But other platforms like LinkedIn, if you post once, that post could continue to show up for people for not days, but weeks and months. I want you to think about your content that you share out there in any capacity as something that can last, something that can be useful for people beyond the time that you’re posting it.
Because of that, you do not need to post every day. Not only do you not need to post every day, you don’t need to post every week. In fact, for most of the professors that I work with, I recommend if you can consider, you don’t have to commit to it, but like if you can consider sharing one post per month that can really impact your online presence. Just one post per month. So people know when they visit your profile, you’re still somewhat active. That makes a really big difference.
You don’t have to post every day, definitely don’t have to post every week. And if you want to take extended months off from social media, but you have that stronger online presence when people Google you, you could do that. You could delete all your social media if people are finding you in those Google Search results with ease and they’re finding what you want them to see.
If you don’t want to be on social media at all or you just want to lurk, that’s an option too. I just want you to have that other side of being findable for the things that you’d like people to find you for that that also be something that supports you.
Ana: Yes, thank you. Okay, we’re going to then start moving into the section of the, the how. I think we indeed covered the, the why, the where.
Would you give us Jennifer some ideas of post that people can access easily I could post about this or about this other topic. Content pillars. Or type of post that they could work on.
Jennifer: There, there’s so many things that you can post about. It really depends on what your personal needs are. So like, I mean, if you have a new publication, there’s a ton of posts that we like, you want to do, we could talk about that for a sec?
Ana: Please, yes.
Jennifer: Yeah, so let’s say you have a a new thing. It doesn’t need to be a publication. Like let’s say a new publication, an upcoming conference talk, an event that you’re attending. There’s a thing that you can share.
That is something that can and probably should be shared more than once. So the first, easiest content pillar is sharing things multiple times.
Let’s say you have a publication. One way to start sharing it is actually before you have the publication, I really recommend talking about research in advance. I’m not saying to give away like all of the secrets that you feel like are really new research on Twitter, but what I am saying is sharing that you’re working on something in a particular topic is a great way to clue people in that there may be something to engage with or read in the future. And honestly, depending on where you’re at, if you’re in like the data collection stage, it might help shape and inform your research. So talking about publications even before their publications is great.
When you submit a publication is probably the most popular time for people to celebrate you. When your publication is accepted is the second most popular time for people to celebrate you. People are actually more excited by the process of publication than they are from the publication itself. And that’s not that your publication isn’t important. It’s that what people care about when they connect with you is you. And the publication itself is just the outcome of what you personally have done.
I’m not trying to downplay your publication at all. It’s amazing and there’s a ton of ways to share it once it’s out in the world, but I just wanted to encourage you to consider sharing it early and those kinds of mindsets about sharing things early is true for events, conferences, things that you care about.
If you’re on a committee, if you’re on any kind of service type thing that you’re doing that is important to you, share it while it’s in process, share it while it’s happening because people love that behind the scenes stuff. They love hearing a little bit more about what you’re doing.
If that feels uncomfortable for you and you’re someone who wants to wait until your publication is out, that’s absolutely fine.
We want to share the things that people really need to know. So that’s what is the publication about? Where can I find more information about it? Who should read this? Should I share it with any particular type of people? Answer questions for people who are unfamiliar with your research area and subject because far more people are going to see your tweet or your post about your publication then are going to be excited to read it.
And that’s not a bad thing, but we have to trust that those people have the potential to share it with someone else who might care, even if they personally do not benefit from reading your research themselves. I think that that’s something the scientists and professors that I’ve worked with have struggled with. There is even a feeling that like if I share this with my friends and family members, like they won’t care. Or like, ‘I celebrate this with my husband, but like my friends on Facebook, no one’s going to care about this.’
And that’s actually an assumption that I think a lot of people have. But when we take those extra steps to invite people into why it’s important to us, why it’s something that we spent that time on, who we want to help, it makes a really big difference. And it can really open your eyes to how much people care about you and the things that you’re doing.
Ana: Yeah, I love, I love that.
Jennifer: Sometimes we’re actually doing this like live on the call because the professor that I’m working with is so anxious about sharing this particular publication or sharing with this particular audience that it feels uncomfortable for them.
One time we were sharing a client’s new book. Their book had come out years before, but it was being released as paperback. And she was like, ‘No one is going to care about this book from 2012. This is so old.’
But when we did it together, she had such a response, not just from people who had read the book the first time, but people who were excited to share it with their students, excited to share it with other people, people who said and felt like it was relevant today. That’s the kind of engagement we can invite when we’re more open about what we do and why we care about it. Even if it’s years after the fact, it can still help people. And because of that you still have an opportunity to share it.
Ana: Whoa, this was so nice, Jennifer, because actually I want to share with all of you also that one of my biggest things was like I thought that we could never share anything again.
Jennifer: Yeah, right. So many people feel that way.
Ana: Like, I already did the post about this paper, I cannot talk about it. Yeah, never again. Right? And then indeed that’s not the game of social media. The game is that first, like for I have here the data for, for Twitter, only 5% of your followers are going to see that post, not to start. So yes, keep sharing even the same post.
But then what Jennifer said, all these ideas like before, before when you see me, right when it’s published, I always say when it’s online first, when it’s the final version. So out of one paper you can write different 10 different posts.
Jennifer: Oh at least. Not saying you have to. If you just like the one post, that’s fine. Try to include your why, like why this is important to me, why I want to help people.
But if you are open to posting more, I want you to know that there are many natural ways to do that. In fact, some, one of the exercises that I’ve done with professors is we take a larger piece of content, maybe it’s their article or a book or like a talk something, something that is quite long and figuring out all the ways we can take this one long piece and break it into different social media posts.
And before we do that, before we do this, like sharing, like lots of sharing things, that’s like a lot of time, right? We really think about who we want to help with that. So for instance, if your scientific paper is aimed at helping other researchers in a particular field, maybe all of your focus is reaching those researchers at different times of day so that someone who’s over in Europe and someone who’s in Australia and someone who’s in South America can see it has the possibility to see it. So just posting that same tweet three times at different times of day might make it easier for a variety of people globally to be able to see it.
Now thinking about the who and how we want to help them is what motivates us to then do the work of sharing it. And if you don’t have a good answer to that who and how it’s going to help them or me, it’s probably not going to be worth the time. And that’s okay.
It’s okay when things aren’t worth the time because that’s helping us better focus on other things. It’s helping us better prioritize. So before you start writing things just to write them, think about you know, who you want to talk with and how you want to help them because that’s, that’s going to help you feel like it’s a good use of your time.
Ana: Yes, that’s good. And then still something that helped me was batching. So although indeed it might take time, but for me it was also that moment of saying, okay, now the paper is coming out, let me write four or five posts thinking yeah, for different purposes and then scheduling. And then you have pause for a couple of months. You don’t need to worry about that anymore, eh. And the same, eh. And I love also the perspective again that Jennifer is giving us about the people.
Talking with some of our students, they were telling me, ‘I hate to talk about my own research but they were saying, okay, what about celebrating the people in your team?’ And then their face was like, ‘yeah, that’s fun.’ So they were very excited to, yes, make posts then about their students either like presenting in a conference or a paper of their student or whatever the student did and that motivated them to do this type of post.
So that’s also something that if some of you struggle to talk about your own work, you could start getting this practice talking about your students in your team, your favorite colleagues, why not, and other people that is not you.
Can you share your struggles and challenges on social media?
Ana: And thinking about that, there is a very nice question from S- now. “So what about sharing about challenges? I do like those posts that are very real and natural, but I be hesitant myself to share those like perfection is kicking in, right now.”
What about sharing about challenges, like personal challenges, that we go through?
Jennifer: Ooh, personal challenges really engage people. It really can actually shift someone else’s mindset or perspective and help them with what they’re going through too. So I love when people are open about posting their struggles or a problem that they’re having.
It’s great if you invite your network to get involved with that. If you find that you want support from people beyond your institution or your colleagues, you can ask social media for support. There’s also ways to ask for support anonymously, depending on what your situation is, there may be another account that can post it for you. I love that there are ways to be more open about your struggles.
I did an interview on The Social Academic on my podcast with Dr. Monica Cox, where she talked about her workplace struggles on social media and how actually posting things helped protect her in legal issues with the university. It actually made a big difference that she had posted these things and shared them in something that was admissible in court. I don’t think that that is a likelihood for everyone, but I do want people to know that posting about your struggles for whatever reason, may be beneficial for you. But it also may be beneficial for other people.
Ana: Yes, thanks for sharing. And here of course, it depends the style, your style, what you want to share, what you don’t want to share. Sometimes you might feel also more comfortable to share that struggle once you have overcome. Sometimes we say we don’t speak from the books anymore.
Jennifer: That’s true.
Ana: So that’s something that maybe some of you feel better or, I love personally, this is part of storytelling, right? The, the problem. And, and seeing, seeing you overcoming this problem. For example, when you, when we are talking about publications, if you tell us also something that was hard for that paper, right? Because we have this bias, bias image of paper finish everything successful while there is behind all those struggles that we all go through. So if you share something about that, that’s also a great way of, of connecting.
We are coming to the end. So I just wanted to show quickly. So Jennifer, I know you love examples and I wanted to show you also some examples of the websites that Jennifer has done. Let me see.
I pulled examples from two early career researchers. You’re going to see three websites. One is a personal website, one is a research lab website from the same person. And then another one is a personal website. So I hope that you find them hopeful, inspirational, and you get some ideas from them.
You do not need to work with me to have your own website. You can definitely make it yourself. And if not, you can hire support locally. You don’t have to work with me (but you can if you want my support). So there’s many ways to create your website and I would love if you shared it with me, if you have one, or if you’re thinking about creating one when it’s live, please email me. I always get excited when people have created websites.
Ana: Oh, this is so nice, Jennifer. Thanks for sharing. Let me drop them then here. And as I have a look, I have a look at them indeed. And we have at least one example of, of something that can be sensitive topic, eh? So you can have a look there also for inspiration.
Jennifer: They may be both sensitive topics to be honest ’cause one is sexual health including transgender people, and the other one is juvenile weapons and gun violence.
Ana: Oh, okay. So actually that the two you mentioned. This is amazing. So good. We are going to close trying to stay on time. I want to thank Jennifer for this super interesting talk. I hope all of you enjoyed. And if you have questions, send them over to me, to Jennifer also on social media. You can please all follow her, interact.
Jennifer: Oh yeah! Let’s get in touch.
Ana: Yes. And I’m going to send the replay tomorrow. We’ll send a replay of this talk in an email and also the links so you can also learn more about Jennifer.
And please, if you have the budget and you want help with this, here you have an amazing person to hire because it’s something important and something that more and more we are giving more attention of also ways of, there is so much time and effort and energy going into your research.
And I always say having this only presence, yes, it takes work, but it can boost that many times. And, and the hard work that you have done is a pity when we just give all that power to the journals to let know about your papers, right?
Jennifer: Yeah.
Ana: That’s it. When you can also boost all that, all that visibility.
Can I use research or professional development funding for my online presence?
Jennifer: Whether you work with me or not, you don’t have to always pay for this out of pocket.
Universities are becoming more and more open to the idea of funding this kind of professional development for PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, professors, other people who work at universities. So I want you to know that there are options that you can explore on campus or through your funders who may be able to support your work on your website or social media.
Ana: Yes, totally. And linking to that, I also work with a lot of people who are grant writing grant proposals. And I, this is also where we basically speak about how the importance of having a, a personal website. Scientists, these people, they don’t have yet a website.
Through that process, they use part of that money to build that website and boost that, that online presence. Because yeah, when you want, especially when you want to go to big funding and big, big funding calls, having a website, it can be quite helpful.
Jennifer: Yeah, funders love when you have an online presence ’cause it means you’re more likely to share the research that you’re doing, that they’re funding and helping the people that, that research ultimately supports. So they are very excited if you have a stronger online presence, whether it’s your LinkedIn or your website, they’re really happy.
Ana: Yes. So totally a moment for you also to, to work on this. Thank you! Thank you so much. Thank you to all of you here. Also those who stay till the end.
Jennifer: Thank you! So nice to meet you all.
Ana: So good. Stay in touch and see you all very soon. Bye bye.
Dr. Martha Kenney knows your time is precious. She cares deeply about employee engagement, burnout prevention, work-life balance and career development amongst professional women. That’s why she works with women in medicine and beyond find work-life alignment. She helps women gain clarity on who you are, what you want in life, and what truly matters to you.
She’s also an Assistant Professor who researches mechanisms of chronic pain in young adults who are living with sickle cell disease. I’m delighted to share this conversation with Dr. Martha Kenney in this featured interview on The Social Academic.
Introducing Dr. Martha Kenney, time management expert, professor, coach, and mom
Jennifer: Hi everyone. Welcome back to The Social Academic, where I talk all about online presence for professors, researchers, and other people who have PhDs. I’m so excited to introduce you to my guest today, Dr. Martha Kenney. Martha, would you mind introducing yourself and letting people know a little bit about yourself?
Martha: Sure. Thank you so much for having me, Jennifer. It’s really a pleasure to be here.
I’m Martha. I’m a pediatric anesthesiologist, clinically by training. But, I spend the majority of my time doing research. My research is focused on understanding the mechanisms of chronic pain in young adults who are living with sickle cell disease. I also do research in other pain disparities area as well.
In addition to that, (as if that’s not enough), personally, I’m married with two young kids. So, I’m a really busy mom as well. I’m also a certified coach. I’m a certified executive career coach. I coach women primarily in academia around challenges related to work-life balance, time management, burnout management in general. Read Martha’s bio.
I’m also a behavior design consultant. I got some training in a certification through the Tiny Habits Academy, of which somebody hasn’t read that book by BJ Fogg, they should definitely check it out.
I work a lot with behavior management. How do we change our habits? How do we rewire our routines in a way that sets us up for success so we can be able to execute the goals that we actually have.
Jennifer: Ooh, that is so interesting. It sounds like you do it all.
How did you get into coaching? How did you decide that research, even though it was something that you love, that you wanted to do more than that? You wanted to work with people one-on-one as a coach as well.
Martha: That’s a great question. I got into coaching because of my experience in academia. I’m a physician scientist, clinically I did a very long training path. I finished everything in the fall of 2018 and took on my first position.
“Like most people who go into academia…I don’t wanna say we don’t put in thought into our first position, but I feel like we don’t know the questions we need to ask.
We’re not really prepared to take on our first position. Nobody actually sits you down and says, ‘These are the things you need to ask. These are the red flags that you need to look for.’”
Honestly, when you’ve been through a long training, whether it’s a PhD or an MD track, you’re just happy to have a job when you’re done. Like, yay, I have a job! You’re excited about that. All of this to say that the place that I started was not a good fit. It was not a good fit for many reasons.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Dr. Kenney’s success story with coaching as a former burnt-out academic
Martha: I had clarity on what I wanted to do, where I wanted my career to go.
The problem is that if you’re in an organization where there’s a values misalignment, no matter what you do, you can’t change the values and the mission of that organization.
And no matter what you do, you can’t. Unless you change your identity, which you can’t / which is hard to do, right? Because you are wired the way that you are, and you’re passionate about the things that you’re passionate about, so you can’t really change yourself also.
So what ends up happening is I see a lot of people kind of dwell in this organization.
There’s constant push and shove where there’s just misalignment between what you value, what’s important to you, and what the organization or the department considers to be important. That’s the situation I found myself in.
One of the ways to navigate around that is that someone recommended that I get a coach. I’m so grateful that I got a coach back in 2018 before coaching was sexy and hot. Right?
Jennifer: Right.
Martha: Through that experience, what I learned is that, so this is the way I kind of often explain it to women who approach me about working with me.
Let’s say you’re on this academic journey and you’re walking your path and you encounter a huge block. Imagine a huge boulder block that’s right on your path.
You feel stuck. Not only stuck, for some people, they can feel overwhelmed. It can even contribute to burnout in so many ways. And you don’t know how to navigate it.
There’s two options. One option is you’re like, “Okay, this is okay. This is not the best situation, but I’m just gonna work really hard. And you know, eventually this roadblock, whether it’s an individual, whether it’s a systematic thing, will get out of my way eventually ‘cause my hard work is gonna pay off.”
The reality is, your hard work is just chipping a few pieces off of that rock. So, what ends up happening is that you yourself are gonna suffer for it.
What coaching does is it opens your eyes into the alternative possibilities. It doesn’t take you away from your destination first. A coach can guide you to make sure that that is the right destination, that is the right path.
Perhaps your path is a different path that doesn’t have that roadblock. And that’s really not the path you’re supposed, you really should pursue.
In addition to that, you get clarity that that’s truly the path you need to navigate, then a coach acts as a bridge. And also almost like a flashlight and a lack of a better analogy to say, “Hey, have you noticed that corner is not being blocked?” You know, “How do you feel about going around this corner? It’ll get you to your destination. It might be a little bit windy, but it’ll get you there.” A coach acts like as a bridge between where you are now and where you wanna be in the future.
A good coach will help you realize that there are so many things within your control. You can’t control the boulder block, but you can definitely find the things you can control that helps you navigate around it so you can ultimately achieve your goal. That’s what my coach did for me. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is like, amazing.”
One of my passions is really helping other people feel great about themselves and help them be successful in their endeavors. I’m like, “I wanna be a coach too!” I wanna give individuals the same feeling that I had cause without my coach I would’ve left academia to be honest.
Jennifer: Yeah
Martha: Through the help of my coach, I stayed the path. I learned to navigate around the path and really create a career that’s authentic to me. And also, find an institution that is aligned with my values and my goals as well.
Dr. Kenney’s coaching at Time Matters Today – Her take on work-life balance
Jennifer: Oh gosh. Thank you for being so open about that, because I feel like the vulnerability with which you shared that story, people are really gonna feel that, that people are gonna recognize themselves in a similar place or needing the kind of support that you received. So tell me about like, your coaching. How does it differ from like, the coaching that you had when you needed it?
Martha: So my coaching is really focused on work life balance, and I use that term because that’s what we’re familiar with. But I actually don’t believe in work-life balance.
Jennifer: Ooh.
Martha: To me it’s something that’s like, nonexistent, right?
Jennifer: Interesting.
Martha: ‘Cause the reality is life is an evolving process and there’s never gonna be a period where like you’re 50% work and 50% life.
And then also work is a compartment of the bigger compartment that is your identity in your life, right? It’s a bucket in your life. And so work should be a full expression of your identity and not like that this is life. This is you and this is work. You’re the same person in both spheres.
Work should really contribute to your personal fulfillment. And so really what I work with. The reality is I use that term ’cause that’s what people are familiar with.
Really what I do is help women really attain better work life alignment. And what does that mean? It means is that really gaining clarity on who you are, what you want in life, what truly matters to you.
Because oftentimes people come to me because they’re overcommitted, they’re overextended, they’re having challenges with time management.
People call me ‘a time management guru.’ I lead workshops. I can tell you all the steps you need to take. I can tell you how to plan your week. I can tell you what priority system you should use and so many things.
But the reality is if you don’t have clarity on what truly matters? If you think of your life as like a bucket, it’s gonna be filled with really meaningless things because you’re constantly going to pile things on without really passing through the judgment value. “Is this really important to me? Is it really worth my time?”
I help people really to, you know, get clarity on who they are, what truly matters to them, and then also who the people that they wanna serve. The people you wanna serve might be the people in your home. It might be the people in the work setting. And then really create goals and execute those goals around that. I believe that what my clients can tell you is that as a result, they have better clarity, more confidence in themselves. They’re able to really draw boundaries around their time and their energy.
People hear me say often over and over again: your time and your energy are finite resources. You can do anything, but you cannot do everything. And so you really have to take the cautious approach of really determining what is important to you and commit into that.
They find I don’t discover more time for them because I’m not God. There’s always gonna be 24 hours in a day. But what I do discover, what I help them do is with the 24 hours that they have, really being able to dedicate themselves to the things that truly matters. Giving them the boldness to say no to the things that don’t matter, and be released from the guilt that comes with that, especially for women in academia. And then also really develop tiny habits or behavioral steps that, okay, we’ve decided that this is the goal.
I can lead a time management workshop and talk about planning your week all you want. Then I’ll encounter people like, “Oh, I tried it, it worked really well for the first and second week, but then I’ve kind of slipped right back into my pattern.” Of course you did, because your pattern is a routine and it’s a habit. It’s an automated behavior. So how do we unwire that and really insert a more intentional and productive habit so that eventually it becomes automated? Eventually planning your week every Friday, at the end of the workday, or Monday morning, or whatever day or Sunday, becomes a routine habit that you do on a regular basis.
That’s my long-winded way of saying I help people manage their time. And feel good about how they use their time and their energy. And also modify their behaviors to be more intentional towards their goals.
Jennifer: That sounds so cool. Oh, you know, a question came up while you were chatting, when you were talking about tiny habits and behavior change. I’m curious, what is something that, like you had maybe a bad habit about that you have worked to improve using your methods?
Becoming more productive and finding a solution for bad habits
Martha: No, I mean, a great example is, so if we go back to my story, I started off of a 100% clinical position.
Jennifer: Mm.
Martha: I was in an environment where despite having a very clear plan, and even going into meetings with my leadership, with, you know, PowerPoint slides printed out and PDFs of my plan and what my research plan was, and having great collaborators who were really interested in me working with them, there’s still nobody wanted to invest in that. I was given literally no protected time.
One of the things that I realized was extremely important in all of us, this is common sense, is I needed to develop an automatic writing habit. The position I am in right now, I have protected nonclinical time dedicated to research. My research time at that time, the first three years of my career, was just free time. You know, when I’m not clinical. So it was my personal time, but I had two young kids. So I also wasn’t gonna try to kill myself to do this.
I developed a writing habit that allowed me to write, eventually write about 25 minutes every single day. And that 25 minutes was, regardless of whether I would go, I was going to the OR that particular day, or if it was a weekend. If it was a weekend, I woke up an hour earlier than my kids, would write for 25 minutes, they’re awake and I’m done.
And I kid you not, Jennifer, in six months on a full clinical load, I published three papers.
Jennifer: Wow!
Martha: Yeah. In the six month period, you know, one was a review paper, but two of them were original research papers.
Jennifer: Amazing!
Martha: Using retrospective data. This is with no protected time. And so I think oftentimes I say this and nobody really believes me. You actually don’t need as much time as you think to accomplish something.
Jennifer: Hmm.
Martha: Oftentimes the problem is our habits. Because the reality is even if I did not have that particular habit and had not developed it in that time period, right now I have 75% protected time, I could have this protected time and be very unproductive. Submit a paper, two papers in one year, despite having 75% protected time.
A lot of it has to do with our maladaptive habits and our not being intentional about building important habits. And so how I started this particular writing habit is I realized that whenever I would get up in the morning and get dressed before I would go to work, I would go downstairs to my office, and then I would actually end up, you know, checking my email before I would go to work. Well, no, there’s no ever any urgent email that I need to actually respond to.
So I created a tiny habit recipe. Any habit you want to develop, you wanna create a, an anchor moment, which is basically inserting that habit into a routine that you have. And my routine was I would turn on my computer in the morning.
And so what I said is that after I turn on my computer in the morning, and then here comes a tiny habit, I would write two sentences in a manuscript and I would have the particular manuscript that I’m working on. And then you also then wanna insert a celebration, which is, I think where BJ’s research really stands above some of the other habit books, because a lot of the habit books will teach you that you wanna give yourself a reward, but anything that you’re trying to wire in your brain, it needs to be instant gratification. And so he, you know, these emotions that create actually that desire to repeat a behavior and over and over again, behaviors guided by our emotions, right?
As soon as I would complete that, those two sentences, I’m a very affirming person. And what makes me feel good is to, you know, state positive affirmation statements. So I would say to myself, “I am an NIH funded researcher.” I was not, I was not close.
Jennifer: But you said it.
Martha: But I said it and it made me feel good!
Jennifer: I love that. So you got your two sentences, and then you’d have your positive affirmation.
Martha: Yes. Yes. It’s like an affirmation and a proclamation at the same time. Yeah. And so I said that it made me feel good. And eventually the two sentences like increased, you know, the two sentences would take me like less than five minutes, then it would increase to more.
Then I could crank out like a paragraph in 25 minutes. And I just kept doing that. Cause imagine this, you are writing in a paragraph in 25 minutes and writing 25 minutes a day. How long is it gonna take me to finish that manuscript?
Jennifer: Hmm. So you really created a recipe that ensured that you got your writing in at the start of the day, like kind of when you already had this habit of checking your email and you just switched that to writing the two sentences?
Jennifer: That’s so cool. That’s really interesting. One of the things that it seems like you are intentional about is who you work with, and that’s women. Is that, is that correct?
Martha: Yes.
Jennifer: Tell me a little bit about that decision and why you enjoyed working with women?
Martha: I got into coaching because of my personal experience. And as I started, before I became a coach, I started sharing my story. I was invited to different institutions to talk about, ’cause I, I did a lot of work around time management to folks talk about time management and career development for early career faculty at school, different universities.
And so, as I was telling, you know, given these workshops and given these talks, have all these conversations with women afterwards, and one of the things I realized was that my experience was not unique. Yes, it was unique to me, but there were so many women who had that same shared experience. And oftentimes when we’re going through some of these experiences, I haven’t really dived into some of the nitty gritty, you know, the gaslighting, the discrimination, all of the stuff that’s like in there, you know, the misogyny that kind of fueled a lot of this, right?
You think you’re alone and you suffer alone. And so as I started sharing my story, I realized that, “Oh gosh, there’s so many women that are experiencing this.”
And for me personally, I’m in a place where I love my academic career. I love being in academia, and I love being in academia because my mind is not wired to align with the traditional academic culture.
Jennifer: Hmm.
Martha: And by unwiring my mind and rethinking in a different way, it has helped me thrive. And it has helped me be successful in my career, and personally. And so, like, I really want other women to experience that joy because we’re seeing women leave medicine and academia at higher rates than men. And so, and for me, that’s extremely concerning.
Even though there’s more women in medical school, on the PhD path than ever before, we have such a leaky pipeline, extremely leaky. And so that’s why you see only 25% of full professors at schools of medicine across the country are females. You know, 25%, which is like utterly ridiculous. We make half. We’re 50% of the population. So, yeah. So, so I think that all of that is, is challenging. And I think that helping, that’s, you know, helping other women who have gone through the journey.
And I feel like when I speak to people or when I coach people, they feel there’s that level of trust because they feel like I’ve gone through that same experience as them. And I can offer, if anything, just a listening ear. And definitely as they open up to coaching, help them really transform their thinking and also their lives at the same time.
Recognizing burnout
Jennifer: One of the things that you mentioned was that after these workshops, women would come up to you and they, they’d have conversations about the things that they were experiencing, maybe how similar it was to what you talked about. What are some of the ways that women, academics especially, can recognize their burnout, recognize when maybe a change does need to happen?
Martha: Oh, that’s, that’s a great question.
Mental, physical exhaustion are like common signs of it. Disengagement from the workplace and from the things like your responsibilities and the things that even previously may have brought you some enjoyment no longer become like very enjoyable at all. Going to work with a sense of dread. You know, all of those things. And also like how your inter- how this, all of this feeds into your interactions with your family.
If you’re not happy at work, because as I mentioned, work should be a component of bringing you personal and professional fulfillment. And so if work is, if you’re not happy there, it really feeds into your personal fulfillment. It’s harder for you to be happy elsewhere. And it becomes obvious in what your kids may say, what your significant other may say as well.
I think that if people are experiencing this just exhaustion, this dread, this lack, this disengagement from work, even anxiety that’s attached to all of it, I think those are all signs that they really should reach out for help. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. It makes you stronger, from my opinion.
Jennifer: I love that. So it sounds like the first step, if you’re listening to this and you are experiencing some of these feelings of burnout and exhaustion, your first step is to reach out for help. Can I ask, who, who do you recommend people reach out to? Is it a mental health professional? Is it a coach like yourself? What’s a good direction for someone to go?
Martha: Well, I think like the, probably the first most non-intimidating thing to do is to speak to a, a trusted peer or a colleague, right? Because oftentimes when people feel that overwhelmed like me in that situation, I, you know, I didn’t wanna speak to a stranger. I don’t even wanna speak to a mentor or have them judge me.
And so I reached out to a trusted friend. You know, I spoke to one of my, some of my physician colleagues, but also reaching out to like my personal friends outside of medicine who knew me really well was extremely helpful for them to act as a sounding board. And I think, I think as you begin to talk about your feelings, it will become obvious whether you need to also speak to a mental health provider.
Right now most universities also have free access to mental health providers for faculty members. And I would say take advantage of that. I absolutely did when I was at my lowest. It was just like one session and it was like a breath of fresh air. So definitely take advantage of that.
And then, you know, from there, I think coaching is really incredible guide that can really help you. And coaching obviously definitely can be paired with therapy because therapy is very different from coaching. If you need therapy to address underlying psychological or mental health issues, definitely pursue that. And then coaching can also kind of help really was like kind of the action steps.
Jennifer: So helpful. That’s great. I really appreciate you sharing those different options. And I like the one about talking with friends and people outside of academia too, how that can be helpful. So I appreciate that.
Jennifer: Now, this is a podcast that’s about online presence. And you’re a researcher, you’re a coach, you do, oh gosh, there’s one other thing you did that was recent. I can’t remember what it was. But with all of these things, how, how do you communicate? I mean, I imagine that your online presence has something to do with it, but tell me a little bit about what makes up your online presence and how you feel about it?
Martha: I feel like I’m in a more comfortable and great position with my online presence now. I think when I started, I just wanted to get, even, this was even before I had a coaching business.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Martha: I wanted to get my ideas out there. I’m somebody that I love to write, I love to journal. I’m very conceptual and very theory based, which is why I have a conceptual framework for my coaching. ’cause that is because I’m like that. I wanted to just get my ideas out there. And so I started off with just a blog and even I, I stopped writing my blog now, but like, I started off with a blog. It was great. Okay. I got my ideas out there. ’cause I felt like I had all this stuff inside. I’m like, I need to, I need to get it out.
Jennifer: I love that.
Martha: And I also then started exploring different social media platforms to just share my ideas. And I think for me, that was a search because, you know, my sister, who’s much, much younger than me, told me to go on Instagram because that’s her generation’s social media platform.
And I tried Instagram for about like, maybe six months or so. But I hated it. And there’s nothing wrong with Instagram. I would say as people are thinking about getting your ideas out there through social media, find the platform that is authentic to your personality.
Jennifer: Yes. I love that. Wait, wait. Before you go on, can I ask like, what helped you know that Instagram was definitely not for you? Because other people are listening to this being like, wait, I wanna delete my Instagram. So how did you know?
Martha: So no. Okay. So what I knew was like, when my sister was like, okay, you gotta create Reels, right? And you gotta figure out like what’s trending and et cetera. And I did a reel based on something that was trending and I put the video up for like, maybe two days and then I promptly deleted it because I watched a video and I was like, this is not you. Like this is just not you.
Jennifer: Yeah, yeah.
Martha: Like, this is so fake and it’s not you in any form.
Jennifer: Mm.
Martha: And I have to lean on my strengths and I need to find a platform that values good writing.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Martha: ‘Cause that is where I’m strong
Jennifer: I like that. I like that. So what platform did you end up really liking ‘cause of the writing component?
Martha: LinkedIn
Jennifer: LinkedIn
Martha: Yes. And so like, yeah, I mean, LinkedIn has been, I have, I, I think it’s been almost a year since I went all in on LinkedIn.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Martha: And, you know, I used to share posts like five days a week, but now I moved, I decreased it to three days a week just because I started a newsletter. And I wanna nurture my newsletter audience as well.
But what I love about LinkedIn is, I mean, sometimes I just put a selfie pick of myself. Like, a picture of me, like, sitting in front of my desk. That is my picture, you know, for like, my inter-LinkedIn. I think in the year that I’ve been on LinkedIn, I have done maybe two videos. I don’t have to do video. I’ve been able to really garner a, a nice engaged community without putting forward video content. ‘Cause I just don’t, that’s not where I lean and I don’t have that time also, or that capacity takes too much time as well. I find writing to be therapeutic for me.
And so whatever you do from a social media perspective, it has to be enjoyable. I enjoy writing these pieces, and so I find it to be fun.
And so LinkedIn rewards that, you know, it’s, people write great posts and people comment on it. People engage on it. They, their algorithm is like really based more on your content and not your images and flashy, they don’t even do hashtags. You know, that’s like, so that’s great.
So that fits for me. And, and for somebody else, they might be like more like the images side of things, which would be Instagram and more trendy or video, which would be TikTok, et cetera. So like, but I, you know, I just tell people, find, you know, experiments with different things and find what is authentic to your personality, where it’s not a burden for you to actually put yourself out there.
Jennifer: I have another question, which is actually about your LinkedIn newsletter. How did you decide that you wanted to go beyond writing posts and actually create a regular piece of content like a newsletter?
Martha: So I realized that when you write a post, sometimes some of the people that are following you, not everybody sees it. And so, and I was writing a lot like five days a week. So some people will miss like a, a certain post. And it also, I wanted to just build a better connection with the people who are following me. And so I started, it’s an email newsletter.
I actually, first, before I did an email newsletter, I created an email course, a five day email course for female faculty members who work in academia. And so I created the course and I got great feedback and I was like, oh, I just don’t wanna like people to finish a five day course. And then like, that’s it. I’m like, bye, you know, you’re not gonna work with me with coaching, then it’s okay, bye. You know, I wanna continue to nurture that. I wanna continue to share my ideas, share advice, and also just get feedback from them. Also insights to create more new content.
And so it was because of that, I created an email newsletter, which I’m having a blast investing time in. I love, with that people respond to some of the posts and I get emails from people, and I’m able to actually build relationships that are a little bit deeper.
Jennifer: Ooh, I like that. Deeper relationships.
Experience with negative social media reactions
Jennifer: I’m curious as a researcher and a coach, some of the professors that I talk with have fear or anxiety about them showing up as a coach online, even though it’s something that they care about and they do.
I think they’re a little worried about what their academic community might think about that. Have you experienced negative reactions sharing all of your identity on social media and being online?
Martha: I’ve gotten a lot of sarcastic comments.
Jennifer: Oh, sarcastic comments. Okay.
Martha: But I’m like, “Oh, so what?” Right? This is how I think about it. And this is what I tell other people. The reality is that each of us are multifaceted individuals. Right?
Jennifer: Right.
Martha: Oftentimes our role in our workplace is not gonna tap into every facet of your personality and what brings you joy. I’m now starting to do a teeny bit of coaching at my institution, but it’s not enough. It’s not like there’s a blog for me to write at my institution or a newsletter for me to generate. I wouldn’t want to do it because there would probably be all these rules attached to it anyways.
For me, this is an opportunity to really show a part of Martha and really feed a part of my identity and personality that’s not being fed in the academic setting.
This is just another part of who you are that you’re not necessarily able to display in the academic setting. Regardless of what you do, people will have something to say about it.
I think when I started showing up so heavily on LinkedIn, and I’ve written a couple posts about this where people started making comments thinking I’m preparing myself to quit medicine.
I’m like, no, I love my job. If you actually read my content, that’s what I’m writing about. How I got to the place where I love my job. And I love the department and the institution that I work at. I love my colleagues. This is me tapping into a creative aspect that I didn’t even know I had.
Since showing up on social media, I realized that, Oh, I am a creative person. I always thought as a science-y, brainy person, I had no creativity whatsoever. I was like, Oh, actually this is my creativity. There’s right in this stuff. It’s actually very fulfilling.
So people will say whatever they want at the end of the day. When you become an entrepreneur, whether it’s a coach or something, or it’s a consultant in academia, it does not fit in the mold in academia. It’s not part of the traditional academic culture. But the reality is also things are changing in academia. The most of the people who are going to have something to say about that are people who are kind of a little bit older or the older generation who aren’t even on social media anyways, much. You kind of just have to let go of that thought.
In addition to the sarcastic comments, I’ve also received like really encouraging comments. A I have people following me, reading me. Like, they never comment. They never ‘like,’ but I’ll meet them at a conference or I’ll see them somewhere and they’ll be like, “Oh, I love your content. I read this.” And I’m like, you’ve never liked a post, never commented. These are academic people. So you’ll actually also be surprised as well.
Jennifer: Oh, that is so familiar to me. Someone asked, “I’ve seen your social media post recently and I feel like you’re not getting a lot of likes?” And I’m like, “No, but I’m getting clients.” The professors that I work with email me and they say, “I saw your post and I wanna work with you,” but they’ve never followed me or liked, liked anything I’ve shared. That’s totally fine. People engage in the way that makes sense for them.
Martha: Yes.
How to connect and work with Dr. Kenney
Jennifer: Before we wrap up, I really want anyone who’s listening to know if you’re like a good fit to work together. Who are your ideal clients? Like who do you want to reach out to you, who are you excited to work with?
Martha: I’m excited to work with any woman in academia who’s like, “Okay, I love being a scientist. I love being an academic physician, but I don’t know how long I can do this for, because I’m burnt out, because I’m exhausted, I’m overwhelmed, but I just don’t know what my next steps are.”
Jennifer: Ooh.
Martha: Those are the kind of women I love to work with to help get clarity on your next steps. If you’re overwhelmed, struggling with time management, I’ll help you to define the boundaries or boundaries around your values and create better work life alignment.
At the moment, I’m not taking one-on-one clients because I just launched a group coaching program that’s gonna start in two weeks. Yes. Super excited! Most of my clients will probably be through the group coaching program. Another cohort will start in January.
Jennifer: So cool. If you’re listening to this, you can get on the waitlist for the January cohort.
Martha: Yes.
Jennifer: That is so exciting. Martha, thank you so much for talking with me today. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we wrap up?
Martha: Thank you so much for having me as well.
One of the things that I would love to add is the fact that oftentimes I think in academia, we don’t like to do a lot of these introspective, what we call soul searching things.
I’m still relatively early career about to go to mid-career. I’ve been struck by the number of senior women, five, 10, even 20 years ahead of me career-wise, who have come to me for coaching.
They have come because they never took that time to really get clarity on their values. They were like, “You know what? I went on the ladder. I got to this particular position and realized that the last 10 years, the last five years I’ve just been going through the motions and I’m so unfulfilled. I’m so unhappy, I don’t even know what my next steps are.”
Time is such a precious thing. And so the person who is gonna value your time and your energy the most is you and your loved ones. Taking that time to really get clarity on what you want.
What do I want?
What truly matters to me?
Who am I here to serve?
What are their problems?
How can I be of help? What solutions can I provide to them?
Am I really walking on the path that I truly desire?
Taking that time is so precious and it’ll make such a world of a difference for you so you don’t look back as a 90 year-old with tons of regret about what if.
Jennifer: Aww, Dr. Martha Kenney, I have loved this conversation.
How can people get in touch with you, connect with you on social media after this ends?
Dr. Martha Kenney is a board-certified pediatrician and pediatric anesthesiologist who completed undergraduate education at Brown University followed by medical school, residency, and fellowship training at Johns Hopkins University. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Duke University where she leads the Pain Equity and Disparities Lab. Her research is focused on pain in people living with sickle cell disease and marginalized communities and is supported by a 5-year K award from the National Institutes of Health. She also holds several prominent leadership positions, including guest editor for the Journal of Pain, member of the professional development & education committee and co-chair of Diversity, Inclusion & Anti-racism SIG for the US Association for the Study of Pain, member of the National Pain Advocacy Center’s Science & Policy Advisory Council.
Outside of teaching medicine and conducting research, Dr. Kenney is a certified professional life coach and certified behavioral design consultant with a deep-seated passion for employee engagement, burnout prevention, work-life balance and career development amongst professional women. She is particularly passionate about working with young female professionals and entrepreneurs. She is a sought out speaker and has spoken at prominent universities and national conferences and facilitated workshops.
Dr. Kenney is married with two young kid. In addition to coaching business, she and her husband own a commercial print shop based in Durham, NC. She loves to read, journal, and serve and support members of her community and church.
Introducing Dr. Monica Cox, professor and change maker for equity in the workplace
Jennifer: I’m so excited to feature Dr. Monica Cox, a professor, author, and change maker. Monica, thanks so much for coming today to talk about your new book Never Defeated: Nine Lessons from the Workplace Front Lines. I wanted to be sure to get that right.
Monica: It’s okay. That’s fine. It’s very long. So you did a great job. Thank you. So great to be here and to meet you in person, kind of.
Jennifer: Yeah. I know we’ve been connected on social media for a while and I’ve been following your amazing work, but I’m so excited to introduce you to The Social Academic community. Would you mind telling people a little bit about yourself?
Monica: Sure, sure. So I am of course Dr. Monica Cox. I am an academic and a professor, an engineering education professor. I’m also a former administrator and I am an entrepreneur who is the CEO and founder of STEMinent, LLC, which offers a variety of offerings that have an umbrella of helping people to emerge whole and bold and strong in the workplace, or whichever environment they so choose. So that’s me in a nutshell.
Jennifer: Bold and strong. I love it. I love it.
Monica: Yeah, thank you.
Writing Never Defeated
Jennifer: Tell me, What prompted you to write Never Defeated? This is such a powerful book. What, what made you know that it had to be out in the world?
Monica: Okay, so there’s the business answer and then there’s kind of the other heart related answer.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Monica: So I would say from a business perspective, I have a Stop Playing Diversity brand, which is based on just my commitment to authentic diversity, equity, and inclusion. And the quick part of that story is that when I was hired in my most recent organization, I told them not to hire me if they were playing diversity. And of course, they didn’t know what that meant. But over time I realized that a lot of the things that I needed to be successful in that workplace as a black woman administrator just, they weren’t there. And I decided to trademark Stop Playing Diversity, and that meant that I wanted to have guides coaching the business arm, and I wanted to write a series of books. So Never Defeated is one of the books that I’m gonna write as part of the Stop Playing Diversity brand and the trademark for the business. Amazing. So, like I said, that’s the business part.
Monica: The personal part is that I went through hell at work. It was a mess. And there’s a quote in the book where I talk about a blueprint and I wished I had a blueprint before I started this experience. But I always said, sometimes you have to be the blueprint. And as I was learning and documenting what was going on, I would look at tweets and kind of just record the tweets. And I wrote essays based on the things that were resonating with people on social media. So that is the heart part of this, where it’s my story where it also is informed from the voices of people who’ve gone through situations very similar to mine. And as you know about social media, there was also the upheaval with Twitter/X. And I thought, if it goes away, what about all of that information, all of those conversations. And this book is kind of the way for me to almost take ownership, to take back some of the valuable conversations and resources that came out of a really good time for me on social media. That was the long story.
Jennifer: Ohh! And a beautiful one that really touched my heart. So I hear what you mean when you say the heart side of, of your reasons for writing this very important book. Never Defeated is so powerful because it reads as authentic, it reads like you’re talking to me. And I think that’s what made me pick it up and not put it down until I finished.
Monica: Thank you.
Jennifer: I mean, I was like walking around the house with it, trying to make sure that I got all of these words in because, you know, sometimes when we see things on Twitter, it does make a meaningful difference in our lives. But seeing all of it at once, like being able to read your words, it just, it was, it was quite meaningful for me. I really appreciated it. Yeah.
Monica: Thank you. And I’ll say something really quickly about it, even this morning, my husband was telling me that someone was reading it and the words were powerful. So I thank you for this. It is still kind of difficult for me to process all of it because I’m also healing as I share what I’ve talked about. So it’s not easy for me to just be like, let me read this every day now. No, that was my life and I lived it. And it was just a moment. And there’s just an element about that that I wanna put about the book too, where it felt like I was sharing a piece of myself and it’s just that it’s all compact, but that was really my life with the death of, you know, my parents and so many real things that have impacted me. So, so even now I feel a little emotional talking about it because it was that real to me as a person.
Jennifer: Oh, I hear you. I hear you. And I really appreciate that maybe despite the emotional weight of writing the book and sharing, like you, you still put it out there in the world and you still write your tweets, even though, I mean, I, I guess I wonder, is there some fear when you’re talking about, you know, things that happen that are maybe not talked about in the room, like, but like you are saying it on Twitter. And so I’m wondering what are your feelings about that? Was it different when you were writing the book?
Monica: So, when I talk about the tweets, this seems very spiritual and some people may not get this, but I will, I will be asleep. And when I wake up I hear like, it’s almost like the words come to me. And so I’m writing them because it’s like, this is what I’m supposed to say for the day. And sometimes it’s punchy, but it is almost like you, you and I talking right now. I just know that there’s a thought that has formed. And so that’s what that is. I don’t feel the fear. When I write things that are so truthful because it is just as clear as to me that that’s what I’m supposed to say.
Jennifer: It’s like already formed in your mind when you’re going to say, I get that. ’cause it’s a poet. That’s how I write poetry. It’s not how I write social media posts, but it is how I write poetry. And so I really, I hear you when you say like, the feelings that, like, that happens when you’re writing it in your head and then it’s out there and you’re like, but I’ve already, it’s already there. It, it exists.
Monica: Exactly. And sometimes I’ll even, I have my phone next to me and I’ll write something as a note. And so that’s something too, like I’ll wake up at 3:00 AM and that’s one thing, the part about the book is that I had a book consultant, a developmental kind of editor.
Jennifer: Wonderful.
Monica: Thank you. And at first I was not going to write stories. Hmm. The first draft was very much practical, and that was it. And she pushed me to include more of myself in the book. And I did not think that I was ready to do that because there are some stories people didn’t know about. And I knew that I would be very vulnerable sharing, for example, how I contacted the president of my university when there were things happening after the murder of George Floyd. And you know, kind of what happened, like I’m whistle blowing on myself. To say, this is what I did with other people during this time. And one thing that people have really complimented me on, and I was very careful about is making sure that I, I was very truthful with my stories without naming names.
Jennifer: Yes.
Monica: So if people do not know where I work, you would not know. And my developmental editor, even by the time she looked at it, she’s like, I don’t even know where you work. So I realized that that’s an immense skill to be able to tell so much. And I do that on social media as well. So, so much without fully telling you what’s up.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Monica: And that also is something I would say that I have to tread carefully with from a legal perspective. Yeah. Because I was so involved in a legal case for three years where I had to decide, am I going to remove myself completely from social media? Am I not going to write? Am I gonna shut down my voice? Or am I going to figure out how to still share my truths without incriminating myself without telling too much? It was, it is a slippery slope to do this work. And I’ll say it’s very strategic, very deliberate. And I hope that’s what you see even as I’m like teetering right there. But nah, I, I know how to say it.
Jennifer: I’m curious when you say that you really had, you approached a point in which you had to make a decision whether to remove yourself from social media or to stay, what helped you make that decision?
Monica: Well, it’s the motivation for me actually being on social media. Once I was an administrator, I said it in my book that it was kind of like an archive for me, but I got to a point in my organization where it became very dangerous for me to be there because of the lack of equity work that they were doing. But also I could tell that I was being set up to be this scapegoat. And I wasn’t going to be that person, I was going to fight. So I had an attorney who I worked with at the time, and two of the things that he mentioned about social media usage is that it’s archived. And I mean, it’s an archived record, of course, of what happens. And he said, you have to tell the truth. Like in, in a court of law, it would be like the timestamps and is what you’re saying true. So I used it very strategically and I always said, because it literally got to a point where I was being harassed because of some stuff. I said, if anything, God forbid ever happened to me, then my husband, maybe my legal team, the people around me could look at what I wrote on social media and have that as evidence of what I was going through. So I was hiding in plain sight.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Monica: And people didn’t understand. What, why does she do this every day? Because I want people to know what happened on say, you know, Monday, February 17th. You know, people would say, “Oh, it’s too much. Why would a department chair do that?” Because I was concerned.
Jennnifer: People tend to have fear when it comes to social media, but you actually found some protection in it in the sense that it was a documented record.
Monica: Absolutely.
Jennifer: I’m wondering, for listeners who may be experiencing something similar on their university campuses, what kind of documentation do you recommend that they practice?
Monica: Well, I would say social media could be good, but you don’t even have to use your real name. You know, so some type of pseudonym or something. And I mean, of course if it ever came to the point where people needed to know that was you, you could say it was you. But that’s one way that you can use it. Another way. I mean, it’s email. When I was a department chair, I used to think about this all the time. There are some like basics. When you have a meeting with someone, you wanna make sure that things are clear. So you can send an email afterward. One of the things that people need to be careful of is having conversations on the phone, because that’s not really documentation.
Jennifer: Right.
Monica: You need it to be written. You need the summary to be written. And one thing that I even learned through my organization is that I would send things and people would not respond. But when it was time for me to compile information, you know, I could have, you know, five examples for of like, when I did contact people, like, “Hey, I told you I was in distress on this date. I told you that I was having this issue with an employee.” And I think that’s going to be one of the big things that we do strategically moving forward to protect ourselves, particularly in an anti-DEI age. People are going to avoid, they’re going to want to walk that fine line, but if we are in distress, we need to put that out there in writing that this is unacceptable. I am being treated this way and this is how I move forward. And I think one other quick thing I’ll say, the reason this is, this is very vital is because I’ve also learned through my experience that the policies are not in place to protect certain issues like microaggressions. There is no law against someone microaggressing you. There is no law in place against workplace bullying. So when you are experiencing situations that make you feel that your life is in danger, or in the case of, I don’t know if you saw Dr. Bonnie, Dr. Antoinette Bonnie, her full name is Candia-Bailey, she ended her life. You know, we need to tell our stories in ways that sometimes are cries for help, but are sometimes those records after we have left an organization to say, this is what happened on this day. This is my voice. These are the people who knew, you know, et cetera. Sorry I went off. That was long, but.
Jennifer: No, Thank you for sharing that much about all this. I, and I think that I have wanted to ask this kind of question before, sometimes I’ve had guests on my show that have experienced some bullying on social media and other things. I know I had Dr. Carlotta Berry, who came and talked about it. But you’ve been through the kind of legal battle and something that’s public. And you’ve written about it in ways that I feel like people will really hear what you’re saying and it, they’ll take it in and they’ll start practicing some of those things themselves. Like, I want to help inspire change with this conversation. And so I really appreciate you being open and authentic about that.
Social media presence and growth, How it’s changed for academics
Jennnifer: Now, when I think about your time on social media, like it’s been so impactful for your thinking and, and your thought leadership and what you share with people. But how has it changed over time? Like, you’ve been on social media for a while, right?
Monica: I have. I think Twitter was documented. I think I started in 2010. So how has it changed? I think people are actually talking, which is funny to me. You know, academics were not talking back in the day. I think there’s still some fields where people just kind of post their accolades, but now people are having more conversations. I also think when it comes to marginalized communities, people are bold, bolder about talking about the issues that are going on in their personal lives. So they’re showing more of themselves. They’re also talking about problems that they experience. I see a lot more political statements.
Jennifer: Yes.
Monica: You know, even religious statements, displeasure with things. And I wonder if it’s like the younger generation that’s coming in, but I feel they just have less fear when it comes to displaying themselves. And just talking about. I’m southern and you know, I come from this more subdued, maybe cultural environment. But I mean, there are people who drop in their pics in tight dresses. They’re kissing up on folks, you know, they’re just like grown and sexy. And I think we need to see people who are just beautiful in every form, who are thoughtful and funny. And so that’s what I see. I see people who are human more and not afraid to be human. And that’s good.
Jennifer: Hmm. What about for yourself? Do you feel like you’ve leaned more into that over time? Or have you always shown up and been authentic?
Monica: You know what? I think that all of this connects back to our disciplines because I said I’m an academic. And so as an academic in a STEM discipline, it’s got its own culture. Engineering has its own culture. I’m in engineering education. So that’s got its own culture. So it’s like nested cultures. And I would say my culture is very, very, very conservative in how they move. And this was like the running joke of me on social media where everybody would say like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe Monica said this. Like, is she off?” And one of my friends even said in my community, she said she didn’t wanna look at my social media because she’s like, she’s gonna get fired for saying stuff.
Jennifer: She was scared for you.
Monica: That’s what she said. And that also speaks to that culture. So how have I changed? I have gotten out of the fear of my community and I have connected so much broader, like my platform, I think across all of my social media. And I probably have repetitive followers as well. But it’s about 75,000 people.
Jennnifer: Wow.
Monica: And you know, I started with a handful.. And the noise of my community is so quiet, it’s so quiet now in terms of what they think, because I see the impact of my work. I see the feedback that I get, like people who are leaving careers because of a book, because of a tweet, people who are sharing their stories because of things that I’ve said. And I’ll even give this as like a testimonial. I knew that. I know there’s something to it. I started a newsletter on LinkedIn in December, and I only have maybe like 13 editions. ’cause it’s biweekly. And I am up to, I wanna say like 8,500 subscribers right now.
Jennifer: Wow. Back from December. Since December!?
Monica: And I had maybe 700 in the first day. So there is something that is happening that is bigger than what I am. So that’s it. It’s the boldness, it’s the, I don’t care what my academic community says about me, because I know that what’s happening is more impactful and bigger than what’s in their box.
The Accomplice Academy with Dr. Monica
Jennifer: Hm. Ooh. Tell me a little bit about the Accomplice Academy. I wanna make sure that people who are listening can join if they’re a good fit for it.
Monica: Absolutely. So it is a really intimate group right now of people who want to be equity accomplices. And what I mean by that is people who we have, we focus on three areas. One is, I talk about like the level of risk. You know, as an accomplice, you’re gonna understand that what you’re doing is high risk. And so I engage through a subscription service, a monthly subscription service, where we talk about what it’s like to take those risks and how people can do this and protect themselves in the process. The second area that’s kind of connected back to being an accomplice is like looking at the level of change. And so I really focus on systemic change. So if you are in an organization, how are we making sure that we are offering sustainable solutions for people to remain safe and for equity to be real? And the third part is really having people focus on others instead of themselves. Many times when you see people who are allies, you know, they’ll, some of them will wear it like a banner and be like, “I’m an ally, I’m an ally. Come to me!” But I often tell people, you’re not an ally if I don’t say that you’re an ally. And it’s this space where sometimes as an accomplice, we do the work and people don’t even know that we do the work. But that’s what it means to do it. And I, I brought up the example in the book about, you know, going to the president of the University, of my university and saying, this is what’s happening in our organization. Please look at these statements from our engineering students. Look at the statements from our engineering faculty and staff, and take that into consideration when you hire the next leader of this organization. So, like I said, even though I shared what I did at the time, it wasn’t that people knew it. And as I told you, my developmental editor was like, you need to share stories. And I was like, okay, I’m finally gonna tell people that I was an equity accomplice in my institution at a very dangerous level, at a pretty high level. And I knew that the consequences could have been a lot worse if the leader was not committed to racial equity. That was a lot. So those examples, that’s what The Accomplice Academy is. It’s like doing the work and having the support to talk about it in a safe space. And I would say a couple of my most active people, one is an LGBTQ plus advocate who is a burnout coach, and another is a professor in a state where they have anti-DEI laws now. And you know, we really talk about this, what does this look like in your roles as a coach or as faculty. So thank you for mentioning that.
Jennifer: That is amazing. It sounds like a group where real change can happen, not just change within ourselves, but change in our communities. That sounds so cool. Thank you. Oh, I’m curious, since we were just talking about being a good accomplice and, and how being an ally is really about making sure that other people feel that we’re good allies, not just ourselves. What’s one way that we could be better accomplices or allies on social media?
Monica: Man, there are a lot of ways. I think one is like amplifying statements that I think are very courageous. You know, so if there is someone who is saying something that the world needs to hear, and if they could be, you know, criticized for it, or if they’re in a vulnerable position by saying that, I think that the very public way that we show support sends messages to organizations that we are aligned with that person. Another is actually putting real content out. You know, being brave, being courageous and saying, you know, this is what systemic change looks like. Or here are some examples. So, so tips. You know, I think social media is a wonderful place to educate. And if we have handbooks, if we have resources that have helped us, if we have contacts, you know, other books, this is the prime place for audiences to see how to do the work really well. So sharing is another piece, but I think being authentic, like once you’re there, and I feel like this gets to like the risk part, but once you are on there, it’s about being that consistent voice so people know that you are trustworthy, that they can rely on you, that you are that person who is for the cause. And so consistency. I feel like that’s an internal thing, you know, for you to, for someone to be courageous, there’s a difference between the theory and action of it. And that’s what I mean. Like my inner circle of accomplices is so small right now because anyone can post just a good statement. But it’s the translation of that statement into action, under pressure that shows me if you are really an accomplice, because it can come with negative impacts on your livelihood.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Monica: And that can include a job. Maybe you lose an opportunity because you’re too dogmatic or because you know, you’ve said something that is really pushing the envelope. But from a business perspective, I often tell people, anyone who reads what you present and they’re turned off wasn’t someone you probably needed to connect to in the first place, because you are gonna have a lot more issues down the road. And that’s what I say even about doing equity work. You know, if someone’s like, “Oh, can you tone it down? Can you do whatever,” guess what? I’m not the consultant for you. Go to the one who’s going to help you to clear things and make sure everything is measured in your organization because that’s what you’re looking for. You’re not really ready for the accomplice level. That’s the work that I’m proposing.
Jennifer: Ooh, that’s really helpful. And I think it also helps people know whether they should join the Accomplice Academy. Like, are you, are you really ready to, to do the work and to take action in your organization? Oh, that’s fascinating. Absolutely. Oh, I love that. Okay. Well, I wanna show the book again.
Monica: You know, just, I’m also an author. I write fiction. Yes. I have one that’s dropping this week.
Jennifer: I’m gonna get it. I’ll say I love romance books. I do.
Monica: Thank you. Thank you. Because you know what, that’s a taboo. So we can talk about that.
You know, we talk about authenticity, people like, what are you doing? Are you out there writing smut? What’s happening? And I’m like, my people love each other. Okay. They love, they love on each other. They love each other. So I will say that, and the thing that I will also mention is that I put social justice things in my book as well. So even in the one that’s coming up, and I’ll say this really quickly. My protagonist did not earn tenure, but she was involved in a domestic abuse situation. And we have an issue where she goes to Alabama and because of their laws, she can’t be an unwed mother and keep her job.
Jennnifer: Oh wow.
Monica: Yeah, with STEM students because of donors. And so that sounds very familiar. The arranged marriage part of my romance is when, spoiler alert, her principal boss doesn’t want to lose this amazing teacher. And so, they kind of like each other anyway.
Jennifer: Oh, That sounds great.
Monica: It’s this whole social justice thing that’s embedded in romance and how they have to move forward. So I’m just putting that teaser out there to say, it’s not just smut, although you get it, but it’s the lessons behind how women of color have to move professionally and personally to be successful and to be whole, bold and strong. Same thing.
Jennifer: I so appreciate that. As a survivor of domestic violence, myself, I found love. I found romance. Like I can’t wait to read this book. It’s, it’s, yeah, it’s on my reading list. I’m very excited. Okay.
Monica F. Cox, Ph.D., is an unstoppable force who has made it her mission to disrupt and trailblaze her way through the world. Her unapologetic approach to life has made her a change agent and leader who is unafraid to make people uncomfortable. Despite facing personal and professional adversity, Monica was raised by her educator parents to persist and pursue her dreams.
As a 2020 Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), Distinguished Professor of Engineering, and former department chair at The Ohio State University, Dr. Cox is no stranger to conflict. Her unwavering dedication to advocating for people and women of color has transformed the fabric of her department and the larger organization.
Dr. Cox’s research focuses on the infusion of equity in STEM education and the empirical exploration of women of color in the workplace. With over 130 publications, a presidential award for research, and approximately $20 million in led and collaborated multidisciplinary projects, she is a true expert in her field.
Martine Cadet interviews me about faculty online presence for the professional development workshop she’s hosting at her university. What is faculty online presence? How can a personal academic website help professors and the people they care about? Let’s talk about your digital footprint as an academic.
Jennifer: Hi everyone, this is Jennifer van Alstyne of The Social Academic. Today I have a special guest who’s actually going to be interviewing me, Martine Cadet.
I’m so excited we’re recording this video as part of a faculty development workshop that you’re doing for your university. So let’s chat about online presence for academics. I’m happy to answer your questions.
Martine: I love it. Thank you so much, Jennifer, for taking the time to meet with me. It’s such an important topic, right? Being digital today is like, you know, brushing your teeth every day. It’s like a no brainer. Everybody has their phones and laptops.
I’m an adjunct professor, and I have found that several of my peers are not actually active digitally. And one of the things that came up is having a website. Mind you, digital marketing includes social media for sure, but it also includes that digital presence online overall websites and blogs and conversations like this on channels and podcasts and so on.
Today, I’m so excited to tap into your expertise in this area of building an academic website. I’m, I’m so excited. And so I have four questions that I truly believe will help any, you know, academic person to identify how important it is to explore having a website or perhaps if they already have one, to continue to maintain it and make it better. And so I’d love to dive in. If you’re ready, let me know, Jennifer, because I can’t wait to hear your expertise.
Jennifer: I am ready.
Martine: Wonderful. And so to get started, I wanted to ask you, Jennifer, can you explain the concept of a scholarly website and why it’s important for faculty to have one, even if they already have a strong presence on social media, why should they even look into kicking off a website and or maintaining one?
Jennifer: That is such a great question. I feel like so many faculty want a website. They’re not really sure if it’s for them, or they think that they don’t want a website, but actually it would really meet all of their professional goals. So let’s chat about it. What is a personal academic website? Well, it’s a place online that you own, that you control, where you can share things like your academic bio, a photo of you, and links to anywhere else that you’re online, whether it’s your faculty profile, your social media accounts.
The thing I love about personal websites for professors is that they can grow as big as you need them to be. They can change their shape and what they hold in terms of the contents and what you wanna share over time. So if you just want a one page personal website that has what we talked about, your bio, your headshot and contact links, that’s great. That’s a perfect place to start from.
But some of the professors that I work with have really extensive needs for their website. They’re trying to reach new audiences. They’re trying to communicate with their current collaborators, you know, attract research funders, share their publications, and really be helpful for their students. There is a teaching aspect to this that I think a lot of people don’t realize that they can have with their personal website. So a personal website can be anything you want it to be. And that’s the beautiful thing.
Professors, if you’ve been thinking about a website for yourself, I want you to know you can have one. You could definitely create your own personal website, or you can hire a professional to create one for you. But it can be up in as little as an hour with a service like Owlstown from my friend, Dr. Ian Li, that is an academic website builder that really supports you to make this a reality like today.
But for some people, you know, it takes a lot longer than that. I don’t want you to think it needs to go up fast or it needs to take a long time to be a good website. You can have the website that you want and that you need for your academic life.
Martine: I love that. And so having a website, the takeaway here, I’m getting right, Jennifer, you can be on social media, but it’s like this added bonus for you, right? To do all those things that you wanna do, that you share, sharing your research, engaging with your students, and so on and so forth.
Let’s talk about that content creation a little bit more. You touched on different aspects of the website that could have the content, either the bio and you know, information about your social and whatnot.
But let’s dive in for one that’s just starting out. Let’s just say I’m a faculty. I wanna do a website. I don’t have one. Can we briefly go back to that content creation and perhaps the resource that you shared is actually a template that’s prompting faculty to include that content. Like can you walk us through the most important content pieces as we get started? That should be there.
Jennifer: Definitely. So, yes, the tool that I mentioned, Owlstown does walk you through all of these steps. So if you have pieces and parts of your academic life, you’re not sure how to bring them together, it’s a step-by-step process that will guide you through that. I want you to know that it is very supportive.
But for anyone who’s looking to build a website outside of Owlstown, or who is gonna be working with a professional to make your website, let’s talk about the content that you need. Definitely a bio that’s the most important thing that you can put on your personal academic website. And you want your bio not to be the standard academic bio that you have. Maybe on your faculty profile, it needs to do a little bit more work because the people who see your academic bio are other academics. There are people who are probably seeing you at a conference, who are gonna be talking with you about your research. But people who come across your personal academic website might be from a variety of fields or countries. They may need a little bit more support to understand who you are, what you do, and the things that you value and care about most as a professor. So I want you to take some time and be introspective when you’re writing that bio to, to really help you make it feel like you, but also communicate with that wider audience. I want the media, the public, and your friends and family to also be able to understand you and connect with what you do based on what you share there. So academic bio is the number one thing that you’ll want to gather.
You’ll also want a headshot, a photo of you. Now, that can be a little bit tricky for some people. You know, I just did my first professional photo shoot. I had an amazing photographer for my engagement photos. And it was so much fun. If you can afford or want to work with a professional photographer, I highly recommend it. It was an amazing experience.
But for the longest time, I have only used selfies on my personal academic website. So I don’t want you to think you have to go out and spend money. You can take your phone and go take some selfies. You can ask a friend or a colleague to take some photos of you. I’ve actually done that for friends, for their first books and for a grant award. Things like, I love taking photos of other people. So I want you to know, you probably have someone in your life who’s willing to take a photo of you too.
There’s lots of opportunities to work with the people around you to create content, but sometimes a selfie is the easiest thing to do. Prop it up on some books. Take that photo with a timer and just call it a day. If you can get your photo and your bio, you can have a personal academic website. You don’t really need anything more than that.
Definitely gather your social media links if you have them. But the truth is, a lot of people with personal websites, maybe not on social media, or maybe they’re not super active on social media or that account that they made, they haven’t actually touched it in like four years. That’s okay.
That’s one of the things I love about personal academic websites. It’s this great tool to help share your online presence and the things that you care about, even when you’re sleeping, even when you’re not active on social media, even when you’re traveling for conferences or grants and you don’t have time to check your phone or don’t want to because you’re so focused on what you’re doing at hand. I want you to have those privileges. And when you have a personal website, it’s doing that work for you even when you’re not working. So I really love that.
Now, in terms of growing the site, there is more content to gather and some of that content, in fact, most of it is probably in your curriculum vitae (CV). So updating your CV and then seeing the different pieces of your life that feel important to you, whether it’s publications, speaking engagements, media mentions, or actually talking about your students and mentees and the people that you collaborate closely with that information. You’ve probably already done the hard work of gathering quite a bit of it. And so placing it on your personal academic website just from your CV, is an improvement.
Now, if you can also go in and add things like abstracts for your talks or publications, links to maybe the conference program or a video of that speaking engagement, if there is one. These are all ways to enhance your website, but I don’t want you to feel like if you don’t have these right at the start that you can’t hit publish, you totally can. Your website can grow with you over time.
Martine: Wonderful tips. My goodness, Jennifer. So good. I love the tip about the selfie. So good. ’cause I know as a faculty, we’re so busy, right? With our work and it, it’s so refreshing to hear the tips that you gave about, you know, reach out to a colleague to take your picture, take a selfie. It’s okay. Right?
I wanna hone back into the statement that you made that I love so much for my next question, when you said, let the website do the work for you, right? And I wanna go back to that.
You mentioned that a website has the added value here for us faculty is to be able to engage with our students, other faculty members and beyond. But how do we get them to come and to see it? Let’s talk about that engagement, right? Yeah. This whole SEO, you know, search engine optimization and website, it kind of scares me. What are your tips with that?
Jennifer: That’s a great question, actually. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a client just last week. We were looking over his new website together. It was a redesign from an existing personal academic website that he already has. And we’re right at the end of this project. And so there’s always this like, “Ooh, like is this gonna do everything I need” kind of feeling? And he said, “My current website doesn’t get a lot of views. Like, is this going to reach people?” And the answer is yes. If you do the work to share it, if you make it available, if you mention it to people, people are gonna come regardless of if they’re Googling you or not. You are someone who is on campus meeting people all the time. You have students coming to your classes. You have students considering your classes. You have people considering your talk for, you know, programs and conferences that they’re running. You have people who are thinking about potentially reaching out and working with you. But when you have that online presence, it’s doing a lot of that kind of in-person work with you.
It’s not like you don’t exist as a person anymore. You have an online presence, but your online presence enhances what people can learn about you even when you’re sleeping, even when you’re not in the room. And this is really important for scholars who, you know, maybe don’t have the funds to travel all the time. Or, who really need their work to reach people beyond their university, beyond their state, or even their country.
Online presence is something that can spark further conversations. But the first step is always being willing to share it yourself first. So places like your email signature, your social media profiles, your faculty profile, making sure that you mention your bio in, or excuse me, you mention your website, URL when you’re sharing your bio with event organizers and with other people who mention you in the media, you have agency and helping people find your website because they’re going to be searching your name and finding your website without you too.
But I want you to remember, like you, you shouldn’t hide your website once you’ve created it. There’s no reason to feel embarrassed or anxious. It’s not self-promotion. It’s actually helping people because when they’re on your website, they don’t have to be there. It’s not like social media where they’re scrolling and like they’re forced to, you know, take a quick look at what you share.
A website is exploratory. It sparks curiosity and it’s an invitation for people to learn more about you for the things that they wanna learn. And they can click off at any time. So I don’t want you to feel icky or negative about sharing your website. But sharing your website is definitely the first step. Google and other search engines, they’re gonna crawl your website. They’re going to start serving it in search results when people Google your name, potentially when people Google topics about your research. So that’s gonna do the work too. There are multiple ways that people can find you and your website, and I want you to know that you have responsibility, but also online that’s gonna do a lot of the work for you.
My favorite part about having an online presence with a personal academic website is it facilitates word of mouth references and collaborations. So if you have a collaborator who has an upcoming graduate student who’s interested in the same research as you, they’re looking for a postdoctoral position next year, that person can easily share your personal academic website with a really great potential applicant for your postdoc position. It facilitates that word of mouth connection that people have. It helps ’em better be able to share who you are and what you care about with other people who they think might be a really great fit to connect with you. So I really love that. It’s just, it’s yourself, it’s the people around you and it’s all of those kind of benefits of being online. So search engines can find you that can help share your website.
Martine: Oh, so good. You know what I love the most in all of this, the biggest takeaway that I’m taking from you here is this mindset shift that you shared about your website is not to be yourself promotional tool. It’s more about presenting yourself so you could help people.
Yeah, like when you said that, I’m like, “oh my gosh, that makes so much more sense,” right? Because then I feel more at ease to share what it is that I can help others do, right? I love this mindset statement that you shared such great nuggets. I wish I could be with you forever.
I have one more question for you, Jennifer. And that’s the big one in regards to what you shared that you said the online world is here and it’s here to stay. And it’s evolving, evolving very, very fast. I mean, two decades ago it wasn’t even half of what it is today.
And so my last question to you, Jennifer, as this whole digital landscape grows every day, what would you recommend a faculty to make sure that they keep in mind to ensure that their website remains relevant and that, you know, they, they update it? Because again, two decades ago it was a completely different experience and who knows what it’s gonna be next year, two years from now? What are your suggestions based on how you see the digital landscape is evolving to ensure that we do if we have a website?
Jennifer: Yeah, that is a great question because I wanna protect your futures too. Like, I’m not gonna give you information or guidance that’s gonna steer you down the wrong path and be a waste of your time. I like personal academic websites for professors because it is lasting. It’s not gonna disappear like if a social media platform no longer exists.
Your website not going to go away if you stop using it or stop having time or attention for it. At minimum, I recommend updating the content once a year. So if you can put a reminder in your calendar to, on that date every year you spend an hour looking through your website pages, just making a list,
what needs to be changed
what needs to be added
what needs to go away because it’s no longer relevant
If you can do that once a year, your website is gonna be doing far better than the vast majority of personal websites because most go un updated.
You know, most people, like, once they create it, it’s there and they’re like, I did the work. But the truth is that Google search engines and the people who are coming to your website, they need new and relevant information. They need to know who you are, what you care about, and the work that you’re doing now and the people that you want to be working with in the future. So taking that time for an annual update for sure.
My second tip is really just being open. I mean, things are going to change over time. I had an amazing guest on The Social Academic just last month that was totally focused on augmented reality, virtual reality, gamification, and all these cool things in the classroom. I know that the way that professors communicate about who they are and what they do, that’s gonna change over time too.
But I’ve met so many people on social media who just say, I’m not gonna join because I don’t know what it’s gonna look like 10 years from now. People are looking for you today. They’re not caring about what you’re gonna be doing in eight years unless they care about you now. You have that opportunity to start reaching people this year, this week, this month.
I want you to have all of that time to be reaching the people who actually care, the people who you want to be having conversations with, the people who you want to be collaborating with, the students who you want in your courses. You have more agency in what you share about yourself online than you might expect.
A lot of people don’t realize they can meet so many goals with their personal academic website, but just being open to having one. Being open that your website may and probably will change in the future because you are gonna change in the future. And your needs and your interests are gonna change in the future.
That’s the best thing that you can do. Be adaptable. Be open to new ideas and open to change if something new that you’re interested in exploring comes up. I think if you do that, you’re gonna be golden. You’re gonna be in such a good place with your online presence, not just now, but long-term. I’m excited for you.
Martine: That’s wonderful. I love this tip about, just check it once a year, pick a time and I’m guessing it could be any time of the year. If you wanna do it right at the end of the year or perhaps over the summer. If you have that break in between semesters and you’re just getting ready for the next semester, like maybe that’s the time. I love that. And it’s so relevant. It makes sense.
This is great, Jennifer. I am so, so grateful for this conversation and I know my peers are gonna be excited to hear all the tips that you shared with us today from why having a website is important as a academic faculty, personal academic website is important from that point to what’s the content creation, how do you make sure that it’s engaging and does the work for itself and truly looking out for the future of it?
My goodness, you gave us everything. And now I’m like, okay, I’m going to do what you’re doing right now watching. Go to the description here and, and click, click, click. Because I understand how exciting it feels to be hearing such information.
Like you said, Jennifer, having an online presence is going to really, really bring a reach of things that you never could have ever imagined. I couldn’t agree more. And so thank you again for this wonderful conversation. Jennifer, you’re amazing.
Jennifer: Thank you. I have loved these questions and I hope that your faculty find it super helpful.
Electrical and Computer Engineering and Robotics Professor, Dr. Carlotta Berry knows her online presence can fit as many of her identities as needed to support her goals to “diversify STEM by being a STEM communicator.” And, to share her black STEM romance books and her children’s book There’s A Robot! Series with the world.
In this featured interview, we talk about what it’s like to be a professor with an extensive online presence with profiles on many platforms and multiple websites. Dr. Berry knows that when she shows up online, when she creates strong black women characters for her books who care about STEM, she helps create “what I really wanted to see when I was an engineering student: was Black women professors in engineering.” We also talk about writing her Black STEM romance books, Elevated Inferno and Breaking Point: Chandler’s Choice and what it’s like to be a professor and an author online. Read her bio.
Meet Dr. Carlotta Berry
Jennifer: Hi everyone, it is Jennifer van Alstyne from The Social Academic podcast where we talk about managing your online presence in academia. Today, I have a featured interview guest I’m so excited about because I’ve been planning this interview for, to be honest, over a year.
Dr. Berry, I’m delighted to have you on The Social Academic podcast. Would you please introduce yourself for people?
Carlotta: Absolutely, my name is Carlotta Berry, PhD and I’m a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Robotics. I’m also the owner of NoireSTEMinist Educational Consulting, a company that I started during the 2020 pandemic. My area of research is robotics and controls. The theme for my company is ‘my STEM is for the streets,’ and my goal is to use robotics to diversify STEM by being a STEM communicator and having a strong presence online and also by doing speaking and writing books and making GIFs and doing lots of things in order to amplify the importance of diversity in STEM and robotics.
Jennifer: The first time I saw you online was a post that you were sharing on Twitter about robotics. It was so visually engaging for me. I was like, “Oh my gosh. I can’t wait to see more from this professor,” even though I don’t know anything about robotics personally. Just having that visual, just seeing who you were as a person made a difference for me.
I’m curious like, what prompted you to get on social media and to create an online presence for yourself?
Carlotta: I’m gonna tell you, the pandemic was a crazy place. So my initial beginning to social media was actually back in 2013. I had gone to a women’s leadership conference and Paul Carrick Brunson spoke. Paul Carrick Brunson was a famous guy who was a matchmaker actually. And he had gotten famous because he was on Oprah Winfrey. And he came and spoke to this room full of women engineering academics who were all professors. And he said, “I went and looked for the clout score for most of you and most of you’re at zero.” And basically what that means is that we did not have any kind of online presence. And he was saying, “If you’re gonna be the thought leaders of tomorrow, you have to understand that your work has to impact people beyond the ivory tower, beyond conferences, beyond paywall journals.” At that time, I started my social media. I think I just started a Twitter account around 2013, but I never really did anything with it.
Then in 2020, thank God, I got approved to go on sabbatical right before the pandemic struck. So I was going on sabbatical anyway. And once we were all home all day and you can only do but so much, I started playing on social media.
What I realized is that every time I was posting something, I think I had maybe like a thousand followers or maybe 2,000 in 2020, even after seven years on social media, and it just started growing and people loved when I put engineering and robotics quizzes. They’d be like, “I don’t know what any of this is, but put another one.” And I thought it was so crazy.
I like to call 2020 my Jerry McGuire moment. It’s like the beginning of Jerry McGuire. He talks about, “I want to be a agent but I want to learn to be a sports agent in a new way.” And my Jerry McGuire moment was, “If I really wanna diversify STEM and the thing I really wanted to see when I was an engineering student was Black women professors in engineering, then how can I increase my visibility for other people and not for me?”
And social media is great. My STEM is for the Streets. Where more are the streets than social media? So I started on Twitter, and the way I ended up other places beyond Twitter, ’cause Twitter really was my pocket because I didn’t really understand social media. I still don’t understand Instagram. No clue how Instagram works.
A parent said to me, “My daughter is a teenager and she is really into STEM. You gotta go where they are. You gotta get over on TikTok.” And I was like, “Ugh.” You know, ’cause TikTok has kind of a bad rap. I went on TikTok and I wanna say within one year, I had gotten the same number of followers that I got on Twitter after 10 years.
Jennifer: Amazing.
Carlotta: TikTok is the jam.
Jennifer: We’re drawn to you. And TikTok allowed more people to see you probably than anything like Twitter or even Instagram with its more limited kind of reach to people. Oh, they were just waiting for you.
Carlotta: They were, I mean, it’s a total different kind of dynamic. So I can truly say that Twitter and TikTok are really where my pocket is. Everyone else is just kind of there. And that all came from, I went to a branding workshop about a year or so ago and I don’t remember her name unfortunately but she said, “You need to make sure that you at least park your name on any platform that you may eventually have some impact on. Because the worst thing you want to happen is that your brand grows and then somebody else takes your username because you never parked it and they do something inappropriate with it.” And so that’s kind of how I ended up with the same username on all these different platforms even if they don’t get as much attention as that one. Because I remember her saying that like, I have a NoireSTEMinist.com website. She’s like, “You need to have a website with your name.” So I now have a pointer from my name to that website, and that just came from that advice from that woman.
Jennifer: Oh, I love that. So it sounds like having an online presence was something that you wanted to be able to reach people in the streets, to be able to reach people. But it was also something that you realized was valuable for yourself as a researcher, as a professor, and just as a person, like a human being. It sounds like that, almost like that comment from the family member of the high school student.
Carlotta: Yeah, yeah.
Jennifer: How you realize that there were a ton of people waiting to hear from you, that were younger.
Carlotta: If you build it, they will come. But you have to build it in the right place, right? So I had to go where they are, you know. They now think Twitter and Facebook and maybe even Instagram to a certain extent are a little bit, you know, still and crusty. Which is interesting because when I first started teaching my students, Facebook was the place to be. Then probably 2013 or so, it was Twitter. I don’t know when Instagram was hot. Some of my students are on Instagram still, but now some of them are also on TikTok. So it’s just interesting.
I do do a lot of cross-posting and cross-pollinating just so that I can have maximum impact. But like I said, I’m trying to invest mostly in now Instagram and TikTok because we’re just not sure how much longer Twitter’s gonna be here.
Trolling, racism, and responding to hate on social media
Jennifer: I hear that. Now let me ask, it sounds like you’re on a lot of platforms, which one do you like personally enjoy the most?
Carlotta: Crazy as it may sound is still Twitter.
Jennifer: Oh! Okay.
Carlotta: Yeah. Despite the fact that they still have a lot more trolling, a lot more ads, a lot more racist. I actually get the trolling being a Black woman in STEM, having a PhD in my bio, I have probably been trolled on all, actually all of the platforms for someone questioning my credentials, talking about affirmative action, diversity hires and all that. It even happened on LinkedIn as crazy as that may sound.
None of them are safe, but I think Twitter is probably the worst for that. Where you know they just wanna come in and question you, like, are you really a doctor? And I tell them, “Yeah. Maybe I did get my degree from affirmative action, but I have it. Do you have one?” Yeah, because they kind of expect you to get defensive like, “Oh my God, somebody gave you a chance, so you don’t deserve it.” I got a chance and my mama did not have to cut my face on a lacrosse crew captain to do it, you know? So I mean, you know, you just have to get them.
I probably get more of that on Twitter than any other platform. But I like to say I’m a troll take down queen.
My vision for trolls is I’m going to keep going at you until I make you block me. So far I’m batting 1000 and have been since 2020. pic.twitter.com/TTkJIeNBnw
— Dr. Carlotta Berry, PhD #NoireSTEMinist® 👩🏾🎓🤖 (@DrCABerry) August 26, 2022
“I’m a troll take down queen.“
Jennifer: You’re a troll take down queen. I love that. What do you do to take down trolls? What do you do to protect yourself in this situation?
Carlotta: What they want you to do is to get upset, and they also want you to block them and run and hide. And depending on if I have a deadline, like I had one when I’m on deadline, like if I have papers due or I got grading to do, I got to get ready for class, I do block them and move on.
If I have a little bit of time in my day, I will GIF and meme the teeth out of you. And a lot of times they block me first. And at that point I’m like, “Troll 101, baby. You blocked me.” But yeah.
Jennifer: Interesting!
Carlotta: And then I noticed that once I start coming back at them, I’ll start getting comments like, “But you’re a professor. What kind of professor acts like this? How do you think your school would feel? How do you think your boss would feel they knew?”
Okay, first of all, I am tenured, and I am a full professor, but a lot of my colleagues follow me on social media as well as my school follows me. So if you are so concerned, feel free to do that.
I had someone on TikTok also threatened to screenshot a video or something and send it to my school. I don’t believe there’s anything I do that anybody at my university really cares about.
But if you think that that’s going to scare me out of responding to your ignorance, then you got another think coming.
Jennifer: Yeah, professors are reported all the time for things that happen on social media, even in person that are recorded on video and their universities often are like, “Thanks for sending that to us.” And then they don’t really do anything with it the vast majority of the time.
I’m sorry to hear that you’ve gotten so many threats, especially reporting to your employer. I really like your response. It actually sounds like you approach responding to them from a very empowered place of knowing yourself, knowing who your real friends are, and who your real supporters are.
Carlotta: Absolutely.
Jennifer: That is beautiful. Thanks for sharing that with me.
Carlotta: Thank you, I was gonna also say, you know, lemme tell you, when I knew reporting doesn’t do anything: there was a guy at a university and I cannot remember where it was anymore, but he was just tweeting things like, ‘this is why women shouldn’t be in STEM’ and ‘women shouldn’t be in the science classroom because they are not smart enough’ and all of that.
He was saying some horrible misogynistic things about women in STEM and all of these women scientists and engineers like me underneath were tagging the university, reporting him to the university, et cetera.
Eventually the university released a statement, “We are aware of the statements of one of our adjunct or endowed or emeritus professors. We have heard you. We’ve gotten the comments. He’s done this for years. You always report. However, we wanna make it clear he’s emeritus and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
I’m sitting here like, “If this white guy can go on here saying all kind of misogynistic stuff and nothing can happen? Then the fact that me promoting diversity in STEM is bothering somebody, then I know nothing’s gonna happen from that.”
Jennifer: Hmm. So you have all of these profiles, it sounds like you’ve got trolled on every platform that you’ve been on. What prompted you to have so many profiles for different things? I get that you went to the branding workshop, but you don’t just have your name, you have NoireSTEMinist, and I think you have Carlotta Ardell. Is that right?
Carlotta: I do, I do. Yes, so what happened was also during the pandemic, not only did I launch my company, but I also started writing Black STEM romance novels.
I just started brainstorming all the different ways to normalizing Black, oh, thank you, Black women in STEM, Black women in engineering. And my mentor, my writing mentor, ’cause it was not an easy transition from technical engineering journal type writing to fictional writing, understanding view, understanding visual writing and all of that. And my writing mentor was like, “I think your messages are getting crossed up. I know everything relates back to your primary, but you don’t want your romance books getting mixed up with your technical papers. You don’t want people going to learn about your books and they’re on your professor site.”
That was her recommendation, to disconnect the two. And so that’s why I came up with a pen name Carlotta Ardell, which is my middle name, so that if you search on that, only the romance books come up. But if you search on my surname, then my textbook will come up or my journal papers that come up, et cetera.
Then that just immediately transitioned to, you need to have dedicated websites, channels, et cetera for book stuff. So I’m not always the best at it and I do most of the managing of my stuff, which is why I’m crazy most of the time. But I do try to dedicate, if at all possible, the Carlotta Ardell stuff to the Black STEM romance, NoireSTEMinist to the STEMy stuff, the educator stuff, and then my others like my personal Twitter or my personal Instagram. I’m liable to say anything on that one. But I’m not always best about doing that.
But I also had to at some point realize I can’t do it all. And so I do have a virtual assistant and she does a little bit of the managing for me, not that much, but she helps a little bit with content creation.
“Canva has been a game changer, designing things in Canva and automating posts in Canva.“
But Canva has been a game changer, designing things in Canva and automating posts in Canva. Even though I know it’s frowned upon and a lot of people don’t, I like it. AI art has also been a game changer for me because it’s very, very difficult to find little Black girls building robots, little Black girls doing electronics, Black women in research labs.
I’m able to en mass create the vision for the world that I want to see. And through that media, I was able to get an Afro-futurism talk at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. So because I started generating this content of little Black girls and brown girls being androids and playing with robots, I got the Afro-futurism talk.
Even though I’ve gotten trolled about my AI art as well, it has already led to some opportunities for me.
Carlotta: But yeah, so the GIFs was the same thing. The GIFS came about also 20, I’m telling you 2020 and 2021, the pandemic sabbatical year was crazy. I hated that whenever I wanted to make a reaction to somebody’s post, I would have to scroll forever to find Black teacher, Black woman engineer, Black STEM, Black professor, Black woman laughing, there were like three or four people.
So that’s why I really started making the GIFs because I could never find GIFs that represented me. And so that’s where that came from. And I don’t do it so much anymore, but I have found that some of them have become relatively popular. Like there’s a frustration one that I made that is like extremely popular. People will sometimes DM me a message if somebody used my meme or my GIF in a response. They’d be like, “Look, this person used one of yours.”
Jennifer: That’s great. When you first created your GIFs, did you have that kind of idea or notion that a lot of people would then be using them? You created them for yourself, it felt like personal, but like now other people are using them. What are your thoughts on that?
Carlotta: A hundred percent I did not. It was completely for me. In fact I was on Twitter venting like, where are the GIFs for people who look like me? Where are the GIFs for people that act like me? Where are my GIFs? And it’s been a few times I’ve tweeted something and somebody reached out to me, and I think GIPHY may have responded or GIPHY identity responded. I think GIPHY identity must be maybe their diverse voices channel. And I think they responded and said something make a GIPHY channel and make your GIFs.
I honestly did not know it was that easy. I mean, I already make videos in Canva. I already make videos for my class in Camtasia. Making a GIF really is as easy as having a picture or a video converting it to a GIF and uploading it to that website. I mean, it’s so easy and I don’t think people realized that. And so once I did it, there were a couple of people who reached out and was like, “Can you make me one?” So if you look at my GIPHY channel, there’s probably about three or four other Black women in STEM on there. ‘Cause I don’t think anybody realized how simple it was. But it was me venting in a tweet where somebody responded and was like, “You know, anybody can do this. You just have to make a Giphy channel and get it approved.” Really? I mean, that easy outta debt that done it years ago. Who knew?
Jennifer: It sounds like a lot. So you’ve made your own GIFs in the past, you have all of these channels, you’ve got the websites, you do have some support with your assistant, which is amazing.
Leaving Spill, and considering other social media platforms
Jennifer: But before we started recording, you actually said like it feels messy. Like it feels like a lot. And so I’m curious, like what’s something like a decision that you’ve made for your online presence that you probably wouldn’t make again, you like, wouldn’t repeat it, or wish you could take it back?
Carlotta: I think when people kept saying Twitter was dying and there was a mad rush to other platforms, I probably would’ve slowed down because now that I’ve opened them up, I probably feel kind of obligated to maintain them even though I don’t post a lot. Like I made a post news site. My post news site may have like five things on it. I made a Bluesky site. My Bluesky may have like five or 10 on it. I got on Mastodon. Mastodon is kind of a different kind of place. The format is kind of different. It’s kind of weird. And I have a Spoutible.
But to be honest, if I would’ve just slowed down and been like, everybody’s making a mad rush for the doors on Twitter, I’m not going, I probably would’ve made them.
One thing I made and I did reverse this decision, I made a Spill. Spill was the one that was invitation only and they sent out the little codes and pretty early on, I got a Spill invitation and I went on there. And what I did not like is Spill is visual. It’s more you post images than words.
I was over there sharing some of the same kind of content that I share everywhere ’cause you know, my brand doesn’t change just because I changed platforms. And I started becoming, they were like, “You’re trolling the timeline. You’re spamming the timeline. You don’t engage right. You’re not doing it right.” And for the first time ever, I deleted myself off of a social media account because I felt Spill was a little bit too judgy.
And I’m like, if I’m gonna be criticized, critiqued, and judged, I can go read my course evaluations at work. And you know, in my time of relaxation, I don’t get on social media to be critiqued and criticized about how I do it.
You know, when a troll does it on Twitter, I just slam ’em down. But when I did it on Spill, you know, this person’s saying stuff like “I’m trying to educate her,” “I’m trying to tell her.” And then other people started popping in like, “Well, she just doesn’t know.”
I said, “Well, I know what I am gonna know. I’m about to delete this. That’s what I am gonna know.” And I actually contacted Spill on Twitter and said, “I don’t think you’re ever gonna be successful because you’re letting the members of your community police the way people engage.” And if you don’t want people here, just say you don’t want people here. I thought the whole goal for a social media community was to build community. And I was just like, it was just so negative.
But similarly with Mastodon, I could post the same engineering professor quizzes and engineering STEM content that I put on Twitter or somewhere else and people will engage or just click on things and be like, “I have no clue.”
On Mastodon, I have people coming underneath and trying to, well, actually this is what your question should say or well, actually this is how we, almost every time, and I’m like. So it’s kind of like, interesting to me how you can post the same thing in multiple places and get completely different reactions. Mastodon is not so negative that I’m going to leave it necessarily.
I just think it’s a little irritating that they have a bunch of elite type of intellectuals over there. Some of them who want to constantly try to tell you how to do things like, “I’m not sure that was the correctly framed question and that your multiple choice options are the best ones.”
This is for fun, honey. And to introduce people to STEM. This ain’t my classroom and you are not a peer reviewer. Get over yourself.
Jennifer: Tell me a little bit about NoireSTEMinist and who it’s supporting. I’d love to hear more about your business.
Carlotta: The business was started because, also during the pandemic, is once my social media presence exploded, I started getting contacted and pinged a lot for speaking engagements. I didn’t mind doing the first couple of talks, ’cause academics and professors, we speak for free all the time at conferences, on panels.
But I started having people asking me to speak in person and online to events that might be 500+ people. Sometimes at events, they were charging people to attend but had no budget for the speaker. Or, they had money to fly me there, but nothing to pay me for preparing my slides, leaving my classes, and wanted to share the slides and the recording after I left.
Okay, I’m now giving you my pearls. I’m giving you my intellectual labor.
It took me six years to get this PhD. You count that plus the 13 years of K through 12, that is like 19 or 20 years of education that you’re now asking for for free.
That was my original motivation for starting my business. I had to find a way to monetize my intellectual property because people will use you up dry if you let them.
Now, I do most of my free labor through the organizations. I help co-found: Black in Engineering and Black in Robotics. We do robotics workshops for low cost or no cost for people in the community.
I also do STEM workshops and webinars for adults and kids through my business. I do speaking engagements through my business and I’m also currently the visiting scientist at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. So I do STEM activities for them as well.
NoireSTEMinist is now taking her work to the streets. And so I take things that I give my students for their high price tuition and my salary and I scale them down into bite-sized chunks for anybody who wants to get or know a little bit more about STEM.
Jennifer: I love that it’s like your business is enabling you to actually help more people for free by allowing you to produce more content, reach more audiences and having a way to like monetize that so it can continue to do so in the future. I love it.
Carlotta: My business is me, right? So NoireSTEMinist is me. So basically, my business is me doing what I was doing for free and doing what I normally do anyway, but now setting it up into a model where I can ideally start making money in my sleep and leave a legacy for my daughter. And that was the main difference, yes.
Writing Black STEM romance novels
Jennifer: That’s amazing. Oh, that felt really powerful. Thank you for sharing that with me. Oh, okay. So who should definitely be reading these books? Because your books are awesome. When I read this, I was like, “Oh my gosh, this character is just so strong.” And someone who thinks about herself first in a beautiful way because she cares about her education, because she cares about her family, ’cause she values herself.
I’m curious. Tell me more about the books. Tell me about being an author online while having like these multiple identities and multiple hats. Cause it’s all you, right?
Carlotta: Absolutely.
Yeah, the intersectionality, when I became a full professor, I gave a full presentation on the intersectional identities of being a Black woman in STEM, being a mother, being a Black person, being a woman, loving romance novels, loving to cross stitch and saying, “Why can’t these all intersect in that ball of being multidisciplinary, intersectional, interdisciplinary?”
So where this started is that during the pandemic as well, I was chatting with a couple of my colleagues in Black in Engineering, all Black women engineering professors, and we always talk about that MacGyver and Dilbert and Sheldon get all the STEM love online.
“How can we devise a way to start getting more Black women in STEM marketed correctly?“
And so we were like TV shows, comedy series, web series, web comics, and we had just thought maybe we start with books, get those to a certain point and then try to mark it out.
But it was really all about marketing. The romance came later. Originally, and we were called the Catalyst Chronicles Crew. Then the pandemic started to end and we started to go back to work and it became very difficult.
But I didn’t wanna give it up. I now had this social media presence. I had already started honing this fictional writing skill. And the first book, Elevated Inferno was actually birthed out of Instagram of all places. That was a young lady who got stuck in an elevator and it went viral because she was recording her experience. And when the doors opened, there was this gorgeous firefighter there. Of course, everybody’s like, “Ah, love interest. Love interest, love connection!”
And it went viral.
Then, he creates a Instagram account. He didn’t even have one. He said his sister contacted him and said, “do you know you’re going viral on Instagram right now because of you rescuing that young lady in the elevator?”
So he comes on and goes, “I wanted to create an Instagram account and say thank you for everyone and for all the love, and I’m married and have a son.”
I thought it was so hilarious. And so I told my friend, I said, “Okay, I know what my first book’s gonna be. I wanna use this story for my first book except he’s not gonna be married with a child.” And so that was where it was birthed.
I always knew all the women were gonna have some relationship to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). And I want all of them to have some kind of meet cute, kind of crazy way to meet. Because I want it to be romance first, but I want the STEM to be injected in a way so that someone doesn’t feel like they’re being preached to, doesn’t feel so high level, they can’t follow or understand it.
The greatest compliment I have gotten is from people who’ve said, “I don’t read romance, I don’t like romance novels, and I’m not a STEM person, but I liked your book” because that means I hit on the right note.
Because I’m the sneak attack, right? I’m proselytizing the STEM in such a way you don’t even know it hits you. You finish the book and you’re like, “Did they STEM me?”
Jennifer: I love it, well, I’m not in STEM. I’m a poet. I’m not a fiction writer. But I love romance novels and I loved your book. So pick up your copy of Elevated Inferno.
Carlotta: Thank you, and because I’m an engineer and my students have found my books, even with a different name as well as some of my colleagues at engineering conferences, they are appropriate for teenagers.
I’ve had colleagues and students talk about, are they the nasty books? You know, this is not 60 degrees of gray or whatever it’s called. These are your high school run of the mill 16+ romance novels.
We fade to black. We make, you know, we allude to the scenes because I’m an engineer and an academic and a professor and my students have found and do read my books. I can’t be talking to them in front of class if, you know, they just done finished reading steam and steamy.
Jennifer: Oh, I love that. Well, I was a writer and went to school for writing. And so a lot of my professors wrote some steamy scenes in their books and it was always a little awkward. That’s very thoughtful of you.
Carlotta: Book two is Moses. Moses was actually in book one. He helped Reese connect with Monet on social media in book one. And book two is all about Moses, who’s a womanizer and a player. And Chandler is a nursing student. So she’s serious about her business. She lost her father some years ago and had a little bit of a detour but she’s on the right track. She’s getting her degree. She’s about her business. And Moses gives off straight player vibes when she meets him. And she’s like, “Uh-uh. I’m not even trying to go there with him.”
He’s a player, but he’s persistent. So eventually, she relents, gives him her number and they start dating. And she tells him, I just don’t have time. I don’t have time for any foolishness. So if we’re gonna date, I wanna be in a situationship. You know, I’m not even gonna put myself out there like that. We know from the very beginning, we are just having a summer fling. We’re flinging it. It’s all good. But he’s great, you know. He’s a great guy.
Even though he’s a player, he’s not a dog. So they have a great summer. And at the end of the summer she goes, “I wanna try this for real. I wanna stop playing at dating and I want to date date.”
And he’s just like, “Uh-uh, you knew what this was.” He wasn’t ready. And so they have a horrible, horrible breakup. It gets really, really ugly. And Chandler walks away. And Moses goes, “Wait a minute. I like her, but she’s gone. She’s gone.”
I don’t wanna give the whole book away, but she goes on with her life. She makes some decisions and does some things in her life. And then some years later, he gets in a motorcycle accident. She’s now a visiting nurse. She does like concierge nursing and he ends up being her nurse. He’s bedridden ’cause he’s broken his leg all the way completely. And so that’s how they come back together. That’s where ‘Breaking Point’ comes from. She reached her breaking point when he couldn’t settle down with her. He reaches his breaking point when he breaks his leg and she comes back into his life.
Jennifer: I love it. I mean, I think you gave a little bit away about the book, but the kind of stuff that’s like making everyone gonna wanna read it. I love it.
Jennifer: Tell me a little bit about the covers. I know, I think I remember that I saw you used AI art for the covers because–
Carlotta: I did not. So that’s one of my challenges. I know you know I do presentations on bias and AI, bias in STEM, bias in robotics. I have one next week. So because of that, I use AI art for marketing, but I don’t use AI, yeah, I don’t use AI art for anything that I want to copyright and sell because you don’t really know what the engine for the AI art is. You don’t really know how it’s being used.
I don’t wanna accidentally ever try to market or sell something that’s somebody else’s work.
So on my website, I think any of the AI art, a lot of it I generate is like 50 cents or a dollar, just whatever the work took for me to put it up. I use real stock photos for the book covers and then I hire somebody to put them together.
The first one my brother did, ’cause he’s a graphic artist. The second one is a stock photos and I just had somebody put it together.
And I don’t want AI art for it, but because my stuff is so very specific, it’s very hard to find stock photos of little kids, Black and brown little kids, building robots, playing with robots, et cetera. It’s just not a lot of them.
So I don’t wanna do AI art, but I gotta find an artist who’s reasonably priced ’cause I’m an independent author and publisher. I don’t have an agent who I can pay to bring my visions to life.
I don’t mind using the AI art for stuff on social media and showing it off. But all of my books need to have either real artists or real stock photos and stuff.
Book three is actually written as well. I’m hoping to get it out this summer. I’m just so crazy busy. I need to get it edited right now. But yeah, this book, I’ve now, because I have a writing mentor, I’ve gone from pandemic taking a year to get a book written.
“I can now write a book in about 35 days and then it takes another two or three months to do the editing, which is where I am right now.“
Jennifer: My mind is blown. That is some work, wow.
Carlotta: Yeah, I just, it’s hard work, but because I’m a professor and busy, I have to get the idea and get it out like that or it won’t get done.
It took so long the first time because I just didn’t know the mechanics of writing. I didn’t know how fictional book writing, I didn’t know how to lay a book out. I didn’t know about changing perspective. And if you notice my books have the male, female thing now, the second one, I just didn’t know how to do that. And so learning a lot of those things really helped me go faster. The editing is what’s slowing me down right now ’cause when I go back to work, it’s all about the students, you know.
Wikipedia and how to connect with Dr. Carlotta Berry
Jennifer: What’s it like to talk about your book online? Do people from your university like, know that you write these books? I’m curious about what it’s like to embrace both of those identities at the same time.
Carlotta: They do, and I love it. I actually, because I was on NPR a couple of weeks ago, one of the young ladies at my school, her parents heard my interview, bought her the books, shipped them to her at school, and she came to my office and had me sign them. And I think it’s really an honor. I had some young ladies who asked to borrow and read the book. And because I didn’t want them to keep taking my one copy outta my office, I had talked, my school library has now purchased copies of my books so that if they wanna read the romance novels, they can go check it out at the school library.
Jennifer: I love it.
Carlotta: But yeah, I think it’s really important for them to know that I practice what I preach and that if I say I promote diversity in STEM and all of those things, then your professor has to do more than just spout those things in the classroom.
I tell them all the time, I’m a STEM communicator, I’m a superstar on social media. And then when I’m not here, you know that I’m off doing an interview or I’m off giving a talk or I’m off doing something important. ‘Cause you know, sometimes they’re like, “Where are you going and why are you going all the time?”
The work I do is important. What I do for you is important. What I do when I’m away from you is just as important. And so helping them to understand that it’s important. And that I tell ’em, “I’m not like any of your other professors, you know.” And I think that’s a good thing.
You know, being the only Black woman engineering professor at my university, the things that I do impact a lot of people.
If I keep all of that in my little box, in my little corner of the world, I’m doing it wrong. I like to say to whom it is given much is required. And if I don’t let my blessing bless other people, then why do I have it?
Jennifer: Hmm, hmm, beautiful, beautiful. Okay, my last question.
What do you most want people to know about you or remember about you when they find you online? What’s that thing that you really want them to bring with them to whatever’s next?
Carlotta: I want them to know that my passion for diversifying STEM is infectious. And I want it to be so exciting to them that they wanna join me on the journey. Whether that’s getting some kids excited about STEM, getting themselves excited by STEM, showing some little kid how to program a robot, helping somebody get excited about being creative, being a designer, being innovative, being curious. That’s all there it is.
Jennifer: Beautiful. Dr. Carlotta Berry, it’s been amazing to have you on The Social Academic. Is there anything that you’d like to add before we wrap up?
Jennifer: Here’s both those books again. Be sure to pick up a copy. I will be linking to those in the interview. How can people find you online after this?
That was something else that happened during the pandemic. There was a Wikiathon to get more Black STEM and Black scientists, engineers and physicians online. And so we did it through the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
One day, we had a Wikiathon and we were all gonna go make Wikipedia pages. I was gonna make a page for somebody. They were gonna make a page for me. Imagine our shock when we went to Wikipedia and somebody had already made me a page. I have no idea who did it. So this was March of 2021 and somebody had made me a page back in September of 2020 and I didn’t even know it. And so I’m going on there.
But I made other people’s Wiki pages ’cause once again, you pay it forward. But I don’t have any idea who made my Wikipedia page. It’s crazy.
But yeah, so really Googling. If you just put in my name, things come up. But probably the easiest is NoireSTEMinist. And I actually purposely selected that word because I wanted it to be something that wasn’t a common term because I was able to trademark it. And also because of that, if you type that in, everything that comes up is me. So NoireSTEMinist.com. And also @DrCABerry on most social social media. NoireSTEMinist is on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. And then there’s author Carlotta Ardell as well as on Facebook and also my website.
Jennifer: Amazing. Well, Dr. Berry, thank you so much for joining me on The Social Academic. And thank you to everyone who’s been listening to this interview.
Go and pick up a copy of Elevated Inferno, or Breaking Point: Chandler’s Choice. And be sure to follow Dr. Berry on social media. Her videos and posts are amazing and you will not regret it.
Dr. Carlotta Berry is a professor, author, researcher, mentor, role model, and prolific speaker. In her efforts to increase the number of women and historically marginalized and minoritized students earning degrees in computer science, computer, electrical, and software engineering at her university, she co-founded the Rose Building Undergraduate Diversity professional development, networking, and scholarship program.
In 2020, to achieve her mission to diversify STEM by bringing robotics to people and bringing people to robotics, she launched her business, NoireSTEMinist educational consulting. She also co-founded Black In Engineering and Black In Robotics to promote diversity, equity, inclusion and justice in STEM. Her innovative strategies to normalize seeing Black women in STEM including performing robot slam poetry, writing Black STEM Romance novels, conducting robotics workshops, creating open-source robots, and using social media to educate the world about engineering and robotics.
Ready for a conversation about educational technology, artificial intelligence, and personal academic websites? The 2024 season of The Social Academic is here.
Meet my featured interview guest, Director of Educational Research Technology at New York University, Dr. Elizabeth McAplin. Read, watch, or listen to this episode of The Social Academic.
Jennifer: Hi everyone, my name is Jennifer van Alstyne. Welcome to the new season of The Social Academic. This blog, podcast, and YouTube channel is about managing your online presence in academia. Today we’re gonna be talking about teaching and educational resources.
I’m delighted to introduce my guest to you, Dr. Elizabeth McAplin, who is Director of Educational Research Technology at New York University. Elizabeth, thanks so much for joining me today. Would you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your role at NYU?
Elizabeth: Sure. I’m Director of Educational Technology Research at NYU. I’ve been in this role a little over 7 years now, and at NYU for almost 10 years. I did my PhD at NYU and a MA in Educational Technology at NYU so I have a very long history with NYU.
When I was a student there and worked, I had multiple hats: student, alumni, faculty, and administrator.
Jennifer: Wow.
Elizabeth: Yup, all of them. I was the face of NYU. My role there specifically is to collaborate with faculty who are looking to make pedagogical changes to their courses usually involving some sort of media or technology.
We had a very large provostial push years ago to encourage faculty to start using technology, trying it out. And seeing how well that could enhance their courses and make things better and easier for themselves as well as their students.
I’ll work with them in part sometimes to develop a technology. Sometimes it might be a virtual reality project that they might want to use in their course or program. As well as conduct scholarly research to see how well that is impacting student learning in their classroom or program. We aim to publish those findings as well.
I’m a central resource. I work with all schools and departments at NYU.
Creating her university-hosted personal academic website
Jennifer: That is amazing. Because you’ve been at NYU for so long, you were a student there, you’ve worked there, and now you’re a director there. I’m curious. You have an internal personal academic website [hosted by NYU]. Is that something you created when you were a student? Or, in your newer role?
Elizabeth: No, I created it during a time when I was both a student and in my current role. I was finishing my PhD while I was still a Director.
I created it not for the purpose of my own portfolio site. I do have a presence at NYU that shows my service within the structure of Research, Instruction, and Technology which is my department, within the larger umbrella of NYU IT. [That presence] does get a little bit lost sometimes in that filter. But it is there. It doesn’t describe me personally, it describes my service to faculty and to the university. It’s not focused on me per se.
The portfolio site is to showcase some of the work I’ve done in the past, mainly at NYU. It does also list my CV, prior work experience as well as teaching experience and the like. In the event life changes, I like to have something available and ready to show.
Jennifer: I love that. When I was exploring your site it was fun for me to see the different types of videos you were posting about educational technology projects you were working on and collaborating with faculty. I like that even though this is a portfolio site, it sounds like maybe a ‘just in case’ site? That it was helping me prepare for this interview and get to know a little bit more about you. At what point did you create that website?
Elizabeth: That was many years ago. It’s hosted through NYU. NYU provides faculty a WordPress service just for that. Sometimes they use it to create a portfolio for grants they’ve received or want to receive. They can provide that to their grant funders. It’s another way to showcase the work that gets done.
It’s an internally managed WordPress hosting site. It’s not something I pay for externally. All faculty have that available to them [at NYU].
Jennifer: Did NYU encourage you to create a website? Or was it something you learned about and then decided to make yourself?
Elizabeth: I think when I knew the service was available, and I was teaching there as well, I decided it was a good idea and why not? I mean, if it’s free and I don’t have to pay for it, there’s no non-incentive not to do it, haha.
Videos for your personal academic website portfolio
Jennifer: Your portfolio had a nice list of videos where you’ve collaborated with faculty to create resources and technologies for their classrooms. Can you tell me about one of the videos that you were excited to share on your website?
Elizabeth: Before I was a Director of Research, I was a Director that oversaw a very large team of instructional designers and media producers. Our role was to create a lot of this content for faculty to be used in their courses. I learned a great deal about each faculty member I worked with and their particular expertise. It’s kind of a wonderful way to learn more, because I love learning. And to create and produce those videos.
Most of those [videos] were created with a team of people. They would be scripted, prepared, and imagery selected for them ahead of time. They were very well planned out videos that were used in their courses.
They’re just fascinating and visually engaging pieces of work. We did a lot of things! A lot of interactive pieces: videos, games, simulations, etc.
Jennifer: That is so cool! And I love that there’s support at NYU for faculty who are looking to introduce those newer technologies into their pedagogy, into their teaching.
Artificial intelligence in the university classroom
Jennifer: I’m curious. What technologies are faculty curious about exploring? I’m coming from literature as a field. There’s newer augmented reality [AR] or virtual reality [VR] technology that can be introduced into that. Most faculty just aren’t aware of it. So I’m curious, what are faculty at NYU curious about learning now?
Elizabeth: Artificial intelligence. It’s a really big topic right now because it has so many unknowns.
I think there’s still a lot of faculty that are hesitant to use a lot of technology. I think since COVID when faculty had to go online during that time period, that was a big change for them. It did kind of give them that opportunity to learn more about technologies they could use moving forward.
There’s giving a Zoom presentation, learning how to present, use technologies within Zoom for their classes, making hybrid courses or fully online versions of them. Learning how to create better videos for their courses.
Not relying so much on lecture as being used for the time in the classroom anymore. Pulling the lecture out, making that as a video or something, and using the classroom for more discussion or interactive uses of the time with their students.
Jennifer: That is so cool.
Elizabeth: It’s such a precious amount of time.
And then, there’s a handful of faculty very interested in virtual reality and augmented reality. Those are mainly in the sciences and medical fields.
And now, artificial intelligence is the biggest buzz at the university. How are faculty going to manage using artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, in a productive and constructive way as opposed to ways that students want to write their papers with.
Jennifer: It’s kind of like a shift in how we think about artificial intelligence in the classroom from fear-based to how can it be a part of it in a meaningful way?
What are your thoughts on it? How are you feeling about artificial intelligence and pedagogy?
Elizabeth: I think there can be a lot of great uses of it, as long as it’s well planned out. There are efficiencies to things like using ChatGPT that we didn’t have before. That can be wonderful.
Even doing literature reviews and such through ChatGPT can help speed up that process. We didn’t have to go to a library before to do a lot of research on articles because now they’re all digitized. We can do that through an online library system.
It just gets a little bit closer to making things more efficient. Maybe we’ll have more doctoral students coming out of it. I’m not sure.
There’s always going to be pros and cons for whatever technology comes before us. We have to acknowledge it. We have to understand what are the risks? What are the affordances? And work with that. That’s always going to be the case.
Just like with a calculator, one of those tools that came out and people said, “You won’t have to learn math anymore because you can just use a calculator.” Regardless of all that, yes, we will still turn to our calculators to make sure we’re right in our math.
It’s not a new problem, and it’s not a new risk. I think some of it comes down to making sure when we’re using these tools, we’re not also putting our students at risk like with identifiable information or grades, things like that. It’s a constant conversation to have with faculty on best uses and practices of these technologies and tools. And to keep monitoring those risks and the things that are gonna come up. They’re going to come up. They always will.
When students get very stressed out and are under pressure, they’re more apt to want to cheat. Or have something, or someone, help them get the work done. So reviewing how much work we’re imposing on our students, or understanding that their social lives are taking a precedence they need to dial back to focus on their academic careers. It’s always a balance: is it the student’s problem? Or, is it our problem? And how do we find a happy medium in between?
Jennifer: I really like that. It’s a beautiful point. When I was a student my parents had just passed away. I was working so hard. There were times I struggled to keep up. My teachers’ empathy for understanding what I was going through, even just a little bit made it feel like a safe place in the classroom, and made me excited to learn (even if I was a little bit behind in some areas). So I loved what you just said.
Which of the technologies you just share with me are you most excited about? You talked about AR, VR, artificial intelligence, games. Which of those kinds of forms of teaching excites you?
Elizabeth: I’ve been working so much in virtual reality recently in the past few years, so I guess that’s the most exciting.
I’ve been working with 1 faculty member for almost 10 years. We just keep evolving resources for her course, which is really large, almost 400 students in her course. The virtual reality project we had for her, we keep trying to find ways to improve the experience overall. We’ve just gotten into working with faculty in the School of Engineering on how to create custom haptics for that virtual reality simulation.
Jennifer: Would you explain haptics for us?
Elizabeth: A virtual reality out of the box headset comes with the headset and 2 hand controllers. When you’re trying to learn a procedure that involves medical instruments like a syringe or a scalpel if you’re doing surgery, you want to know and feel what that device is like as you are performing the procedure. It’s not just cognitive. It’s tactile. It’s procedural. It has multiple learning and practice components to it.
An out of the box hand controller is not particularly authentic to actually holding a syringe and actually practicing learning that procedure. Working with engineers, they developed a 3D printed syringe and connected that to a haptic device that now students can pick up and actually feel something that’s more authentic to that experience as they are in a virtual reality simulation in going through those procedural steps.
It’s never going to replace working on an actual patient. We’re trying to prepare them to get as close as possible to a real patient experience before they work with a patient because there are so many risks involved in working with a real patient. So that’s the impetus behind that. It’s an ongoing process. We keep learning and we keep trying to make things better. That’s for us, part of the learning process as well. And that’s what’s exciting.
Jennifer: That sounds so exciting. And I love it’s been an ongoing project and exploration over 10 years to improve the teaching and tools in that course.
Jennifer on sharing the resources you create online
Jennifer: One of the things I wanted to chat about for faculty who might be listening to this, is that when you do create educational resources or tools like this, it would be great to share on your personal academic website and on social media.
These tools don’t just help your students and other faculty at your university. They might help or inspire faculty across the world. I want you to know when you do take time to share those educational resources that you’ve made in a new way, in a way that’s accessible for people not directly in your classroom or talking with you at a conference 1-on-1. You can actually help more people with the hard work you’ve already done just by sharing it.
There’s so many things you can share on your personal website related to teaching. I thought I’d list a few for those listening: your syllabi, course descriptions, any videos, or tools like PDF resources or guides. That can go on your personal academic website. If you find that it’s helpful for you or your students, I’ve had professor clients who actually create lists of internal resources and external resources at their university that they regularly share with not just one class, but multiple. Putting that on their personal website creates a kind of home for it where your students can go to find those resources when it makes sense for them.
I want you to know that your website can be a portfolio. And that portfolio can be for the job market, it can be for grants like Dr. McAplin said. It can also be for your students. There’s so many ways to share the amazing teaching and educating you do online. I want you to not hide from that if you have resources to share.
Jennifer: Dr. McAplin, why did you actually choose to share the videos on your website? I think that’s the step a lot of people are missing. They create things, but they don’t always decide to share them. What prompted you to actually share the videos and the resources you helped create?
Elizabeth: We’re proud of the work that was done. We want to show what’s possible. We’re not creating things for National Geographic or some NOVA high-production value thing. It doesn’t have to be that. But we took as much time and care as we possibly could with very little budget at all to make these resources. So it’s just to show examples of what’s possible and change a little bit the narrative. We get comfortable lecturing, but when we don’t have a visual idea for our students for what we’re talking about as we’re talking about it…we don’t want to cause a cognitive dissonance with that information either. Thinking carefully about the words with the imagery or short clips of documentaries or films that go along with what we’re saying to describe as examples of what we’re talking about. As long as they’re relevant and not overdoing it, I think it’s a good way to connect what we say with our eyes. We process these two things simultaneously, so we have that cognitive ability to do so, and we should take advantage of that ability.
What we try to encourage with faculty and to try and make it a more enriching experience for our students.
Jennifer: That is beautiful. I’m so glad we got to talk about this today. Elizabeth, is there anything else you’d like to add about your website, or about the amazing work you do at NYU?
Elizabeth: I list [on my website] that I do workshops at the university. I get asked to do talks within the university. Those are important things to share, like this conversation. We have something at NYU called Teach Talks through the Provost department and there’s some other departments that do similar things, that connect with faculty to talk about things like their assessment practices, pedagogical practices. We haven’t really had one that talks about their research. That might be a missing link we could try to fill, which is more what my area is, on the research end.
These are great resources for faculty to connect with other faculty, to learn about more ways to do things, to inspire them to do things differently, and to take a leadership role forward in that department. That’s more or less what I provide on my website.
Jennifer: That’s amazing. I’m so glad you have your website. And, that I was able to explore it so we could have this conversation today.
It makes such a difference when people are open to sharing a little bit more about themselves. So I’m happy you were open to coming on The Social Academic to talk with me. Anything else you’d like to add?
Elizabeth: If anyone has any questions, I’m available to answer them.
Jennifer: Wonderful. Well thank you so much for listening to this new episode of The Social Academic. Be sure to share it with a friend if you think they’d find it helpful. And, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode.
I’m Jennifer van Alstyne. I’ve been in conversation with Dr. Elizabeth McAplin. I’m so excited to share this episode with you.
Elizabeth: Thank you Jennifer for asking me to participate.
Dr. Elizabeth McAlpin is the Director of Educational Technology Research at NYU Information Technology. Her team assists faculty in scholarly research on teaching and learning strategies when enhanced with technology to improve student learning. She holds an undergraduate degree from Denison University, an Ed.M. in instructional technology and media from Teachers College, and an M.A. and Ph.D in educational communication and technology from New York University. In addition to her full-time position, she also teaches as an adjunct at NYU. Her interests include educational technology research, effective educational design, innovative pedagogy and assessment, and educational technology and media for all kinds of learning experiences.
Julia started Wise Investigator to help researchers get funding for their research
I had this picture of what getting research funding looks like in my head. I had sought small grants and travel funding in grad school. But never the big funding proposals my online presence clients write. I know that research funding might be integral to your career. It may also be something you’ve never attempted before, and has recently become a goal for you.
I learned so much about getting your research funded the 1st time I met Dr. Julia Barzyk.
After 10 years at a major United States funding organization, geoscientist Dr. Julia Barzyk left to start Wise Investigator. She helps Principal Investigators (PIs) get funding for their research to grow their careers.
I’m delighted to feature Julia here on The Social Academic. Let’s uncover some of the hidden curriculum together to get your research funded.
Jennifer: Hello, everyone. I am Jennifer van Alstyne. Welcome to The Social Academic. Today, I’m talking with Dr. Julia Barzyk of the Wise Investigator LLC. We’re gonna be talking about research funding.
Save this for later, because you’re gonna wanna come back to it.
Julia, I’m so glad you joined us today. Would you please introduce yourself?
Julia: Thanks, Jennifer.
I’m Julia Barzyk. I’m speaking to you from my home in Durham, North Carolina. I spent most of my career as a geoscientist.
Right now I’m working full-time helping university researchers get funding for their research, and by doing so, grow their careers more generally.
Jennifer: Why is this something that’s important to you? Why did you decide to do this full-time?
Julia: I’m gonna tell you a little bit about my responsibilities that I had in the position that I was in prior to what I’m doing now, because I think that answers a good bit of the question.
“I’m a geoscientist. I spent many years working at a major United States funding organization managing a portfolio of research in geoscience and civil engineering.”
These are projects that researchers at universities, otherwise known as professors, or principal investigators, or PIs, are performing on university campuses. They’re conducting their research with these funds, they’re supporting students with these funds, and they’re supporting themselves in terms of some salary with these funds.
My duties involved going out into the academic and the scientific community and letting people know about the opportunities through the organization I was with.
I had a lot of interactions with people as part of this outreach. Then we would have conversations that would go to the actual research topics that people were interested in pursuing, discuss and refine those topics.
Some of these people would then submit proposals. I was in charge of managing the proposal evaluation process. I directed that by sending these out for review, getting the comments from those evaluators, synthesizing all of that, and making recommendations on what was gonna be funded.
Some of these proposals were funded, and after that, I followed the work. I managed certain aspects of it. I was also responsible for connecting those university researchers with government scientists and engineers who wanted to collaborate with them. The government only has the capacity that it has in its labs with the staff that it has, and so they can extend that capacity by partnering with extramural researchers, otherwise known as university researchers.
The reason why I went into all of that was because as I was going through this process, year after year…
“I realized that the vast majority of these PIs, or professors, that I was working with were not prepared to know how to engage to their full advantage with this process.”
Generally, the advice that they’re given and the support that they’re given centers around the preparation of the proposal itself. Now, proposal preparation is very important, so I don’t wanna diminish that. This is one of those things where you’ve gotta check all the boxes. So I’m not saying don’t worry about the proposal. Get all of the support that you can on the proposal is my advice to anyone.
But, all those other steps that I described were aspects of the process that principal investigators didn’t even really know existed. By learning about the broader process, they can have a lot more success and not waste time writing proposals for an opportunity that may not even be a great fit because it’s a huge effort to write that proposal. Even if someone is not interested in funding your work, I feel like you would much rather know that before you put in those dozens of hours on writing a proposal. I decided the best way I could fix the situation was to resign from that position to dedicate myself fully to doing what I’m doing now, which is teaching this hidden curriculum to these principal investigators (PIs).
Jennifer: Tell me a little bit more about this hidden curriculum. It sounds like universities are providing some support for researchers, especially when it comes to preparing that proposal, but there’s a lot of things that researchers don’t know about that process.
Can you give me an example of some part of the hidden curriculum that your work supports?
Julia: Just one example of all of these pieces of information that piece together to form this hidden curriculum is when you’re interacting with someone from one of these organizations, is it a community-driven organization like National Science Foundation, or is it a mission-driven organization like something maybe with the Department of Defense?
Because while they’re both gonna be supporting basic research and they may also be supporting more applied research, that is just one thing that can really help guide somebody’s understanding and decisions and the questions they ask and the way they pursue that opportunity because there may be more that an organization wants to get out of a relationship with an investigator than only supporting the science or the research itself.
These are the kinds of things I talk about with clients so they can kind of wrap their heads around the bigger picture and then know how to use that to their advantage and know where the best places for them to engage are or the best places for them to say, “I’m gonna pass on that.”
Jennifer: Yeah, actually, just the word that you said, “relationship,” like it’s an ongoing relationship. It’s not just a proposal that’s going to be funded or not funded, it’s a longer journey.
That’s something that I did not recognize when I was still applying for research funds. I am so happy that someone like you exists because universities just aren’t providing the kind of support that researchers actually need to launch themselves into the world into this more funded reality. I want that for researchers. And so I’m so glad that we’re talking today.
Now, one thing that I wanted to ask you about specifically was a LinkedIn video that you had posted in the last couple of weeks. And you talked about how important it is to ask open-ended questions when you first connect with someone at a funding agency. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Julia: The short answer is that there are so many opportunities and by that I mean funding opportunities that are available that any one representative will know about. Even if this person at the funding organization is responsible primarily for one program or one opportunity, they are going to know about many, many other opportunities within their organization and even at other organizations.
At the same time, the researcher is going to have many different ideas for research that they would like to pursue. They may go into a conversation thinking, “Oh, I think this topic would be a good fit for this opportunity based on something I read.”
But if you go in with that narrow focus, you could get a “no” or even if you got a “yes,” you could still be missing out on more information.
It’s the open-ended conversation is for both parties to say kind of, here’s an overview of the opportunities and someone to say, here’s an overview of my interests and what I do. And even beyond the research topic, are they engaged with the community? Are there other aspects of what they do that are important and could be relevant to that funder? But with a yes or no question, you may not get to that.
Jennifer: Oh, that’s fascinating. So it really is a conversation starter. And it’s because both of you as the person submitting the proposal and the research funder are able to bring information to that conversation that can help you both get closer to your goals. I really like that. I really have never thought about it this way before.
Can I ask, do you get pushback from people who are coming to work with you? Are they like, wait, this is how it works? Like, I had no idea. Is there a lot of shock?
Julia: Really, their reaction is really one of relief. Because it’s like they know that there’s more to the picture. Because these are very bright people. And they’ve seen aspects of this manifest here and there. But to have somebody put all of those pieces together, it does provide a relief.
It’s not so much that they’re shocked, but that it’s like, “Oh, okay, now I see it.” And then once you see it, it’s one of those things you don’t really unsee it.
And that’s why we talk about a kind of a transformation because once you know this stuff, you know it, you don’t have to relearn it. You just really are getting to that next stage of your career where the relationship building is important and not in a way, sometimes people would have a feeling of, oh, if it’s a relationship, you know, that can go the wrong way.
If you have a closed network and you’re calling on the same people for opportunities all the time, it’s not letting other people into that circle, into those opportunities. And that’s the way we don’t wanna go where people say, “Oh, it’s an old boys club,” or something like that.
At the same time, we all are building relationships with each other. So we wanna take the positive and the good and the productive aspects of building relationships and sharing opportunities, not the kind of relationship building that closes the opportunities for other people.
Jennifer: I like that. When we first met, one of the things that I pointed out was how much I liked your bookcase behind you. I really like all the things that are on your bookcase and it tells me something about you. You actually talked about how that was like a conscious decision, isn’t that right?
Julia: Yeah, I think definitely you want to, if we’re talking about the remote-first environment, you really want to be setting yourself up with the tools that you need, with the environment that makes you feel good.
That way, when you have an opportunity to be on a podcast, or to have a meeting with a potential collaborator or a client that you can just get right to it. Just like if you met in a coffee shop and you were just set. You got your cup of tea or got your cup of coffee and you sat down and you got right to it.
And so that’s something that’s overlooked, especially now. I mean, if we’re talking about the funding environment, where I believe we can consider the funding environment or the funding landscape to be remote-first. I feel like a lot of professors, they definitely had to adapt to a lot with the pandemic and teaching on Zoom. Fortunately, they’ve really restarted the campus life environment and that’s wonderful. But it could be the case that they start thinking, “Oh, I’m back here all in real life again and I have this dynamic environment in my lab, in my building, in my office.”
“But the funding environment, I believe we should think about that as remote first. I think everybody should set themselves up to be able to thrive in that remote environment.”
Jennifer: I love that, remote-first. That’s definitely a new idea for a lot of researchers. I mean, at least when I talk to the professors who I work with on their online presence, a lot of them say, “I don’t network online. I network in person when I’m at conferences. I network at these in-person events,” but when you think about research funding as a remote-first environment, it means that you also need to reconsider how you are able to and want to network. I really love that you brought that insight to us.
Jennifer: Now, the professors that I work with at least have anxiety about talking about their work, about talking about their research online. And I really help them with that process and build their confidence.
Why is that helpful for research funders to see? Why is having an online presence helpful for people who are actually funding that research?
Julia: First of all, the most practical reason would be just to be findable. If you have something online that has some ability to show up in a search engine and a LinkedIn page is good for that because search engines like that, website can be optimized to show up in a search engine. And that’s a way that when people at a funding organization are looking for experts…
And of course we think, “Oh, they’re looking at me so I can review proposals. Well, that’s more work.” And that is true. They may be looking for you so that you can hopefully do some work for them, or let’s just say for the community. And that’s something that comes to mind first.
But there are other reasons why people in the government or at funding organizations will be looking for experts:
to serve on a panel
to serve on a committee
to speak at a workshop
or participate in a workshop
And so you do want to be findable. Then maybe you’re findable and that does lead being fundable.
Then beyond that, you do wanna stay top of mind. That’s a spaced repetition type thing. It’s that if you keep seeing somebody, then when you are in a conversation with a colleague, I need an expert in this, or who could I talk to about that? That’s the person that’s going to pop to mind as well as building this know, like, and trust, which is important for relationships, especially in the virtual environment.
Beyond that, I would say it moves into being supporting inclusivity, because like I was saying before, I definitely know that people at these organizations want to bring out and bring new people into the conversation. They can do that most easily if people are findable.
“Beyond that, moving into can it bring you any kind of advantage to a proposal, to a funding decision? Well, decisions are going to be made based on strict evaluation criteria. And that’s the way that they should be made. That said, I think very much a picture is worth a thousand words in this case.”
Julia: Because when you are writing a proposal, there is either a strict page limit on the project description, or there’s an effective page limit because evaluators don’t want to read, more than a certain number of pages.
But if you can show that you’ve engaged in the community, people know that about you because there’s some information that demonstrates that, be it photos, or a press release, or something like that on the internet they may have seen. Then it’s demonstrating, “Oh, this person has done this community-based work that they’re talking about doing in the proposal.” Or, “Oh, we’re really hoping that these researchers could maybe collaborate with some of our government scientists and engineers. Here is some evidence that they did that in years past with another group of collaborators.”
These are things that anyone can demonstrate about themselves online. It kind of proves the point more than just writing a few sentences saying, “Oh, we’ve got these great ideas. We promise we’re gonna do all this stuff.”
Jennifer: I love that. It’s like more social proof, more engaging places that those research funders can explore about you. Now, I am curious. Let’s say I’m a researcher who’s ready to start finding some research funding. Where do I start? It sounds like it’s not with the proposal. I need to have a conversation. So where do I start?
Julia: The first place to start would be to go to, and now I’m gonna speak mostly about federal government opportunities, but it would be to go to Grants.gov and to search by keyword for funding opportunities that you may be able to submit to. You’re gonna see a lot of stuff come up from all different agencies and organizations. It’s a lot to start working your way through.
If you’re at a university, your institution may have, or probably does have a subscription to commercial tools that will help you do these kinds of searches too. I would say, sure, do that. And that’s something most people think to do because they know that that’s available. That’s kind of what I’m calling like a bottom-up approach.
They should also be doing a top-down, which is to actually go to the websites of these various organizations. It’s time-consuming and it’s cumbersome because many of these websites are not easy to navigate. Some of them may say clearly, oh, “Find funding” or “Grants”, and you can go there. And even if you go there, you may get a little tripped out because it may be kind of a dead end or something. But if you’re persistent, try to find it on the website because then you’re getting the big picture view of what is this organization broadly.
“What you wanna do is when you’re going top-down or going from the bottom up is look for the names of actual people. These are your program officers, or program directors, program managers, technical points of contact that could be called or other points of contact. And you want to reach out to them because there is so much information out there.”
Julia: There is no hope. I mean, I don’t mean to sound too pessimistic, but there’s very little hope of being able to sort through it all on your own. And you don’t wanna find yourself behind your computer, just scrolling PDF after PDF hundreds of pages of this stuff, trying to think where your research could fit when it’s a much better option to
send the email
a video call
an audio call
Get on the phone with someone who works at one of these organizations and ask them “What would be the best opportunity for me?” Have that back and forth conversation. I encourage people to reach out because I worked with many of these folks for many years and they are friendly people.
Their email inboxes do get very full. So if you don’t get a response at first, just write back, but they wanna hear from you and they want to help you. I promise that. So don’t hesitate to reach out.
Jennifer: I love that. They wanna hear from you and they want to help you and follow up if you don’t hear back because they do wanna hear from you. That’s so important for people to know. Thank you for sharing that.
Wise Investigator, a program for researchers like you
Jennifer: Tell me more about your program. I wanna hear all about it because I think some people listening are gonna wanna join.
Julia: When we start out in this 10-week program, which they’re able to participate in by asynchronously in terms of watching some recorded classes, but then also each week have a one-on-one meeting with me so that we can then talk about how they’re getting their materials and their situation aligned with the material that we’re focusing on that week, if that makes sense. They do have some assignments week to week and we go over that each week so they get that one-on-one feedback and support.
We start off talking about a research vision and getting clear on that. And that aligns with the focus on the online presence and really up-leveling that because your online presence should be guided by your overall career and even life vision.
From there, we break down the mechanics of the funding process. And that’s some of the stuff I was talking about when we started the call about what are actually all of the steps that occur for something to go from a conversation to a funded research project and then after, what happens after it’s funded. By pulling back the curtain on this, then that really helps clients start to see, “Oh, how can I help move this process forward? How can I be a more active participant in these various steps and build these win-win-win relationships?”
“It should be a win for the person performing the research or the Principal Investigator, a win for the individual that you’re working with, that program officer, and a win for the broader organization.”
Julia: By learning what goes on behind the scenes, that helps support achieving these outcomes.
From there, we go into framing research questions effectively. This is something that it’s pretty spotty in terms of, some faculty have had some training in this previously, but many of them have had no training in it whatsoever.
This is very much an iterative process in terms of looking at their ideas. They get ideas out on paper and we iterate on that to get those framed in a way that’s going to be most advantageous for them to be able to present this material to a general audience, to an audience of scientists who are maybe not in their specialty, but just have general technical knowledge. And then of course, they still have to explain it down in the weeds to the technical experts who will eventually do the evaluations on the proposal.
From there, we talk about the approaches of actually getting in contact with these program officers so that they can have the most productive conversations possible. That really provides a lot of relief for clients because that’s something that they hear a lot, kind of like what I was just saying about, just talk to them, just reach out, just talk to them. And they don’t necessarily know, “Well, what should I say in the email? How should I start the conversation?” And so we go over all of that and I provide that information, which is helps people get started on those conversations.
Jennifer: Oh, this feels like such a supportive process. I really like that. What is the thing that you say people are getting most from your work together?
Julia: You know, it’s been interesting that the feedback that I’ve gotten in terms of what has been most valuable has really varied from client to client. Some of them definitely, that framing of the research question where people have said, “No one has ever sat down with me and gone through this before.” And these are people who are Assistant Professor positions at top programs and they’ve accomplished so much in their careers, yet they never had that helping hand to just take the time to work through a one-page document and pull out the parts that are kind of most important and need to be emphasized and reorder them and draw out the impact. That’s an exercise that many of them have never been through before.
Others have appreciated the fact that this provides a broader framework for them to approach the entire process. And many of them have really had a reaction that they weren’t expecting to have about how good they felt about starting that online presence.
In fact, one of my clients, just six weeks into working with me, using what she learned in the program, and it wasn’t even something that I had coached her to do specifically, but she took the information she was learning, she hadn’t finished the program, but she came in and said that she had actually gotten additional funding just by sending an email.
So while you’re not going to get a $300,000 reward by asking for it in an email, and that’s not the way we want things to run, she had a situation where she was able to take some beautiful photos that had been taken of her working with a student in the lab, attach those with the description of the progress that she had made to an internal funding body within her organization, and said, “Hey, look at this, look at this great work.” And they said, “Yeah, just here’s the funding to support this person over the summer,” just like that.
Those are those quick wins, which of course it’s great to get that support for the summer. But also just how she was beaming with excitement to say, “Oh yeah, it doesn’t always have to be so hard because now I know I should just ask for it, and I’ve got these great photos, and I know what to say on the email.” And that’s a quick win. So that’s a really great outcome.
Jennifer: Oh, that made me feel so warm, I love that, like an email with photos of her working with the students. That’s great.
Julia, it has been wonderful to talk with you about Wise Investigator and your program and all of the amazing work that you’re doing. How can people keep in touch with you after this call?
I think you understand just how much of a privilege it is to work with the clients that we work with because we work with such talented people. I don’t know if a person can really take credit for a gift of talent, but they can take credit for the hard work and dedication on top of the talent that these folks put in.
We’re so fortunate here in the United States that we have people coming from all over the world to continue their studies here and make lives here, and not only to do the research that they’re doing, which is what I support them with, but the contribution they make in teaching, which is enormous.
I’m just inspired by my clients every day, and just a shout out to them because that’s why I’m doing this. I’m here to serve them. I just wanted to give them the credit they deserve for all of the hard work they’ve done to get to the point that they’re at, and what I’m able to do with them is really a small, give them a small helping hand just to get to this mid-career stage after all of the years and years that they have put in. It’s a privilege to be able to do that.
Jennifer: Thank you so much for joining me on The Social Academic. This has been a conversation with Dr. Julia Barzyk of Wise Investigator. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next interview.
Julia Barzyk founded Wise Investigator LLC to help U.S.-based university researchers get funded so they can grow their careers with the intention and resources they need to thrive. Prior to starting Wise Investigator, she managed a portfolio of basic research in geoscience and civil engineering at the U.S. Army Research Office. She received her Ph.D. in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago. Julia lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and two teenagers.
When you write a book, it’s lasting. It’s sharable. Your book is findable online which for professors that means you can help more people with your research, teaching, and the things you care about most. I’m delighted to share this featured interview with you.
Dr. Jane Joann Jones is a book coach for minoritized women professors. She left the tenure track 8 years ago to help you confidently write your book.
Jane says, “You’ve done this research. It’s really meaningful to you. And you wanna see it out in the world.” If you want a book, I want you to have a book! I hope this interview resonates with you.
Welcome to The Social Academic blog and podcast. We’re also on YouTube! I’m Jennifer van Alstyne (@HigherEdPR). Here we talk about managing your online presence as a professor. You can build skills to have a strong digital footprint to share your research and teaching online. And I’m here to help you.
In this interview, Dr. Jane Jones and I talk about
Meet Dr. Jane Jones
Jennifer: Welcome to The Social Academic. Today I’m talking with Dr. Jane Jones of Up In Consulting.
We’re gonna be talking about books. So, authors, please listen up. This one is for you. Dr. Jane Jones, would you please introduce yourself?
Jane: Sure. My name is Jane Jones. I am a New Yorker and I am a book writing coach. I came to book writing after I left my tenure track job. I was an Assistant Professor of Sociology. That’s where I have my PhD, in sociology.
I started out as a developmental editor and then transitioned into coaching. The business I have now is a book coaching business where I work with women in academia who are writing books in humanities and social sciences. I help them get those books done through a combination of developmental editing, coaching, and project management support.
Jennifer: I love that. Now, can I ask, what do you like most about coaching? Why do you like working with people on their books?
Jane: Oh my goodness, there are a lot of reasons actually. I really do love coaching.
One thing that stands out with the coaching side is how much academics already know, but have been socialized to believe they don’t know. Especially women.
Jennifer: Ooh. Especially women. Okay.
Jane: Especially women. Especially Black women, other women of color, They’ve been taught not to trust their own knowledge.
Jennifer: Mm.
Jane: And through coaching, a lot of what I focus on, is helping people realize that you already know a lot about your topic. You already have a lot of expertise. You don’t always have to defer to other scholars, to your dissertation advisor, especially when you’re writing your book. You no longer have to answer to your dissertation advisor. And that you have a lot of the skills already.
To be sure, there are a lot of things that we aren’t taught about publishing. There is a big hidden curriculum around book writing. And exposing that hidden curriculum is very important, while also reinforcing people’s trust in their own knowledge. Being able to do both of those two things at the same time, I think is the most important part of the coaching relationship for me.
What are universities not teaching you about book writing?
Jennifer: I love that because my next question was what are universities kind of not teaching you, right? What are universities not teaching, especially minoritized faculty, about writing books?
It sounds like people do have more knowledge than they’re able to process, maybe admit, or accept of themselves. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Where is that difference between how much we know and how much we really need support?
Jane: I always joke that there’s no Publishing 101. There’s no Book Writing 101.That course is not taught in grad school. I mean, for that matter, Article Writing 101 isn’t either. Those aren’t taught in grad school.
Where people have a lot of knowledge is in their subject matter. In the data you have collected, all of the literature, you’ve read, how you make sense of the literature. People are experts there. You’ve spent your whole graduate career…Because I work with people at all stages of their career from Assistant Professor to Full Professor. You’ve accumulated so much data, number one. And you have so much knowledge. Right? So that is there.
But in terms of questions like, “Well, how is a book different than a dissertation?”
You know, “Structurally, what do I put in my book that wasn’t in the dissertation?”
Or, you know, “How do I create the through line in my book?”
You know, these really, kind of tactical questions about how do I actually do the writing of this type of manuscript? Which is different than an article, and is different than a grant proposal. They’ve never been taught that.
Even though they have all of the information, they don’t know how to get it on paper in a way that is going to be legible for our reader. That’s where the work happens. That’s what we do, and that’s what universities don’t teach people how to do.
Sometimes it’s because people just don’t know how to teach it. It’s kind of like, you write your book for yourself. For many people who write their first book, and if you’re a first book author watching this, if someone comes and asks you what you did, you might be like, “I don’t remember. I just got that done. I was on a tenure timeline, and I put my head down, and I wrote.” And maybe I had a book manuscript workshop. Or, you know, like, I had good friends, or a supportive mentor who read it and gave me feedback. And I wrote, got feedback, wrote, got feedback, and that was it. And then the book was done, right? That doesn’t mean you can then teach that process to somebody else.
So being able to be a little bit on the outside of the process as developmental editor, and with the other developmental editors, you know, who work in the program with me, being on the outside of that process and saying, you know, there are some common things. There are some things that all books have in common. And we’re gonna teach you how to implement and how to learn that craft, the things that are common about the craft of book writing.
We work with people across disciplines. We’re ‘discipline agnostic’ as we like to say. You know, from art historians to people who are more on the side of doing quantitative, big survey research, but writing books. We run the gamut. But even within that, there are things people have in common in their books and in their trials of writing, you know? The experiences they’re having, trying to make enough time to write the book, feeling imposter syndrome, not knowing what to do with feedback, being worried about approaching an acquisitions editor. You know, going back to the hidden curriculum, not knowing how to talk to an acquisitions editor and feeling very intimidated. Those are all things that we help them with that I think aren’t really being talked to them in other places.
People might be exchanging information informally. They’re like, “Oh, my friend published here. They said the editor is really nice.” Or, “They said the editor is really hands-on or not hands-on. So I have this informal knowledge, but I don’t know how to craft an email to an acquisitions editor. Or, strike up a conversation with them at a conference. And I feel very worried to do that.” You know, “I don’t know how to describe my book in one or two sentences so that I could talk to somebody about it at a conference and not spend 10 minutes talking about my book. Which, ultimately I will be, but I don’t have that sharp, quick summary.” Those are things that we help them with, because it could feel very disempowering when you don’t know how to do that.
Again, you have all this great information, but, if you don’t know how to talk to an acquisitions editor, how are you gonna have a book? If you don’t know how to craft a chapter, how are you gonna have a book.
Minoritized women in the academy do more service and mentoring
Jennifer: These are skills that professors can learn. These are skills that are learnable and that you can develop, but because they’re not taught by universities and the people who have experience in them maybe don’t know how to teach these skills, it is amazing that you and your team are there to support them. I’m so happy about that.
And I’m also happy that you work with minoritized faculty, with women. Why is that important to you?
Jane: It’s really important! I just want to go back to one thing, the people who have written books and don’t necessarily know how to teach it. I would add additionally, and kind of looping this into working with women and minoritized faculty is, like, they don’t often have the time to teach somebody elsehow to write a book.
It’s a time consuming process. A book is a multi-year process and people add mentoring like, “I’ll read a chapter for you and give you feedback.” But for someone to give them that structured support over time, faculty are having to publish themselves. They have to do their own service committees, they have their own families. Again, that doesn’t mean that they don’t offer help, but it means that they may not have the time or capacity to give that systematic type of help we do.
I think that’s especially pronounced for women and minoritized faculty because they often have an extra service load. They do more service. We know that statistically. They do more service. They’re doing more care-taking outside of work. Right?
There isn’t always that easy transmission of knowledge from a senior faculty member to a junior faculty member because they’re just as pressed as anybody else. And so are the junior faculty! And we don’t only work with junior faculty, but the majority of our clients are.
They have the same issues like extra service, students who want their mentorship because they’re the only Black person in the department. They’re only person who studies race. They’re the only person who does X research. So they have students who want their mentoring. And all of this creates extra commitments for them.
One thing that we focus on in coaching is helping people prioritize their books when there’s a lot of other things going on. Teaching that craft of writing, but also saying, like, “Hey, this book is really important to you for a lot of reasons. Like, professionally take a tenure promotion. But also because you’ve done this research, it’s really meaningful to you, and you wanna see it out in the world. How do we help you make sure that it stays top of mind?” What do we do to support people so that the book can stay top of mind.
Jennifer: I love that. I feel like my work is really aligned with that actually, because I’m really helping professors and researchers talk about the research and the teaching that they do on online. That way more people can have conversations, so that they can have more collaboration, so that they can get more research funding.
But most of the people that I work with have a lot of anxiety talking about themselves. Do you find that your authors have anxiety talking about their books?
Jane: Yeah. (laughs) Yeah. Definitely. And I think that the work you’re doing is so important, ’cause, in my opinion, if you write a book, don’t you want people to read it?
Like, you want it out in the world. Like, you wanna be in conversation with other people. You want people to read it, but you also want to talk to people about it.
Jennifer: Right, yeah. Yeah. Even, the ability to have someone on your team, be that kind of support, not just when you start writing the book, but through the whole process. That’s such an amazing idea that we can’t necessarily get through a mentorship position at your university. Especially if no one is in your field. I love that that support system is there.
It also gives authors an opportunity to have someone that they can talk with about their book. Some of the authors that I work with, I ask, “Who do you talk about your book with?”
And their answer is, “No one. Once I stopped working with my editor, I don’t talk with my colleagues. I don’t talk with my family. I don’t talk with my friends. My book came out seven years ago and I never talk about it.”
That really strikes me as something that I think that, people who work with you, they’re talking about their book. And thinking about it in much larger ways. Because it’s really introspective, and being introspective is hard. I love that you help people with that process and actually understand their motivations for why they’re doing it, who they’re helping. It’s amazing.
Jane: Yeah. Thank you. I think that another part that’s really important is that my programs are group programs.
Jennifer: Ooh.
Jane: And that’s on purpose. Because like you said, it is very introspective. For some people, the solitude, the solitary work, they like it. They’re like, “I like writing solitary. I like being alone with my thoughts.” And that’s great.
Some people are like, “It’s isolating, and I don’t like it, and I feel very alone in the process.” Being with people who are at a similar stage as them, and when I say stage, I don’t mean career-wise, I mean stage of the book. Because people come in, and they’re all at a similar stage of writing, so they’re all kind of going through it together.
“I’m trying to figure out the overarching argument of this book,” or, “I’m writing two of my empirical chapters, the two of my body chapters.” There’s a feeling of, “We’re in it together.”
I spoke to a former client the other day, and she was in Elevate a year ago maybe, and she said, “Our Elevate group still meets on Mondays and Thursdays on Zoom, and we still write together.”
Jennifer: I love that.
Jane: I was like, “Oh, my goodness.” I didn’t even know that they did that. And she’s like, “We kept the time and whoever can make it comes on Mondays and Thursdays and we meet.” Just having that community of people who are in it with you and are like, “I’ve seen you from when you started this book and you weren’t sure what it was about. And now you’re here and we’re just seeing each other’s process and giving each other support that way.”
It’s just awesome because we don’t get a lot of that in academia. We have to be very intentional about cultivating it. It doesn’t just show up for us.
Being able to provide that space where you have peers so you can be like, “I tried that too, and this is what happened when I tried it. “You know, or, “I went through that experience and I came out and I was, like, ‘I did it, and you could do it too.’”
Jennifer: I did it and you can do it too. Just hearing those two sentences, they’re so short. But, it just makes such a difference, especially to the women and minoritized faculty that you most want to help.
Jane: Yeah. I mean just seeing that. ‘Cause you get into it and you’re like, “I don’t know if I’m ever gonna be done with this book.” (Jane laughs). People definitely have that thought,
“I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to finish this.”
“I’ve been avoiding it.”
“I haven’t been working on my book, because I’ve been scared.”
“I got some feedback that put me into a tailspin.”
“I became overwhelmed with other commitments and I feel some shame about it.
“I feel so embarrassed.”
Jennifer: Hmm.
Jane: And reminding them that it happens. It’s disappointing that it happens, but it doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you. I was normalizing it and seeing when I did one-on-one, one thing that always happened was people would tell me something, I’d be like, “Oh, that’s really common.”
And they’d be like, “It is?”
And I’d be like, “Yeah, I have other clients who have experienced that.”
And they’re like, “They have?”
Jennifer: (Laughs). Yeah
Jane: So being able to put everyone in the group and be like, “Look, you’re all having this experience.” You are not uniquely incompetent in some way. This is something that happens to a lot of people. Just because we aren’t talking about it on Twitter, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Jennifer: You know, I like when it is talked about on Twitter. I like when people talk about their struggles with writing on Twitter. Because I cheer them on. I’m like, “If you struggle with your writing, you get back to it, even if it’s a year later, two years later, 10 years later, I don’t care. Because I will remember that you were vulnerable and open about something you were going through. And I wanna cheer you on and I wanna hear about things when they’re not so good too.” So I really like vulnerability.
I love that people have a safe space to do that in your program. But I also encourage people, if you’re struggling with something, being open about it on social media can help spark new ideas, tools, and resources that you can use. But also new collaborations and ideas that could help spurn your research in another way. I mean, there’s just so much possibility besides hearing from other people, “Yes. I went through that too.” So yeah, I like that idea of being open about it.
Jane: Yeah, to be open about it! You know, it’s interesting. We gravitate to what is other people’s achievements and our failures, right? So, you finish a chapter and you’re like, “Yeah, but it’s not as good as I thought it would be.” Or, “Yeah, but it took me two months longer than I thought it would.” There’s always a diminishing.
Jennifer: Mm.
Jane: And convert on the flip side, they talk about other people who are like, “Well, that person finished their chapter so much faster than I did.” Or, “That person, you know, did this.” And it’s like, well, maybe they did. Maybe you don’t know the whole story. But it’s interesting, in our brains we kind of put everyone else as, “Well, they did it better or faster than I did. And when I did it, it was a mess.” And to coach around that and be like what is the story you are telling about your progress? And, is that story serving you? Because often it’s not. Saying, “I wrote my chapter, but…” And then using some type of diminishing, diminishing it in some way, how is that helping you?
Jennifer: Hmm.
Jane: Why would we emphasize that part of the story? What does it accomplish? It doesn’t accomplish anything besides making you feel like crap. It doesn’t accomplish anything. It doesn’t make you write faster. You can’t go back in time.(Jennifer laughs) You can’t go back in time and write the chapter faster.
Jennifer: Yeah, yeah.
Jane: So why would we talk about it so much? But we do, because sometimes we’re like, “Well, I don’t wanna seem arrogant.” Or, “It’s because I don’t believe that this is worthy of celebrating because it didn’t happen the exact way I wanted it to.” So where are the opportunities to kind of neutralize some of that language, so that people aren’t…
Jennifer: But you can find positives in it, right? Like, maybe that extra time gave you opportunity to realize something new. Maybe it was good that you didn’t write it as fast as you thought you might have been able to. There’s so much self-talk that can be negative that can be harmful for ourselves.
Jane: Yeah, there’s a lot of negative self-talk. Yeah.
Jennifer: Yeah. – I’ve definitely done that. I’m a creative writer and I’ve totally done that to my own. I didn’t write that fast enough or I didn’t write as much as so-and-so, yeah. It’s never helpful. It’s never helpful.
Jane: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like our running critic. And sometimes, it’s something my coach always says, “We can’t always get the critic to completely go away. We can put them in the backseat of the car, and be like, ‘You go back there. You’re not driving this car anymore. You’re not even in the back seat, but, like, the third row.’” (Jennifer laughs) You know, “We’re putting you back there. Like, I recognize that I may not be at a point where I can get rid of you, but I’m not going to give you authority over this ride. You don’t have the wheel. You’re back there.”
Jennifer: Still in the car, right? Can’t kick it out entirely. I mean, sometimes we can’t get control over it.
Jane: Still in the car. Like, you realize, you’re not wrong for having these thoughts. Like, they’re natural. And we’ve also been socialized to believe it’s not rigorous enough. It’s not fast enough. Publish or perish. There’s a lot of socialization at hand that is part of the reason why people have these thoughts.
As a coach it would be irresponsible for me to go in and just be like, “Oh no, you shouldn’t think any of this ever again.” Because as a sociologist, I know how strong the socialization is. As a coach I know that just makes you feel bad about having the thought. Then you feel bad because you didn’t write fast enough according to your standard. Then you feel bad that you’re judging yourself. And then you just feel doubly bad. So it’s like, “Okay, let’s just, like, take it back.”
Jennifer: Get out of that spiral.
Jane: Yeah. Let’s get out of the spiral. And, it’s okay that you had that thought. It’s okay that you feel bad. We don’t want you to feel bad indefinitely.
Jennifer: Hmm. I like that. We don’t want you to feel bad indefinitely.
Jennifer: Tell me more about Elevate. Who should join?
Jane: Everyone. I’m just kidding. (Jane and Jennifer laugh).
Jennifer: You said that people in the cohort are all in a similar place writing their book. When is it right to join your program Elevate?
Jane: Okay, so Elevate is a group editing and coaching program. We have a curriculum that we walk you through the
craft of writing a book
project management behind writing a book
mindset issues behind writing a book.
So much of what slows us down is our own thoughts. Like, “I’m not ready to write this.” “I don’t know what decision to make.” “So and so said this about my chapter, so I’m going to feel bad about it and just ignore it.” “I’m gonna avoid. I don’t wanna look at the feedback, so I’m just gonna avoid it.”
Those are the three domains we work in the craft of writing, project management, and mindset. We do that through a curriculum. We have lessons the same way you would in any course. We have editorial feedback, so you submit your writing for feedback twice a month.
And we have a lot of mindset coaching that I coach people hard, (Jennifer laughs) which I think is what most Elevate alumni would say. Like, “Jane really coaches us. Like, she really pushes us.”
Jennifer: Right.
Jane: I push you in a way that not like, “Write your book faster, write your book faster,” but rather, “Let’s get to the bottom of why you’re having these feelings about your book. Let’s get to it and figure it out,” type of coaching.
Because we’re academics, we’re in our brains so much. When it gets into having emotions, we’re, like, “Oh, no, we’re rational. We can’t really think about that.”
I used to be that person too. Oh, no.(Jennifer laughs) I hate that, all that emotion stuff. That’s not gonna work for me. Well, I kind of need to confront it, because you and your book are gonna be together for a very long time.
Like you were saying, like, as you write it and then after you write it, it’s not going anywhere. You should figure out how to enjoy it. To find pleasure in the process of writing it and be excited about it.
It’s just like any other thing. You’re not gonna be excited about your book 24 hours a day, but you wanna get to a point where you’re more excited and motivated than you are demoralized and stressed.
Jennifer: Hmm, mm-hm.
Jane: In the program, we go 24 weeks. We go through those three themes one by one. People who join, all women, they’re normally at a stage in their book where they are figuring out the big overarching picture of the book and the structure of the book.
Some people come in and they haven’t written a lot yet. They have all of their data collected, most of their literature read. You might need to go back and collect a little bit more data, but, we want you to really be past that stage. Some people come in and they haven’t written a lot.
Some people come in and they’ve written a lot and they’re just like, “I’ve been writing and writing, but I still don’t have a really clear through line,” or, “I still don’t know my argument.” And that’s fine, because people’s processes are different. Some people like to get a lot of words on paper and then go back and kind of orient themselves.
We advocate you creating the foundation first and then building your house. (Jennifer laughs) So people normally come in when they want that support. What we do first is teach people how to write your book overview, how to write your book’s framework and then create an outline for the entire book. And then they start writing chapters.
Normally within the program you can come out with a couple of chapter drafts if you have the time to commit, and you will know what your book is about, how you’re going to write it. You know how it’s going to unfold over time. And then you get to work.
Jennifer: You have a plan in place. You have the mindset that you need to make that plan actually done, like, to get your book done. I love that.
Jane: Yeah, yeah.
Jennifer: Oh, if people want more support, you help them with that too. Like, beyond writing their book, is that correct?
Jane: We focus on books, but we have an alumni program for Elevate. We don’t expect anyone to write a book in six months. (Jennifer and Jane laugh). That is not what we do. We do not make pie in the sky promises.
We have an alumni program and people often come back and do the alumni program, which is another six months. There we really focus on more now you’ve done a lot of the deep work, the deep thinking in Elevate. Now we are helping you get a lot of words on paper. People are doing the writing and getting the body chapters, I call them ‘the empirical chapters.’ But I know people also have ‘theory chapters,’ so I don’t want anyone to be like, “What about the theory chapter?”
We focus on getting chapters done or revising because some people will take Elevate, go off for a little while and work independently, and then come back and be like, “I have a couple of chapters done.” And we’re like, “Great, let’s start revising them.”
Jennifer: I’m glad I asked you about that because I felt like there might be some people who are like, “Oh, I need a little bit more help than that. Is there an option?” I’m glad that there’s an alumni program that supports you with continuing that process. That’s amazing.
What else should people know or consider about Elevate? Because your new cohort is opening up again soon.
Jane: Yeah, so we accept people who are writing first, second, third books. I think initially when we ran the program, it was very much for people who were transforming dissertations into books. And we have gotten a substantial number of people who are writing second books, which are a different challenge because you don’t have that scaffolding of the dissertation. Even if your first book is dramatically different from the dissertation, which many are, the book is not a revised dissertation. It is like a caterpillar to butterfly.
But the second book just poses different challenges, and we support people who are writing their second book, their third book, because that foundational work of creating the overview, the framework, the outline, you need to do that every time. It’s not like you write the first book and you’re like, “Well I’m an expert on book writing now, so I don’t need any help.” That’s not how it works. (Jennifer laughs). And even experts get support.
So it’s not a matter that it’s a remedial type of program. That’s not what it is. It’s not, for, “Oh the people who don’t know how to write books.” No, it’s for people who wanna write books with supportive community, expert editorial feedback and coaching to help them write the book with less stress, a better support system, a clear foundation for the book. So that they can make progress with more ease.
Writing a book is a complicated thing. It should be because you’re dealing with complicated ideas and all sorts of interesting data. And it’s not easy. But there can be more clarity and momentum in the process than what there currently is for a lot of people.
Jennifer: I think that this is such a wonderful gift that you can give to yourself, especially if this is, like, your second, third, or fourth book. Like, why not make this time easier and better?
Jane: The majority of the people who work with us pay through their universities. We have a significant number of people, and some people pay out of pocket. We have people who are like, “I wanna make this investment because my book’s important to me and I don’t wanna twiddle my thumbs…”
Jennifer: (Laughs). Good. So if you are listening to this, if you’re watching us on YouTube or reading the blog, know that this is a program that’s there to support you and that you can pay for it out of pocket or you can request funds from your university. I hope that you sign up for the wait list.
Jane: You can apply for Elevate. The application is just an application. It’s not a commitment to join the program. We look at your application, because one thing about the program is that we wanna make sure that you’re a good fit for the program.
We also wanna make sure the program’s a good fit for you. If we think that you’re not at the right stage, if there’s something about your research that we feel that we can’t support you…For instance, we had someone who’s writing a memoir and we’re like, “We don’t really edit a lot of memoirs.” If we feel like the program is not a good fit for you, we will tell you because we only want people in it who can commit and who we can help.
That is the point of going in and applying and possibly talking to me about the process if you have a lot of questions, that we wanna make sure that it works for everyone. Because it’s a big commitment. And also, a book is a big deal. If you’re gonna get support, you wanna make sure you’re getting the right support at the right time.
Instagram Live about finding your book audience on social media
Jennifer: I love that. Thank you so much for joining me for this interview, and for everyone listening, I do wanna let you know that Jane and I did an Instagram Live where we talked about your book audience versus platform.
Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Social Academic! And thank you so much, Dr. Jane Jones, for joining me.
Jane Joann Jones is an academic book coach who helps minoritized scholars get the feedback & support they need to confidently write their books. Jane strives to be the coach she wished for when she was on the tenure track.
In her eight years as an editor and coach, Jane has successfully helped dozens of academic authors create and execute a writing plan and ultimately write their books, confidently. Her clients have published with presses including Oxford, Princeton, Bloomsbury, University of Chicago, Stanford, Duke, and UNC. Through her work, Jane has restored minoritized academics’ faith in their writing abilities and their place in the academic world.
When she’s not challenging the status quo in academia, you can find Jane sipping a craft bourbon, on the rocks, while experimenting with a new cooking recipe. She also enjoys visiting museums for only one hour, devouring cooking shows, and impromptu dance parties to the tunes of Lizzo and Queen Bey. If you happen to be strolling through her New York neighborhood, you might see her at Lucille’s, her local café, drinking an oat milk latté with a raspberry donut and a good book.
