Ideas for Your Online Presence Before, During, and After Your Talk or Presentation
The best time to share about your upcoming talk or presentation is before it happens. Some people find that their most engaged post on social media is announcing that you’ve submitted your abstract to speak (or your publication). People are excited by the possibility and what you care about. Telling your story of your upcoming speaking engagement is a great way to do that.
Sharing on social media can start early, but I don’t want you to think it’s the only way to help your online presence and the people coming to your talk. You’re going to explore many ideas today, but you don’t have to try all of them. I hope that there’s at least one idea that resonates with you and you’d feel comfortable trying it yourself.
When you submit an abstract for or are invited to speak
Add your website URL and social media handle to your bio. This will help people find you before, during, and after your presentation.
I’ve just submitted an abstract to speak at…
Announce that you’ve submitted – If you’ve been invited to speak, a good time to share on social media is when you’ve agreed or committed to that engagement. It’s great to add your social media handle and a link to your personal academic website if you have one, along with your bio. You might add that information to your CV.
Connect with people before you go
Once your talk is confirmed, you can add it to your website and you might take time to connect with your fellow panelists or event organizers before the event.
Conference Hashtag
If there is one, you can check out the conference hashtag and make plans with people who will also be at the event that you want to see, especially if you live in different cities or countries.
Business cards
If you have a business card, add your social media handle and website there is a good idea.
Share your talk on social media
When you’re sharing your talk on social media, people need more information than you expect. They need to know what your talk is about, when your talk is to know if they can attend, what the event is, and any link where they can learn more information. This is something you can share on any social media platform or across all your platforms.
Some professors hesitate to share their upcoming talk on Facebook where they may have a more personal audience, but these people are excited by what you care about when it comes to your research and how you choose to spend your energy. You might include , on all social media posts, any definition or story that helps people better understand why this talk or research matters to you.
Tag people or organizations that are related to your talk or event.
The conference hashtag can be added to your post about your talk but you can also add a hashtag that relates to the topic of what you are presenting on.
You can share the post about your talk before, during or after the event.
Create a graphic or infographic
If you create a graphic or share an image to go with your talk, a great resource is Writing image Descriptions on Accessible Social – which helps you create social media posts accessible for people with disabilities.
The next ideas are for things you can do while the event is happening.
Check out the conference hashtag, again
If you checked out the event hashtag, you might find that people weren’t using it. Once the event starts, you can start using the conference hashtag and check it out! See if there is a conversation you want to be part of, or an event you want to check out.
Be open about your online presence
The best thing you can do for your online presence while at an in person event, is to be open that you have a website or that you’re on social media.
Help people find and connect with you
You can make this easier for people by making a QR code that helps people go to your website, have this info on a business card, create a hand out with information or resource about your talk (that includes people need to your online presence) , or use an end slide in your presentation to help people connect with you after the event is over.
Resources to take home and share
When you create a resource like a handout or links /slides to share, that can go on your personal academic website. They can also be shared on social media using that conference hashtag to help people find this resource that you’ve already taken the time to gather.
Will this be recorded?
Ask if there is going to be a recording. Sometimes, there isn’t an official recording but you can ask if you can record yourself.
Stay connected once you’re gone
Connect with people you meet or you like and admire on social media, while at the conference. Helps others be more likely to learn about you.
It’s okay if you don’t do any of that too
I have never had time for any of that at conferences, personally. In person events can be overwhelming for me as an introvert. Because of that, I don’t have the brain capacity to remember things like take a photo, much less record some videos.
Anything I just talked about – some of those things can be prepped in advance others you don’t have to do live (you can do afterward)
Next are ideas you can do after your presentation or talk is over.
Whether there was a recording of your talk or not, you could always record your talk and slides using zoom, then post the video to your website or social media. There are options to share the full version of your talk, if you like to. You can just share the title slide, or full text version of the talk, or even the full slides.
Connect with people when you’re back at home
If you didn’t connect with people during the event, sometimes connecting AFTER the event is easier. You can look at the conference hashtag. Look through the business cards you collected. See the conference program and look at the bios to see who is on social media.
Create and/or share resources
If you didn’t have resources to share at your talk, if there are things you want people to know after the fact, you can create a graphic or handout that is shareable on social media or a page on your website.
Celebrate other people
While you can post about your own talk, you can also post about your panel and thank the conference and event organizers. If you want to participate in the conference community but not want to talk about your own talk, you can celebrate others instead. It’s a great opportunity for PIs to celebrate their lab members or grad students who are at the event. There are so many ways to celebrate people instead of yourself, if that feels comfortable or more exciting for you.
These don’t have to be professional shots. A messy desk shot or photo of you working on your slides or going over your notes on the plane. Something that feels quick or easy to you.
Take pictures during the event
Snap a photo of things you see, people you meet, friends you catch up with. Ask someone to take photos of you while you’re speaking or pose at the conference.
You could record a video of your talk
This can be before, during, or after the event.
You can record a video about your talk
Record a short video introducing your talk and the main takeaways. This video is especially for people who couldn’t be there live for your presentation.
Record some b-roll
If you like video, record b-roll video. Take a sip of coffee, getting ready to speak, short travel clips, video of fellow panelists or friends. These might be put into a longer video or Instagram reel.
But these might feel like too much – so even though they are fun ideas, don’t be stressed if you do none of them.
I love virtual events. Maybe you do too. But it’s okay if you don’t. As my guest on The Social Academic, Dr. Julia Barzyk said, “research is becoming virtual first.” Virtual events are here to stay when it comes to academics and researchers.
Your online presence can enhance how you experience and interact with people at conferences and events. This is true for both in person and virtual events. But today, I want to chat with you about what to do for your online presence when you’re attending or presenting virtually. In this blog post:
Tell people you’re attending the virtual conference or event
Sometimes, professors hesitate to tell people you’re going to a conference or event because it feels self-promotional.
But, actually, when you share you’re headed to an event (even when it’s virtual), you help a lot of people. You can help your
Colleagues
Students
event organizers
Speakers
There are also people who are anxious to join the conversation. Conference attendees sometimes wait for someone, anyone else to use the conference hashtag on social media first. I get that. It can be hard to start a conversation.
When you think about the people you have the potential to help? Thinking about those people helps the time I’ve put into crafting a post be a lot more meaningful. My professor clients have found that’s true for them too.
Here are a few places you can share you’re headed to a virtual event:
Social media
Your website
Mentioning in person
Tip: The most dynamic way you can improve your online presence and your presence at any event you’re presenting at is by improving your speaker bio.
Watch my video on speaker bios with Dr. Echo Rivera
Share about the specific talks you’re presenting or attending
When you share the talk you’re presenting specifically, it helps people know if they can attend. If they can attend (or even if they can’t), it helps people share the event with others who may be interested. Like their grad students.
Sometimes conference programs are hundreds of pages and multiple days, with concurrent sessions to choose from. I love that virtual events tend to come with options to plan your schedule in advance.
Let’s say you share your talk on social media too. And, you use the conference hashtag. Only a small percentage of the people presenting are using the conference hashtags (or posting about their talk at all). Already it’s more likely you’ll get eyes on your event.
When you share the details people need to know if the talk is right for them, things like
What your session is about
The time and date you’re presenting at
Where people can find more info
It makes a huge difference for people to have ease when learning about your particular event. Some professors make a graphic on Canva, but virtual events tend to create graphics for you. So it’s a good idea to log into the conference platform early to see if there’s a visual way for you to enhance your social media post about your talk. It’s also worth asking the conference hosts if that’s something they plan on having to avoid unnecessary labor (unless you love graphic design, in which case yay!).
I’ve also worked with a lot of professors who host or moderate events. Sometimes they have multiple events and presentations at the same conference over several days. There’s an inclination to not share their own thing, so it’s okay if you find comfort in sharing the thing you’re hosting instead. It makes a big difference for the panelists or speakers at your event.
The truth is, people often wait to share about themselves until the last minute (if they ever do). I think that’s often because of either imposter syndrome or time. As a host, you care about this. And you can help make it easy for the speakers at your event to share with ease when you tag them. It’s much easier to repost than to craft it themselves.
Tips for your social media post reach the right people
Use the conference hashtag using #CamelCase where you capitalize the first letters of each word
Use up to 1 other hashtag related to your field at the end of your post
When you have a link where people can learn more info about your talk or event, please know that most social media algorithms downgrade how many people it shows your post to when you include a link in your post. When you have a link to share, one way to do that is by including the link in the comments or replies of your post. For Twitter/X, you can include the link in a thread.
At virtual events, connecting with people in ways that are lasting can actually be easier. That’s because virtual events have virtual platforms where you can have a profile, get a link to click on to find someone’s social media or website, or download their slides/resources. Virtual events may have networking sessions, pre or post events, and ways for you to stay involved.
Most virtual events have a space for you to create a profile. Your profile helps people see you and get to know who you are. And when you update your profile early (like when access to them opens), you give people opportunity to learn about you as they’re updating their own profile.
One way to connect with people in advance is by adding an invitation in your bio. For example:
Adding a scheduling link and inviting people to meet you for coffee
Adding your email and inviting people to contact you if they are interesting in collaborating or networking
Some conferences have space for you to create your own virtual event (like a hangout with a shared topic of conversation).
There are also asynchronous ways to feel like you’re part of the community. For instance, the option to ask a Question to all attendees, or to create a poll. Some virtual conferences have games you can participate in. Or a scavenger hunt.
I love that virtual events can often create better environments to communicate with speakers as compared to in person conferences. When you’re in person, you have what, 10 minutes before your next session starts? Virtual allows for asynchronous options, giving you opportunity to ask questions to speakers before their session (even when you can’t make it live). There’s even space for speakers to upload resources and share links for you to take home.
When their session has ended, the chat space often stays so people can engage in conversations when watching the replay. And actually, don’t wait for someone else to do it first. If you’re at a virtual even and you see that no one has said anything in the chat (after the event has ended), you can start by thanking the speaker. You can build meaningful relationships with people virtually even when you don’t have a specific conversation or feel unsure of what to say at the moment. Every relationship doesn’t need to be built on something “big” or “deep” or “collaborative.” Do what feels natural.
Virtual events allow us to have more control, even when it comes to our schedule. I love the flexibility and accessibility they create for academics and researchers. And I know that for some people they’re maybe not your cup of tea. And that’s okay.
Whether you prefer virtual or in person events, there are ways for you to connect with people in meaningful ways online. And there are ways you can have agency with your online presence to help the people at that conference better know who you are and what you care about.
Your online presence is a great way to share your research, teaching, and academic life. To find collaborators and make lasting connections. And I want that for you, if it’s something you’re curious about for yourself.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what your online presence should look like as a professor. And it stops people from feeling confident or comfortable showing up online, even when you know a strong online presence aligns with your goals.
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.
LinkedIn is one of my favorite social media platforms for academics. It’s become more popular in the last year, especially since things have changed at Twitter. So I wanted to chat with you about LinkedIn today.
I’m Jennifer van Alstyne of The Social Academic. Today we’re going to be talking about LinkedIn.
Twitter isn’t dead, but the state of social media has changed
So first, the state of social media has changed. I would say since things changed at Twitter, people have been asking me where should I go next?
The answer is that academics are on every social media platform. If you don’t want to use threads or Mastodon or Blue Sky or any of these kind of new platforms that are popping up where you hear academics are spending time, that’s totally okay. They’re still on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, like TikTok, all the major platforms. I promise that you are going to find an academic audience wherever you feel like spending time.
That being said, LinkedIn is my number one recommendation for professors and researchers. LinkedIn is not just for business people. Professors are finding that their audiences are already there. People like their colleagues, administrators at their university, people that they might be talking with, offices on campus, they know that their collaborators are probably on LinkedIn. Even if they don’t have a profile that they use often, that’s somewhere, that they have potential to connect. Who else? Your research funders, editors, publishers, members of the media like journalists, scientific community, policymakers, all sorts of people who might care about your research in particular are already on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn used to be a social media platform that was really specifically for professionals, especially when they were on the job market when career searching. But academics find that LinkedIn is effective and a good use of their time even when they’re not job searching, and that’s kind of my specialty.
I mostly work with professors who want to have a stronger social media and online presence, but they’re not actually looking for jobs. They just want to be better connected with people in their community.
So first, LinkedIn is not just for business people.
Second, your LinkedIn profile shows up in Google search results. This means that it does have a strong impact on your online presence, and LinkedIn profiles tend to show up at the top of those search results.
So not only does it impact your online presence, it can be a really good answer for people when they know that there’s potential to find what they’re looking for. Oftentimes, people might be looking for contact information. They might be looking for what your current research is about. They might be looking for a photo of you because they’re going to meet you at a conference next month. So I want to let you know there’s many reasons why people might be looking for you online, and your LinkedIn profile might be the answer that they can be looking for.
You don’t need to pay for LinkedIn (or other social media platforms)
LinkedIn is free, so there are many social media platforms that are free. Some of them, they have an option for premium, including LinkedIn. But to be honest, you do not need to be spending money on social media platforms to have a strong online presence.
I don’t spend any money on social media platforms, and even though I have friends that have upgraded to say the premium version of Twitter, like it hasn’t really paid off for them in a way that makes it super effective.
I’m just saying that I don’t actually recommend paying for social media even if you have the budget for it. So LinkedIn is a great free way to build your online presence.
Finding people on LinkedIn with advanced search
I love that LinkedIn has a powerful search. So number three is that LinkedIn profiles really do show up in Google search results, but they also show up when people are searching for your name or something that is on your profile on LinkedIn. So for instance, let’s see, what can I use as an example?
Let’s say an English professor who has a specific focus in American literature has a profile on LinkedIn because they have professor of American literature in their profile, both in their headline and in their about section, that profile will show up on Google search results potentially, but also within LinkedIn search results.
So if I’m looking for professors of English, especially people who focus on American literature, I can type that into the LinkedIn search bar and find all the people that are in, say, the United States. You can even narrow it by specific region or location. So I could find American literature professors in Oklahoma, for instance.
There are so many opportunities to find more people who care about the things that you do, who care about the research that you’re working on within a specific location using that search. So LinkedIn search is really powerful. It’s helpful for finding people within your research interest. It’s also helpful for people finding people at your university or who are alumni of the same programs that you are.
Professors are joining LinkedIn (and updating long-forgotten profiles)
Other professors are on LinkedIn. Number four is that you can find the people that you want to connect with there.
Now, I’m not saying that everyone you know is on LinkedIn, but the chances are at some point in the last decade or so, they’ve created a profile. They’ve created a LinkedIn profile, whether they use it or not, and they have some kind of presence on LinkedIn. This isn’t true for everyone.
I mean, for so long, LinkedIn was known as a platform that is not really for academics. It was kind of so business-y and there wasn’t a lot of conversation that was outside of job searching, and so it wasn’t a place where academics were spending time.
I have seen so many more academics who want to post and share their thought leadership and research on LinkedIn. But there’s also thousands and thousands and thousands of professors who are on LinkedIn and never post at all.
The people that you want to connect with are probably there, and if they’re not there yet, they probably will be soon because like I said, it is a growing platform for professors and researchers.
Inviting people to connect with you, build your scholarly community
Number five is that the other people that are there are people that you probably care about, whether they’re research funders, publishers, editors, members of the community or policymakers, the people outside of the ivory tower who need to find what you’re working on, who can be impacted by it and put it into practice.
There is potential to reach those people on LinkedIn, and I’m saying that there’s potential to do that even if you never post.
I want you to be more open-minded about what LinkedIn could do for you as a professor. It’s not just about job searching. It’s not just about talking about your research or kind of showcasing who you are.
It’s kind of an invitation. I like that LinkedIn profiles when they’re filled out are, it’s like you being open to having people find you and connect with you and reach out to you if it’s relevant to them, even if you never post at all. Having an awesome LinkedIn profile is great for professors.
How long does it take to make my LinkedIn profile?
One question I wanted to be sure to answer today is how long does it typically take to do a LinkedIn profile? That’s a really good question because it really depends.
If you are starting from scratch and all you have is an hour or two to put into your LinkedIn profile, please do it.
Any small change that you can make to your online presence for your LinkedIn profile makes a difference. I encourage you to spend any amount of time that you have in your schedule on making an improved LinkedIn presence for yourself as a professor. It can really help people better connect with you.
How long does it take me to do a LinkedIn profile? Well, it’s taken, kind of different amounts of time for different people, and when I’m doing a done for you profile, it typically takes upwards of 7 hours.
I would say 7-9 hours total is about how long it takes for me to do a LinkedIn profile.
That, to be honest, I could probably spend another 5-7 hours on it and to find even more ways to improve it because that’s how my brain works. The more I understand a platform, the more I understand the person that I’m writing for, the better I can make the profile.
So there’s always opportunity, I think to make a difference with our LinkedIn profiles, but typically the amount of time that I spend for what I would say is a really great LinkedIn profile that meets all of my professor clients’ needs, it’s about 7-9 hours. And that includes a planning meeting, includes everything done for you and a review meeting to make sure that we can make any tweaks or changes in real time.
So it takes quite a bit of time, and that’s why when professors come to me and they’re like, I want a stronger LinkedIn presence, but I know I don’t have time to fit into my calendar. I know, I mean 7-9 of your time is like that’s not only a full day away from your research and the things that matter to you. It’s like time away from your family and the people who you care about. It’s a big commitment, and so I would never, I would never say you have to make this commitment for yourself.
If you don’t have 7-9 hours in your time to work on your LinkedIn profile, I absolutely understand. Please don’t push yourself to do something that is beyond your capacity, especially if this is your first time really being intentional about your online presence on LinkedIn.
Tips for your professor LinkedIn profile
There are so many ways that we can have a stronger online presence, but really any small change that you make makes a difference. So let me tell you the sections of your LinkedIn profile I recommend that you update first because these are the places where people are really looking to know a little bit more about your story and the things that matter to you.
On your LinkedIn profile, the thing that people most often see is your LinkedIn headline. It is a specific number of characters (220), and it’s that little kind of section that goes right next to your profile photo right under your name that people will see when they come across your profile on LinkedIn.
They’ll also see it if they’re already connected with you and they’re seeing you post. So your LinkedIn headline shows up in a lot of places.
When I see professors on LinkedIn, what I most often see is associate professor at university name. That’s actually not enough information for people to know whether they should even click on your profile to learn more about you. They need a little bit more information about your field of research, the area that you teach or the values that you really care about, the change that you want to see in the world. And so if you can fit a little bit more about you, a little bit more detail, a little bit more invitation, that will make a huge difference for your LinkedIn headline.
Profile photo
You’re going to want to have a profile photo that looks like you. On LinkedIn, there is I would say a tendency to use your traditional business headshot, but I wouldn’t feel pressured that you have to use that. If you have a selfie, if you have a friend of you take a photo or a family member.
Let’s see. I have had clients who go out and do professional photo shoots, so there’s lots of options to get new photos that you can use on social media.
But for your LinkedIn profile photo, I really encourage you to have something that is more focused on your face, and that’s because when people are on mobile screens and they’re scrolling it’s kind of small. It’s small enough that if it was more of a upper body shot, I might not recognize you from the photo because your head is then so small that it’s hard to recognize features. So if you can have a little bit of a closer shot for your LinkedIn profile photo, that makes a difference.
Cover photo
Ooh, your cover photo. So one of the first things that people see if they’re seeing the entry for your LinkedIn profile in search results is if you have a cover photo, which is a background photo on other social media platforms.
It’s like a horizontal photo that goes on the top of your profile and gives you opportunity to share a little bit more about yourself through that image. Now, some people prefer something simple like just a solid rectangle of a specific color. So you could just choose your favorite color and use that as your cover photo.
But if you have photos that you’ve taken, photos that you care about or even searching stock images on something like Unsplash or Pexels, in order to find photos that feel like you or maybe remind people of your research, this is a great opportunity to add a touch of personality to your profile.
Now in my LinkedIn for Profiles Course, people do learn how to create a simple cover photo using the design platform Canva, and there are templates already in Canva that you can use to create something that is a little bit more custom. So I want you to know that that’s an option. It’s actually pretty easy to learn. There’s YouTube videos about it.
I want you to know that you have the capability to do fun, custom visual things for your LinkedIn profile, but don’t feel pressured. Again, like I said, if you just choose your favorite color and set that, it will make a difference.
Your LinkedIn About section
Faculty often overlook the about section of your LinkedIn profile. This is a section where you can provide your bio or a little welcome note that says, “Hi, I’m Jennifer, welcome to my profile,” and a little bit about you. So some people write this in the first person, some people write this in the third person, whichever feels more comfortable to you is what I would go with. But this is the number one place people will go to learn more about you.
I don’t recommend just copy and pasting your academic bio. A more general audience is going to be visiting your LinkedIn profile than say, your faculty profile or your Academia.edu.
I want to make sure that one, any jargon is explained, any words that people don’t understand could use a phrase or a sentence of definition.
I want people to know what you do, but I also want them to know what you value, what you care about, why you do what you do. That’s what’s going to help them be curious to explore the rest of your profile or to reach out and connect with you.
I also want people to know how to get in touch with you. So don’t forget to include, say your email address or an invitation to maybe send you a LinkedIn message if you would like people to be able to take that next step and get in touch. Let them know what the best way or preferred method of doing that is.
Experience section
The next section the academics should definitely fill out is the Experience section. This is where you can add your work experience entries. This is a good opportunity to talk about your teaching, to talk about your research. You can even share links to your program so people can learn more about the specific courses that you’re taking or the kind of environment that you’re in.
There’s lots of opportunity to give people more information in the LinkedIn experience section, but if you don’t have a lot of time just filling out the entry with the title of your role, the location of your employer and the time span of which you’ve worked there is enough. If you don’t have time to add details, if you don’t have time to add media links like PDFs or links to maybe the website of the program, I want you to know you don’t have to fill all of that out. The more information that you can give people that is curiosity provoking, that is memorable will help make a difference.
Education section
The Education section is the next place that I know academics typically fill out. In your education section, you have opportunity to include a little bit more information. Some things that academics consider including is if they had fellowships during that time, if they had publications that they were particularly proud of, or if they have maybe an event that they organized and wanted to share a little bit more about.
People also use the detail section of the entry in order to include information that may still help people feel better connected to you. Maybe it’s a description of the type of research that you were working on then, the lab that you were working in, any collaborators that you worked with. It’s a great place to add activities or awards, and I’ve also seen people include information like ‘I’m a first generation student,’ or ‘I had a full fellowship for being a minority STEM student and this is something that I’m really proud of because it made an impact on my education.’
You don’t have to just list things there. This is your space to tell more of your story. Those are the sections that I think matter most. I know there’s so many sections on LinkedIn. The more you fill out, I would say the better.
Publications
One thing to avoid is in the publications section, even if you have a lot of publications, it ends up being just a really long list on your LinkedIn profile. So go ahead and pick maybe four to six publications. I wouldn’t say more than that is particularly helpful, but there’s a great opportunity to share . . . things that you don’t have room for on your LinkedIn profile or you’re not quite sure where it fits in.
Featured
LinkedIn has a featured section. It’s something that goes at the top of your profile, and you can add media like your CV. You could add links. You can add links actually to posts that you’ve shared on LinkedIn or articles. It gives you lots of opportunity to be creative.
If you have a link on a personal website or you want to upload your CV for that full list of publications, please do that. There are opportunities to share more, but on your LinkedIn profile, it is better to be a bit selective with the project section and the publication section because those end up being really long lists on a one page profile.
A nice thing about LinkedIn profiles is that even though there can be a lot of information, people aren’t necessarily shown all of that information at once. Typically, they’re just shown your first few experience entries, and then the more you add, there’s a little show more button that you can click to be able to view that information.
So you can add more information, even if it feels a little bit overwhelming for you, and just know that on the other end when people are experiencing your profile, they’re having the opportunity to choose to see that information and are not forced to or anything. It’s a choice. It’s an exploration, an invitation for people to keep reading.
One question I’ve gotten is about a newer feature on LinkedIn profiles. It’s called Creator Mode, and this is an opportunity for people to have the things that they create, like social media posts on LinkedIn be highlighted on their profile. It has a couple other features, like it switches your connect button over to a follow button.
I have creator mode turned on my profile because I do share posts on LinkedIn.
Creator mode is not right for you if you’re probably not going to post on LinkedIn very often. It’s also probably not right for you if you want people to be able to connect with you easily.
A reason why I have creator mode on is because I post a lot and because of that, people have opportunity to follow me and be able to see my posts. Not all of those people are quite right connections for me. Maybe they’re in another field, but they really care about what I’m saying. I want them to still be able to see my posts.
But in a sense, I also want to protect my audience. I want to protect my connections from any business-y things or sales-y things. I don’t want someone just connecting with me and then spam messaging all of the people that I know, and so I am quite protective over who I connect with and who I don’t. Sometimes business people connect with me. Sometimes coaches connect with me, and I really want to protect the academics that are part of my network from any kind of unwanted messaging.
If you have time to kind of go through connection requests and check out your followers list to see if there’s anyone who didn’t know how to connect with you, but wanted to and you want to connect with them, then turning Creator Mode on makes sense.
Like, you want to have that attention and focus to be able to do those steps because otherwise people are going to not know how to connect with you, and it just changes the profile setup to feature those posts.
If you’re not posting and you don’t have time to do the admin side of being in creator mode, which involves checking those things that I just mentioned, it just doesn’t make sense for you.
Actually for each of my clients, we’ve really talked about what is your professor life? Are you someone who is going to be posting often? Because if you’re not, that’s okay.
If you have a filled out LinkedIn profile and it’s inviting people to connect with you in the ways that make sense for you, then you don’t need to post. Posting is a plus, but it’s not a requirement by any means on LinkedIn or frankly on any other social media platform.
I used to have courses that taught people how to post across platforms. Then I realized that what people need is the ability to post when they want to, how they want to, and they don’t need to, to post everywhere. You don’t need to be everywhere. You don’t need to be consistent even if you can show up intentionally when you do.
When you are posting, if you’re thinking about the people you want to reach and you’re providing them with the information that they need to connect, yay! And if it’s not all the time, that’s totally fine. So posting on social media is great when you have time to do it. It’s great when you want to do it. It’s great skill when you want to get better at it, it can reach so many people. But having a filled out LinkedIn profile I would say is more of an important thing. It’s a better use of your time first.
If you’re someone who’s new to social media or you don’t really post on social media, I still recommend a professor LinkedIn profile for you. So Creator Mode, not recommended for most professors. If you’re going to be posting, and you have time to do some admin checking to see about connections versus followers, then you’re good. Turn it on, it’ll help you reach more people. But if you’re not going to post, don’t bother.
Sending connection requests on LinkedIn
Next, ooh, sending connection requests. Once you have a filled out profile, connecting with people is the next step, and that can feel scary to some professors. Even reaching out to people and care about can still feel a little bit worrying, like a little bit like a task that would be easy to avoid. That’s totally okay. I get it. I get it.
Connecting with people can feel awkward. One thing that people worry about is like, “Oh my gosh, it’s going to take me so much time to write messages to each of those people, and I don’t know. What if they don’t even read it?” But I would say if you have a filled out LinkedIn profile, there’s not really a need to send personalized notes to people. If they are visiting your profile and they’re like, “I don’t know what I would ever talk about this person with. I have no idea who they are, and I can’t see myself even having a conversation with them because their profile and what I do and what I think about isn’t really aligned.” I mean, that happens and that’s okay.
Your profile can be kind of that invitation. Your profile when you put thought and intention into it can really help people know whether you’re a good person to connect with or not. And if you are reaching out and connecting with them, my guess is that you probably know them. So all they need to see is your filled out profile.
You may get some messages from people who you’ve reached out to connect with that are like, “Oh my gosh, I’m so excited you’re on LinkedIn!” That’s what happened to my recent professor client once he joined after many years of people telling him he should and not having the time to do it. I mean, it’s understandable. He has children, he has a family, he has research, he has priorities.
You’re a professor with priorities too. It’s okay if your LinkedIn profile isn’t one of them.
Get support for your LinkedIn profile
There are different ways to have a stronger social media presence on LinkedIn.
You can do it yourself
You can totally do this yourself, even if you only have an hour today to set up your LinkedIn profile, and all you do are your headline, your profile photo, and your bio, I will be so proud of you.
That will be a huge plus for you. So please know that any amount of time that you spend on your own LinkedIn profile is great.
All you have to do is a planning meeting with me. We’ll talk about your CV. We’ll talk about the people that you want to reach. We’ll talk about your goals, and if you have things to share with me, if you have projects that you care about and you want me to make sure to include that report that made a difference in people’s lives, we’ll gather all those materials first.
Then on your VIP day, it’s all about your LinkedIn profile. We’ll meet in the morning to get me set up so I have access to your profile. I’ll do the whole profile for you. It’s like a process that you really, you can focus on the things you need to that day.
I might email you a question, but for the most part, I’m doing all of the work for you so you can relax and have the weekend to focus on your family, to have that date focus on your teaching and your research and the things that you care about most.
Once the day is over, we typically meet the next morning, the next day to make sure that we can look at your LinkedIn profile together, make any needed changes in real time so that your profile looks and feels like you.
We always actually have some changes to the cover photo. So cover photos are something that people often are like, “oh, I don’t really have any ideas.” But once we get talking about it, we’re like, “oh, how can we connect this to the places that I love or the research that I care about?” Or people actually find sometimes they have photos of them with their students or photos of them on campus. That is something that we can use for that space.
There’s a lot of opportunity for us to be creative together about how to make your LinkedIn profile more personal, more colorful, more you.
After we review your profile, there’s always time for training on how to use LinkedIn because most of the faculty that come to me, they don’t know how to use LinkedIn at all. They don’t necessarily want to post. Some professors tell me straight up, “I’m probably not ever going to post,” and I say, “That’s okay.”
That’s okay because this work on your profile is still going to help people connect with you. It’s still going to help people be able to find you, share your research, and do these things that you care about, these goals that we’ve talked about.
Now, when you don’t post on LinkedIn, that’s great. You don’t have to, but LinkedIn you should know is a place that you can post. You can post sporadically, you can post longer things like articles. You can have live events, you can share videos. You can share photos and PDFs and reports.
There’s lots of opportunities to share things on LinkedIn if that’s something that you are curious about. So we do personalized training at the end of your LinkedIn, VIP day, at the end of that profile review meeting to make sure that you know how to do the things on LinkedIn that’s going to make sense for your life, for your goals, and for the things that you actually want to accomplish with LinkedIn.
If that’s really networking and connecting with the people, the people that you care about most, we can actually start doing that process together. That’s what my last client and I did, and we had so much fun reaching out to some past students and making sure that we were connecting with people in his life that mattered and making sure that we were connecting with people at the university.
There’s lots of opportunity for us to move your LinkedIn presence and your social media profiles together. Really a full transformation, not only on what goes on the profile, but how you use the platform during that LinkedIn VIP day.
Free resources to support your LinkedIn presence as an academic
If you’re someone who’s like, wow, that sounds amazing, but I think that that’s more than I even want to do. Just start. I have free resources to share with you on The Social Academic that help you update different sections of your profile.
I have one that’s specifically for graduate students, so I’m going to share all of these resources with this podcast episode.
I want you to know that any small change that you do for your LinkedIn profile makes a difference. You do not need to work with me in order to have a great LinkedIn profile.
I work with, I would say, mid-career academics, senior career academics, higher education administrators, principal investigators, people who really have a lot on their plate. They know that this is going to make a difference for the people that they support, the communities that they want to reach and the communities that they care about, but they’re just not going to have the time.
So if that’s you, if you’re someone who knows that you’re not going to have the time, but that this is something that you need, I’m here to help you.
My name is Jennifer van Alstyne. Thank you so much for listening to this episode all about LinkedIn profiles and why LinkedIn is amazing for academics.
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.
Update: It’s official! We’ll be back for another contest in early 2025. Jennifer, Brittany, and Ian look forward to your entry next year.
Your personal academic website is a wonderful thing. Professors, researchers, scientists, graduate students, and independent scholars who make their website a reality should be celebrated. That’s why I created the Best Personal Academic Websites Contest last year with my co-hosts Brittany Trinh and Dr. Ian Li.
The 2023 award-winning personal academic websites we’re showcasing today are some of the best examples to learn from. I hope exploring their websites inspires you to create your own. Check out winners from the 2nd annual Best Personal Academic Websites Contest.
The Best Personal Academic Websites Contest is brought to you by Jennifer van Alstyne, Brittany Trinh, and Ian Li.
About the contest
The Best Personal Academic Websites Contest was open from July 17 through September 30, 2023. Entries were free. The contest recognizes the best personal websites of
Faculty
Professors
Scientists
Postdocs
Grad students
Independent researchers
Our goal was to award your hard work. And, to create this resource of great examples of personal websites along with with last year’s winners with notes from the judges.
2023 Winners of the Best Personal Academic Websites Contest
Congratulations to our winners, Dr. Sheena Howard, Dr. Seth-Aaron Martinez, Dr. Jarrett Dillenburger, Dr. Guy Cameron, Dr. Alex E. Stern, Dr. Yalidy Matos, Dr. Zoe R. Smith, Dr. Aloysius Soon, Kantwon Rogers, Jared Boyce, Dr. Melanie Sindelar, and Dr. Fuschia-Ann Hoover.
2023 Award Categories
Overall Best Personal Academic Website Award
The top 3 websites tied with perfect scores. We are celebrating overall top 3 websites from Dr. Sheena Howard, Dr. Seth-Aaron Martinez, and Dr. Jarrett Dillenburger. Congratulations!
Your websites excelled in every judged category (Website Content, Website Design and Organization, About You, Portfolio, Contact Info). You are the best examples of personal academic websites.
Dr. Sheena Howard
Dr. Sheena Howard created her website “to highlight my work, skills and accomplishments in a way that best aligns with who I am. In addition, to be able to have a closer relationship with the people that are most interested in my work.”
She’d love to acknowledge the website designer, Alesha Randolph.
Notes from the Judges
Brittany Trinh: I love how Dr. Howard’s work and personality is very present throughout the website. She highlights her work by posting on her blog to announce any recent news and photos. The homepage of the website is also set up to showcase her publications and features. Finally, the contact page is used well, as it not only functions as a contact page, but also a media kit for potential speaking gigs.
Jennifer van Alstyne: Colorful, personal, and full of stories, Dr. Sheena Howard’s website shows how there’s no limits to being yourself. A great example of how to share your forthcoming book, like her Academic Branding: A Step-by-Step Guide to Increased Visibility, Authority, and Income, online. This website shares Dr. Howard’s story and media appearances along with a well-organized creative portfolio.
Dr. Ian Li: I really liked Dr. Howard’s website because of the breadth of content that she shares. She has a lot of experiences and accomplishments, which shows through on her website. Dr. Howard shares her academic publications and books, her documentaries and media appearances, and her blog posts.
Dr. Seth-Aaron Martinez created his website “to provide a single source of information for all of my scholarship and professional work.”
Notes from the Judges
Brittany Trinh: My favorite page on Dr. Martinez’s website is the Consulting page. I like how he establishes credibility in his field by including the logos for organizations that he’s worked with along with testimonials. His website is a great example for other professors who want to incorporate their consulting work with their academic work.
Jennifer van Alstyne: With a clean design, simple structure, and friendly About page, this is a website to remember. I wish the About page and the homepage were combined because Dr. Seth-Aaron Martinez’ bio was memorable. I especially like the descriptive Media mentions page for his YouTube video and podcast appearances.
Dr. Ian Li: Dr. Martinez shares a breadth of content on his website. He shares his academic publications and dissertation and his media appearances. I really appreciate that he shared his research philosophy and biography, so you learn more about him as a person. He also shares his consulting services and how his expertise can help organizations.
Dr. Jarrett Dillenburger, “decided to create a personal academic website because it’s challenging to regulate and manage the data and information circulating about us on websites that we cannot modify or keep up-to-date. With my personal website, I gain the power to control what information is accessible to others and how they view it online. The ability to curate my portfolio of research and present the best possible image of myself is crucial for establishing a strong and professional online presence.”
He says, “My current website was designed and built by myself (through many iterations). I fully expect my website to continue to develop and morph as my career does. I have tried my best to create an adaptive design that will allow for future changes easily. My designs and layouts have been influenced by many academic website designers including Jennifer van Alstyne and Brittany Trinh!”
Notes from the Judges
Brittany Trinh: This is a great example of a personal academic website for a chemist! It was built on Google Sites, which just goes to show that it’s not about the platform you use, but how you use it. I like how he incorporates other aspects of his career as a scientist, including his science communication and interest in space science.
Jennifer van Alstyne: This website is well organized for curious website visitors. It’s a deceptively simple website that doesn’t feel overwhelming. You discover more as you’re curious about exploring each page. Then you find new, more specific resources. On the Chemistry page, I love that there’s the Scientific Abstract typically published with articles and a Non-Scientist Abstract too! It would be great if media mentions got their own space as a page on this website.
Dr. Ian Li: Dr. Dillenburger’s website is very clear in what his academic website offers: SciComm, Material Science, and Space Science. For each of these topics, Dr. Dillenburger shares a wealth of academic content such as publications, media appearances, and coaching services.
Owlstown is a website builder specifically designed for academics. It is designed for ease of use and maintenance, so you can focus on sharing your research work. Congratulations to Dr. Guy Cameron for having the best Owlstown website!
Dr. Guy Cameron
Dr. Guy Cameron says, “I created my personal academic website to share my journey through medicine and scientific research, and my experiences as a proud Wailwan (Aboriginal) man living in Newcastle, NSW. Through my website, I aim to inspire others by showcasing my achievements in academia and research, especially in the field of Immunology & Microbiology. I also want to highlight the importance of Indigenous representation in the medical and research fields, and the significant role that collaboration and community-driven approaches play in improving healthcare for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. My website reflects my commitment to being a #MentorFirst, where I aspire to guide and support others, particularly those from Indigenous backgrounds, to achieve their academic and career goals.”
Notes from the Judges
Ian did not judge Dr. Cameron’s website for this contest.
Brittany Trinh: I liked how he personalized his Owlstown website with visuals that are relevant to his research. I also like how he delineates his role in each research project and provides a thorough description of each project.
Jennifer van Alstyne: With memorable details like that he’s a proud catdad, Dr. Guy Cameron is as descriptive about himself as his research. I like that his Research projects page includes details beyond a project description including project status, scheme, role on the project, and the team who worked on it. Dr. Cameron’s Publications page shares abstracts and figures. A great example of a detailed portfolio with an Owlstown website.
How do you showcase all the work you do on a personal website? By creating engaging pages for people to explore. We’re excited to award the Best Portfolio Award to Dr. Alex E. Stern and Dr. Yalidy Matos. Congratulations!
Dr. Alex E. Stern
Dr. Alex Stern, “initially created my personal website when I went on the academic job market. During several interviews, faculty members explicitly commented that they had seen my website and were interested in how I had put it together. It gave me a small but positive boost as a candidate for assistant professor roles. My website allows me to take a leading role in how my work is presented to colleagues, students, and the public and has helped me develop a cohesive narrative of my motivations, accomplishments, and future goals as a scholar. My website is entirely my own creation and I am self-taught.”
Notes from the Judges
Brittany Trinh: Dr. Stern’s teaching page stands out to me because of how she clearly states her teaching objectives for students and course descriptions for the classes that she teaches and a photo that complements it. Her research page also highlights a current book project that is in progress and links it to the project’s separate website.
Jennifer van Alstyne: Yes! You can definitely share a book project in progress. Dr. Alex E. Stern’s website effectively shares her research, public writing, and teaching. I love that Dr. Stern’s portfolio has the same care for Media mentions as Courses on her Teaching page. Advising / Mentoring pages are becoming more popular. I like that Dr. Stern creates space to celebrate her students’ theses, projects, and publications on her website. With engaging visuals, descriptions, and thoughtful design, this is a great portfolio website to inspire academics.
Dr. Ian Li: Dr. Stern’s website is a great showcase of her work. In her website, Dr. Stern shares her academic research, public writing, course descriptions, and appearances in events and media. It’s not just a list, instead, she provides summaries, so you can be informed whether you want to dig deeper into learning more about each work.
Dr. Yalidy Matos’ academic website “needed a revamp. As an academic, my website serves as a central location to find information about my writing.”
She says, “I’d like to acknowledge Jennifer van Alstyne, who helped me develop the concepts and ideas, pulled out information from our interviews that are really important to who I am as an academic, and helped design the foundation of the website.”
Notes from the Judges
Jennifer did not judge Dr. Matos’s website for this contest.
Brittany Trinh: Dr. Matos’ website is a stellar example for a professor-level website that is designed specifically to land new opportunities. I like how the research page gives a broad overview, then the “About This Research” gives a deeper description of the research, highlights the relevant works/publications, and provides an offer to speak for those relevant topics after establishing her authority.
Dr. Ian Li: Dr. Matos’s website offers a comprehensive view of her work. She shares her publications, writings, courses, and speaking engagements. She presents each work with a detailed description and links to more information, so you can explore her work in more detail.
We’re excited to present the Best Google Site award to Dr. Zoe R. Smith. Congratulations on making your Google Site stand out!
Dr. Zoe R. Smith / ACCTION Lab
Dr. Zoe R. Smith says, “I wanted our work to be more accessible to our community and students, as a way to disseminate information and also promote the amazing work the ACCTION team does! I also realized that I had skills that were marketable and wanted a place to showcase them, like statistics consulting and workshops. I also wanted to make sure students could get to know what it’s like to work with me and to highlight students’ work so people can see the new exciting things everyone is working on!” She created the website herself.
Notes from the Judges
Brittany Trinh: The ACCTION Lab is a fun and colorful Google Site! I like their “prospective students” page, which outlines very clearly what the PI is looking for in an application.
Jennifer van Alstyne: The colors and branding of the ACCTION Lab flow through each page of this website. Great for visitors who like to skim when reading, this is a great example of using headings and drop downs to organize the written content on your website. I like the Frequently Asked Questions for prospective PhD students interested in joining the lab. I love that the People who are members of the lab are celebrated on their own page with bios that include their photo, pronouns, education, research interests, goals and what I do for fun. “Dr. Z,” as she goes by in her bio, shares what she likes to do for fun in her bio too! I get the personality of this lab and their research.
Dr. Ian Li: The ACCTION Lab website is a great example of a lab website. It’s well-organized with lots of content about the work of the lab. It has a dedicated page of lab members and some of their group activities. The website also shares resources for prospective students and mental health information.
Creating a website for your research lab or group helps everyone. We’re excited to share the Materials Theory Group website as an example for you. Congratulations, Dr. Aloysius Soon!
Dr. Aloysius Soon / Materials Theory Group
Dr. Aloysius Soon made the Materials Theory Group website “for publicity and to keep a record of the overall performance of my research group.”
Notes from the Judges
Brittany Trinh: As a current graduate student and chemist, I think that this is an awesome example of a lab website made with Google Sites. The homepage highlights their notable papers, making it easy for people to find the right papers to start with. They incorporated their figures into the website to make it more engaging and interesting to look at. I also love how they have videos to promote their group, along with having text in both Korean and English. Finally, my favorite page is the Gallery, which shows annual group photos, which shows the overall group’s personality. It seems like a cool place to do science!
Jennifer van Alstyne: This lab website shares their specific goal, and a description of the group’s focus. It also welcomes students interested in joining the Materials Theory Group right on the homepage. Dr. Aloysius Soon has a page about himself on the website which feels well balanced with the Team pages. I especially like that this research group website considers current researchers and staff as well as alumni and collaborators. A well-organized way of sharing grants and research funding on this website. Despite having many pages with descriptive, detailed information, this website doesn’t feel overwhelming.
Dr. Ian Li: The Materials Theory Group exemplifies the qualities of a great lab website. It has lots of information about the activities of the lab, including research publications, patents, and conferences. The website also has a gallery of lab members and a gallery of group pictures, so you can learn more about the people that do the research.
Telling your story is powerful and memorable. We’re excited to award the Best Storytelling Award to Kantwon Rogers! Congratulations.
Kantwon Rogers
Notes from the Judges
Brittany Trinh: I love this website because of the voice/personality that shines through on the page, through the colors, word choice, and images! It’s also unique in that it is a 1 page website, but has more than everything you need to know, by telling the story in order.
Jennifer van Alstyne: Large font and bright, colorful personality. This PhD student website is one of the best examples I’ve seen of sharing who you are through the aesthetic look and feel of your personal website. 1-page websites can be overwhelming to scroll. Kantwon’s website is exciting to explore. It works as a portfolio, linking to things like his CV, publications with downloadable PDFs, and a sample syllabus. I love that it shares videos Kantwon created for his courses at Georgia Tech too. A beautiful website.
Dr. Ian Li: Kantwon’s website is lively and engaging. Browsing through his website, you get a great sense of his personality and his research. He also presents his academic content in an organized manner and in a variety of media (papers, video, podcasts). He also shares a lot of videos teaching concepts about computing and engineering.
This award goes to a memorable bio on a personal academic website. We’re happy to award Jared Boyce for his academic bio.
Jared Boyce
Jared Boyce “decided to make a personal academic website in order to share more about myself and build my brand as a scientist. I’m an MD-PhD student at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. I’m interested in becoming a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and studying the neurobiology of early life trauma. My personal website serves as a place where potential collaborators, recruiters, etc. can see my CV, learn about my advocacy, research, and clinical interests, and learn more about who I am beyond my CV.” He says, “I used Brittany Trinh’s website for guidance.”
Notes from the Judges
Brittany did not judge Jared’s website for this contest, but has shared a note about it for you.
Dr. Ian Li: Jared writes about his experiences and describes what motivated him to pursue medicine and his research. His story engages viewers and invites them to care about the research. His page on his advocacy is great too because it shows the breadth of his interests.
Jennifer van Alstyne: Jared Boyce’s website feels retro in a good way. His About page shares his personality, family, and journey. This website doesn’t just tell you what Jared does, he shows you why he cares about it too. A great example of how to share your Advocacy and the values important to you. I love the personal photos on this website.
Brittany Trinh: Jared and I have become friends while studying at UW-Madison, so I didn’t judge his website. What I love about his website is how he wrote his bio and integrated his story and motivation for pursuing medicine and research throughout his website.
Some academics are also amazing entrepreneurs. We’re excited to give the Best Academic Entrepreneur Award to Dr. Melanie Sindelar. Congratulations!
Dr. Melanie Sindelar
Dr. Melanie Sindelar created her website “to showcase my academic and freelance work, to make my coaching, editing, and translation business more visible, and to attract new clients! I used Canva’s Brand Kit tool to design the logo and the Color Palette, Brand Colours, and Fonts. I wanted my brand to appeal to academics, artists, and institutions (my main clients) while using a muted and reduced color palette that remains timeless.”
Notes from the Judges
Brittany Trinh: Dr. Sindelar’s coaching webpage is very in-depth about the services she offers and provides clear directions on how to work with her. The packages, pricing, and process are transparent, so you know exactly what she can help you with.
Jennifer van Alstyne: Calm. That’s how I felt exploring Dr. Melanie Sindelar’s website from the color palette to the easy navigation. Unapologetic about being a researcher, editor, coach, and teacher, this shows your website can adapt to share all of your identities (if you want it to). Many academic entrepreneur websites I see remove research and/or teaching altogether. This one feels approachable for a variety of audiences. I especially like that Dr. Sindelar’s Research page is descriptive about her interests and shares related publications.
Dr. Ian Li: Dr. Sindelar is a good example of how an academic website can share academic work and teaching as well as other entrepreneurial services. In addition to a Research page, Dr. Sindelar’s website has pages for coaching and translation. Each page has detailed description of how Dr. Sindelar’s expertise can help you.
A new award to honor the best looking website of the pack. Congratulations to Dr. Fuschia-Ann Hoover! This beautiful personal academic website is one to admire.
Dr. Fuschia-Ann Hoover
Dr. Fuschia-Ann Hoover says, “I wanted to have a public facing representation of my work, and a research profile that was independent of my affiliation, employer, and business. This allows me to control my own narrative, and in a way that stays with me regardless of where my career takes me.” She’d like to thank the photographers credited on her website.
Notes from the Judges
Brittany Trinh: Dr. Hoover’s website is minimal with an artsy aesthetic to it. Her portraits show that your headshots or photos for your website don’t always have to look the same as everyone else’s.
Jennifer van Alstyne: While there’s an About page with a more traditional bio, Dr. Hoover’s homepage is an excellent example of how to share who you are in different ways. I get a feel for who she is and what she cares about in an easy-to-read way because of how big the font is on Dr. Fushcia-Ann Hoover’s homepage (which I love). The photos on her website compliment the clean, modern design. Green comes in through the photos on Dr. Hoover’s website through trees, landscapes, and even her blazer. It’s a beautiful way to visually relate to her environmental research, using green in the photos rather than in the design of the website itself.
Dr. Ian Li: Dr. Hoover’s website is aesthetically pleasing with its clean and modern design. Its navigation is easy to use and each page has engaging images along with the text. I felt calm and engaged while browsing through her website.
A big thank you to all our contest entrants. We’re so lucky to have you inspiring the world.
Your website will be added to The Academic Gallery on Owlstown. Thank you for being an amazing example. A website is a big project. You should be proud of sharing who you are and what you do with the world.
We created this contest to help as many people as possible. I hope these personal website examples encourage you to make your own website! Some of our award winners did-it-themselves, others hired help. They all made their personal website work for them. You can too.
Please bookmark this page. Share it with your friends. Make your website a reality. And don’t feel like it needs to be “finished” to hit publish.
Hosts
Brittany Trinhis a website strategist and designer for STEM leaders. She helps grad students, scientists, and academics create impact-driven websites so they can level up in their careers & get paid for their expertise. She’s currently a chemistry PhD student at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Ian Li is the creator of Owlstown, the website builder for academics. Owlstown websites are easy to make and maintain, so you can focus on your research. With templates for various research artifacts, Owlstown allows you to present your research in various ways to inspire and inform others.
Jennifer van Alstyne helps professors feel confident when showing up online. The Academic Designer LLC is a minority woman-owned business helping academics share their research, teaching, and leadership on websites and social media since 2018. The Social Academic blog, podcast, and YouTube channel helps professors manage their online presence to build a strong digital footprint.
7 free resources for creating your own personal academic website
Our goal is to help as many people as possible. Here are free resources from Ian Li of Owlstown, Brittany Trinh Creative, and The Academic Designer LLC to help you make your website. Please share with your friends.
The 2nd annual Best Personal Academic Websites Contest was hosted by Jennifer van Alstyne, Brittany Trinh, and Dr. Ian Li.
Allanté Whitmore, PhD started the Blk + In Grad School podcast on her phone, a podcast created to encourage and inspire people of color in grad school. It’s since grown to over 160 episodes with a new season on the way.
Discover Allanté’s journey as a podcast producer and host. It’s all in this featured interview on The Social Academic blog.
Meet Allanté
Jennifer: Hi, everyone. This is Jennifer van Alstyne. Welcome to The Social Academic featured interview series.
Today, I’m speaking with Dr. Allanté Whitmore. We’re gonna be talking about podcasting, which is something a lot of you have been interested in. I’m excited for you to be here today.
Would you please introduce yourself? Just let everyone know who you are?
Allanté: Absolutely. Jennifer, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. We’ve been internet buddies for years now which is kind of amazing. So excited to be here.
So hi, everybody, my name’s Allanté Whitmore, PhD. I recently completed a joint PhD in Civil Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University where I studied autonomous vehicle policy research.
On the weekends, and in the wee hours of the night, I built a podcast and community called Blk + In Grad School. There I chronicle my experience as a black woman pursuing a PhD in Engineering. I also interview other graduate students and early career professionals about their graduate experience. With the whole hope of
Motivating
Inspiring
Providing tips and tricks
Mindset shifts
for graduate students to get through their journey.
Jennifer: Oh, I love that. What a good podcast topic. It’s also gonna help so many people. It’s one of those things that those resources are gonna be valuable to people again and again for years to come.
Allanté started a podcast to create the resource she needed in grad school
Jennifer: What inspired you to start a podcast?
Allanté: Yeah, absolutely. Honestly, my own experience through grad school.
Prior to going to Carnegie Mellon, I finished my master’s at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And I did undergrad at North Carolina Agricultural Technical State University which is a historically black college [HBCU].
The transition between my undergraduate experience and grad school was very jarring.
A lot of people maybe assumed because I moved from an HBCU to a predominantly white institution…the academic rigor was the same.
It was the social pieces and some of that kind of hidden curriculum around how one navigates themselves as a graduate student that I really wasn’t knowledgeable about.
I really stumbled through my 1st graduate school experience. I didn’t know I was supposed to show up to Friday coffee to connect with my professors. I wasn’t really involved or engaged in a way that was beneficial to me as someone who’s aspiring a profession and career.
When I left, I finished my master’s, I went and worked in Detroit at the McNair Scholars Program at Wayne State University. I led that program. If you’re not familiar with McNair Scholars, it’s a program that helps 1st generation low income students go to graduate school. There, I got all this professional training around grad school readiness and retention in graduate school.
Coupled with my own experience in my professional training, I just felt when I decided to go back to graduate school…There was so much I wished someone told me that had nothing to do with the technical or academic skills we need to be successful. I think a lot of us have that already.
It’s just like, oh yeah
You’re supposed to go to Friday coffee.
This is how you manage a meeting with your advisor.
Here’s how you kind of work through those stickier situations where we may not have a safe space to ask those questions at our university.
That is how Blk + In Grad School started. The whole idea was what I wish someone told me. The research I wish I had when I started back in 2012.
Jennifer: Oh, I love that. It sounds like what you went through in your experiences helped inspire you to create this beneficial resource for everyone who is going through it now. And who may be advising students who are also going through this journey.
You said earlier, ‘hidden curriculum.’ In grad school, especially if you’re not from an academic family, if your parents aren’t PhDs. Especially if you’re from a low income household…There are these kinds of hidden curriculum things that no one’s gonna tell you unless someone like you creates resources around it. I love that you’re welcoming that community and starting that conversation for so many people across the country.
Jennifer: Now how did you get started podcasting? A lot of people are like, ‘Oh yeah, I wanna have a podcast.’ But what was the process for you like when you were getting started and hitting the ground running?
Allanté: Oh yeah, absolutely. Now, I would not recommend my path [laughs].
Jennifer: That’s good to know too.
Allanté: This was 5 years ago. Okay? When you could start things on your phone. I swear y’all, for those listening, I literally grabbed my phone and put the mic as close to my mouth. If you go back to like the first 10 episodes they’re terrible because it’s literally me on my blow up mattress because I didn’t have a bed yet. I had just moved to Pennsylvania.
I maybe did a little bit of light editing on my computer. But it was literally stream of consciousness. That’s how I started Blk + In Grad School.
Then I upgraded to my computer. The next 20 episodes are me huffing into the computer.
Then I finally invested in a mic and the quality improved.
I started to invest in editing and started to think about crafting stories.
I started interviewing people around the 20th episode as well. I was like, “Oh, this could be really good to bring in more perspectives, more experiences.” It was a very organic growth that happened from the start.
I would not recommend starting with your phone anymore. We have really great inexpensive mics that you can get started.
Jennifer: That’s so cool that it really was this project and you’re like, ‘I’m gonna do it. Even if it’s on my blow up mattress with my phone in my hand. I’m going to create this.’
Allanté: Oh gosh. Another transparency moment for me: I actually hate writing. Right? [Jennifer laughs.]
I’m an engineer. I’m an engineer through and through where I wrote quite literally what was exactly needed to get this PhD. And technical writing is way different than creative writing. I definitely feel more comfortable writing for research.
In my life prior to being in graduate school, I’ve done a number of entrepreneurial pursuits. One of them was a blog. Hated it.
Tried vlogging, hated it. I wasn’t able to keep up with it.
And so what I love about podcasting is that I was able to be consistent. It was low pressure for me as someone who’s kind of on the go. Even now, I just left the gym. I have a hat on. Like, Jennifer looks beautiful. Eyebrows done, lipstick. I put lipgloss on and got here. And podcasting takes that pressure away from me.
Jennifer: It does.
Allanté: Yeah, so I can create consistently. And I’m not really worried about the visual…I love podcasts. I kind of started to realize the power of podcasting and having someone in your ears. And the intimate moment of listening to someone else’s thoughts or hearing their perspective.
It just felt like a very natural fit because I had tried other forms. They weren’t really for me. And in this one, I was able to make stick.
Jennifer: Yeah. So your podcast listener yourself. And you tried blogging and didn’t enjoy it.
I really like the things you said about how it allowed you to really be consistent. That is so important when we’re creating something new. When we’re creating this kind of new project that is going to take an unknown amount of time.
Really, when we’re starting out, that idea of consistency is something that a lot of people don’t think about.
And when professors tend to approach me and they’re like, ‘I wanna start a blog. You know, I’m excited about this.” And I talk with them a little bit about some of the things that go into it. And how much work they might have to do in order to get things up and running. And they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, I had no idea.’
Finding a budget for a podcast editor
Jennifer: Was there anything that was really surprising about the podcasting process that you learned once you kind of got into it?
Allanté: In my 2nd year of my program, I moved into a cheaper apartment because I really was enjoying Blk + In Grad School. I knew I needed to be able to put a little money towards it. As a grad student I was earning nothing. But I was like, ‘Okay, I can now carve out $100-$200 a month toward an editor.’ That was the 1st thing I invested in to take that off my plate.
It’s very time consuming and I’m grateful to my [podcast] editor who’s like one of my best friends, Stephanie. I’m also very fortunate to have a best friend who is an editor, right?
Jennifer: That’s wonderful.
Allanté: Yes! I’m very grateful for her. I told her, ‘Hey, I’m doing this project. Here’s what I can afford right now.’ And as Blk + In Grad School grew, I was able to do some increases in her pay. She was also a very supportive person.
You can look in at Fiverr, you can look in at Upwork. You can do a bunch of things to delegate if you know there’s a piece of the process that you simply don’t wanna do. Or, that you don’t have the time to do.
Editing was the piece that I think I very quickly realized this is a time suck for me. That it would actually harm or decrease my productivity or consistency if I’m the person responsible for editing.
Jennifer: That is so smart. It’s really nice that you figured out the piece of that puzzle where if you send this off and get some help with it, that’s what’s gonna allow you to actually produce more. And put more energy, the kind of energy you want into this project.
I love that you chose to change your lifestyle in order to actually put more energy into this and more finances too.
A lot of people don’t realize that some money may have to go into the kind of upkeep or creation of a project like this. I really appreciate your transparency with that.
Allanté: Absolutely.
How starting a podcast has impacted Allanté‘s life
Jennifer: Now, you must have made that decision because it was impacting you in some greater way.
I’m curious, what kind of impact has the podcast had on your life? Or, your online community?
Allanté: So many amazing things have come from Blk + In Grad School. I genuinely was just creating something I wish existed. Right?
From that I have had speaking engagements at universities across the country, which is really exciting. Especially during the pandemic, I was able to do a lot since it was virtual.
Jennifer: That’s great!
Allanté: Yeah, it blew my mind. Right?
I’ve done campaigns. I’ve dabbled in the influencer space as a result of Blk + In Grad School, representing the graduate lifestyle to an extent.
Jennifer: Oooh.
Allanté: It’s very interesting.
I don’t fully take on the identity of an ‘influencer.’ It feels awkward. But the reality is that it’s a stream of income that has been helpful.
Especially when I was finishing up my PhD in the last like year or so. It was really like, ‘Okay, this is actually bringing in income,’ sponsorships.
Lastly, my community. In 2019, I started The Scholar Circle. It’s a community for folks in grad school. It’s an accountability and coworking community. We meet 3 times a week for a total of roughly 8 hours over those 3 sessions. We work together. We get things done.
In the membership community, there are a host of resources to help you through your graduate journey. That also became a piece that I didn’t anticipate growing. I will also be honest, that was very hard to grow. That took time. And even still, it takes time to readjust and attract new people. That is a task, but it’s a labor of love.
All of these different things have kind of cropped up.
There’s just like so many different kinds of new streams of income that helped me support the podcast so I didn’t have to be the one putting the money into it.
Jennifer: Oh, that’s amazing. So, you’ve created streams of income that are associated with the content that you create, this podcast. And that helps you support the creation of the podcast.
Allanté: That’s right.
Jennifer: If The Scholar Circle, that kind of co-working and accountability sounds great to you, check that out.
Jennifer: One thing that I love about your Instagram and your online presence is that community feel is really there as well. When you’re talking about how you are picking up some sponsored and campaigns for some influencer type things that makes total sense to me. Because the audience that is already following you, the people that are connected with you, they wanna see more content about grad school.
They wanna see more of that lifestyle and what you were going through as well. I love that you were a great representative for them and that companies were able to work with you for that kind of thing.
Allanté: Yeah, thank you. I mean that totally came left field. [Jennifer laughs.] And it’s still so funny nowadays because I realize it is a lucrative option. And recognizing that Blk + In Grad School is also very niche.
There’s a really interesting balancing act that happens there. It’s been very helpful. It’s like, ‘Okay, now I actually have a substantial amount of money I can support. Now I can get more resources. I can now pay someone to help me with The Scholar Circle.
So it all goes back into serving the community. I’m grateful for it.
But I also don’t wanna start spamming the community, right? So there’s like a balance.
Jennifer: Yeah, right.
Allanté: Exactly.
Jennifer: There is a balance. And I’ve never seen anything that looks even remotely like SPAM from your accounts.
Allanté: Yeah. [Laughs.]
Jennifer: You’re always so thoughtful with the content that you share. And actually you’re a great example when I’m talking to other grad students about what they might wanna post on Instagram. I often direct them to your account. I say, “There’s all sorts of things you can do. You can help people. You can talk about your own experiences. And this isn’t a great example for you to check out.”
So I love your Instagram. And oh my gosh, spammy? Definitely not [laughs].
Allanté: I started that the Grad School Success Summit the 1st year of the podcast. That was the event I used to help attract people to Blk + In Grad School.
Not just current grad students, but also other folks in the academic content creation space. That’s how I think I first reached out to you, Jennifer, was to be a speaker.
Jennifer: That’s right. That’s totally right.
Allanté: Yeah. It was really a way for me to kind of tap into the community of content creators who we are supporting the same community.
But then also let new people know ‘Hey, there’s this resource available. You know, it might vibe with you.’ If not, I always share a bunch of other resources that might be a better fit.
This year was the 5th Summit which blows my mind.
Jennifer: Wow! 5 years. I mean that’s really amazing.
Allanté: Thank you. It blows my mind. That is definitely the staple event I have every single year. It’s always helpful in building my email list. That’s my main email list building activity for the year. I really enjoy it.
Those 3 days are intense but really, really fun.
Jennifer: They’re fun. It sounds like it’s something that helps build your list. That helps more people learn about Blk + In Grad School and The Scholar Circle.
How does it help the community? What is the Grad School Success Summit? And who should go to it?
Allanté: I think everyone has the academic skills. I’m really not super concerned with folks having the academic skills. I think if you got into grad school, you’ve got them.
But it’s the social bit. It’s the financial wellness. It’s the emotional wellness. Physical wellness. Creating a personal brand. Right? Building community. All of those other pieces of the grad school experience that universities don’t feel fully responsible for.
I feel like we try our best to create an environment where you can get some tips. You can get some information. Some resources and motivation around any of those topics so you’re a more well rounded graduate student. Not just a brain, you know, doing research day in and day out. And doing homework. And doing readings.
So helping grad students think about what do they want their year to look like? Beyond their academic goals. And how they’re gonna take care of themselves to carry them out is really the impetus behind the Summit.
Jennifer: I love that.
Is there somewhere people can watch the replays if they missed this year’s Summit?
Jennifer: Well I’d love to hear what you’re up to now. Congratulations on finishing your PhD.
Allanté: Thank you.
Jennifer: I know that you’re in a new job. So I’d love to hear a little about it.
Allanté: Yeah, absolutely.
So, I have left academia. That was honestly so stressful to actually admit on the internet. I don’t know why.
I just feel like there’s this assumption, even my own inner feeling that we’re supposed to go onto a tenure track position.
I had a really great opportunity at a national energy security organization. We look at transportation policy as it relates to reducing our dependence on oil. I am now the Director of the Autonomous Vehicle Policy Research Center there.
Jennifer: Exciting!
Allanté: It’s really exciting! Yeah! It’s really exciting work. I get to do exactly what I’ve always wanted to do, which is stand between technical folks (so automakers in this particular expertise I’ve built) and policy makers to communicate what’s happening on that side. See what’s happening with policy. To help create policy. And my emphasis on equity informed policies, so how do we make sure that things are good for everybody.
Jennifer: So that they’re accessible.
Allanté: Yeah, yeah. It’s exciting.
Jennifer: I love that! Now, since you were kind of anxious about talking about it online, what kind of reaction did you get to announcing you were leaving academia?
Allanté: All resounding ‘Good for you’s [laughs].
Jennifer: Yay! [Claps.] So if you’re also leaving academia, or thinking about it, it is okay to talk about online. A lot of people are gonna cheer you on.
Allanté: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.
There are some folks who were like, “Oh, I think you would have made a great professor.” And it doesn’t mean that part of my life is absolutely not an option, right? But yeah.
Mostly we get it. It’s hard out here.
Finishing grad school after the peak of the pandemic, so the academic job market was something I just wasn’t really in a place to even do at the time. I was like, ‘I just wanna figure things out if I need to. But I’m very [emphasis] happy with my position.
Jennifer: It sounds like you’re exactly where you wanna be. Right in that place with policy and the automakers themselves. So that’s so cool.
TikTok is Allanté’s favorite social media platform
Jennifer: One thing that I wanted to be sure to ask you about is what is your favorite social media platform? You do have a big online presence. You’ve got multiple websites. You’ve got your Instagram, your YouTube. Which is your favorite?
Allanté: TikTok! [Laughs.] Where I’m not at.
[Jennifer: laughing loudly] That’s so funny! Why do you like TikTok so much?
Allanté: I love TikTok. I have a very irreverent sense of humor and I feel like TikTok is full of all of the, like, just wild and kind of wacky stuff. I thoroughly enjoy that.
Jennifer: It fits your personality.
Allanté: Yeah, yeah. There’s things on there. I’d create a page…But I enjoy consuming TikTok. I haven’t gotten to where I wanna contribute too much.
Jennifer: Well you’re a creator in a lot of different areas. You don’t need to create on every platform. Especially the ones you enjoy consuming the most. [Allanté nods her head.]
That’s really fun to hear about when you have so many social media platforms.
Keeping her online presence updated
Jennifer: How do you manage all of that? Like you have multiple websites. You got the social media. That’s a lot to keep track of.
I have a pretty good system with the podcast. Right now, the podcast isn’t on YouTube. I only have like the Summit on YouTube. When I first started, I did a couple of webinars. So they’re there.
My YouTube is pretty tame. That keeps it very manageable for me where I’m only adding 6 new videos a year for those 3 days that we have the Summit.
Jennifer: Nice.
Allanté: Now as far as the websites, everything from the podcast goes to the website. Once I create a podcast episode through my podcast provider, I then link everything: the show notes, all of that. I’m pretty much just repurposing all of that written content and putting it into a blog post on the website. That keeps it very easy to maintain and pretty low maintenance.
Now the social media piece, that’s where probably the bulk of my content creation energy goes. Because you have to create things all the time.
I more recently took a break because I was writing my dissertation. Honestly, so much life has happened since I finished my PhD. Even like us recording is getting me back into the groove of content creation.
Jennifer: Right.
Allanté: What that looked like before was, ‘Okay, I have this episode that’s gonna go out. I only need 2 more pieces of content around the post with the podcast every week. So that’s kind of how I managed it and kept it very low maintenance for me. Like, I can create 2 more pieces of content.
Jennifer: It sounds like you have a good system.
Allanté: Yeah, I do. Thanks.
Jennifer: I like that your system is all based around the podcast. And figuring out what needs to be shared, where it needs to be shared, and when. Right? That’s the multiple posts part. But it sounds like you have a system in place.
I love that you took a break during your dissertation. And even afterwards. Taking a break from social media is so important, especially for our mental health and well-being. It’s great that you shared that as well.
Jennifer: Now, is there anything else that you’d like to add that you wanna be sure to talk about during this interview? I’m having so much fun.
Allanté: I know! Me too.
Only thing I’d say, for anyone who is starting out. The advice I give everyone, and this is what I did when I started the podcast…
Before you go live, create 5-10 pieces of content.
Jennifer: Oooh. Why?
Allanté: 1: you’re practicing the consistency of creating the content and making it a part of your schedule. Even if that means you’re sitting and bashing it. It’s like, ‘Okay, this is how long it takes me to make 5-10 episodes. Or 5-10 videos. 5-10 blog posts, whatever.
Then you can schedule those anchor pieces of content over those 10 weeks, 5 weeks, what have you. If it’s every other week, now you’ve got 20 weeks worth of content if it’s biweekly that you’re producing content.
You get to kind of mess up too. Those very 1st episodes, I don’t listen to. Because they’re not great! But, I got to figure out so much with those first few episodes. Then I could reassess and create some direction. And decide if I like it.
I think all of those bits are really important, 1: with building an audience, and 2: figuring out what works for you and your flow. And making sure you can stay committed to something you said you were going to do.
Jennifer: You have to like it. Right? It’s a big project. It takes a lot of energy and maybe even some finances if you want to get into it. So liking it is important [laughs].
And I’m glad you had a topic you were passionate about. And that you put all this energy into. Because you created something amazing.
Jennifer: What is next for Blk + In Grad School? Will there be a new season?
Allanté: Yeah! Literally, I recorded an episode yesterday. It’s so exciting. I definitely wanna hit 200 episodes. We’re at 165 right now. So I know the goal right now is okay, hit 200. And then we will reassess again.
[Allanté and Jennifer laugh.]
Allanté: But I’m definitely wanting to serve the community. I’m open to what that looks like. I think there might be time for a new voice. There might be time for a different approach. I’m really open to what’s needed from me.
And also balancing my life post-grad school. Right? My time is different. I actually travel a lot for work. Figuring that out has been really interesting.
Jennifer: You’ve changed your lifestyle to work with this podcast. And now you’re even maybe changing the podcast to fit with your lifestyle. And what the community is hoping for in the future.
Thank you so much for talking with me today. Dr. Allanté Whitmore, this has been a joy! We’ve been internet buddies for a few years now.
Allanté: Yeah!
Jennifer: I’ve been involved with the Grad School Success Summit. And so I’m so excited that you came on The Social Academic today.
Allanté: Oh, so happy to be here, Jennifer! Like literally means the world to me.
And make sure you link your session from the Summit in the show notes.
Jennifer: Oh! Good idea. I wouldn’t have even thought of that. But I did talk about social media and how to talk about yourself online in grad school. So I’ll link that below as well. Thanks so much!
Allanté Whitmore, PhD(@BlkInGradSchool) is a proud Detroit native. She earned her bachelors in biological engineering at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, and her masters’ in biological and agricultural engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned a joint PhD in Civil Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University in 2022.
Allanté’s research focused on uncovering the environmental and social implications of autonomous vehicle technology. She used computer modeling to test different ways in which shared autonomous vehicles and shuttles might be used in public transit systems, with the aims of improving transit access and equity in public transit systems and reducing the transportation sector’s contribution to emissions. Allanté is now the Director of autonomous vehicle policy research at a transportation policy research organization. She continues to create knowledge to inform future policy on shared mobility that ensures physical and environmentally equitable access to transportation.
In her free time, Allanté hosts a podcast, Blk + In Grad School where she chronicles her experience getting her PhD, providing encouragement and tools for women and people of color to successfully navigate the graduate-education journey.
Connect with Allanté on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok @BlkInGradSchool.
