23 Things: what I have learned

23 Things programme is coming to the end, and then it’s time for me to write down a few lines to explain what I got from it.

I can doubtlessly say I learnt a lot from this experience. First of all, I gave a try to many useful programs and tools I hadn’t heard of before or that I barely knew. Mendeley has already become my main resource to organize and group references, and, since I’m just at the beginning of my research career and the papers  I collected so far seem already to amount to an incredibly high number, I count on using Mendeley quite a lot also in the future.

It would be boring and useless now to make a list of tools I tried and started to use and why I considered them useful. It’s something I’ve explained week after week through my posts along with trying to give it a go to all those new proposed tools.

Something I’d like to remark here is how glad I am to have finally a LinkedIn and Twitter profile. If in one hand I mainly use Twitter to keep myself updated on scientific news, read interesting posts or articles and share opinions and thoughts, on the other hand LinkedIn is something I discovered being more powerful than I thought. It has been less than two months from my first appearance on this social network and I’ve already received job offers. Even if I’m not looking for a job at the moment, I am very surprised it works so well, and it’s helping me to be known and to show who I am and what I have done to potential employers.

Finally, I’d like to thank the Researcher Development Programme of University of Surrey for giving me the opportunity of following this programme and hopefully, now that the 23 Things is completed, I will try to keep my blog updated by writing posts related to my research project.

My personal website

This week I’m going to talk about my personal brand and how I intend to make my online presence stronger. Since I’m still in my first year of doctorate, I’m not sure what my future is going to be, if in academia or in industry. However, what led me to choose an EngD rather than a PhD was the link between University and industries and the opportunity to do research along with the practicality of an industrial experience, which is probably what I’ll end up doing after I finish my doctorate. For this reason, I prefer to ‘define the professional me’ with a website like LinkedIn rather than Surrey.ac.uk, which is more likely used in an academic field to outline your research interests and by owning a .ac.uk. suffix it also has the highest search engine optimisation, so that on Google searches for you will always feature your staff profile page highest.

As suggested in Thing 7 and explained in one of my previous posts, I found LinkedIn very useful, and a logic conclusion when having a LinkedIn profile is that this one is going to be my personal website. Since the aim is ‘to sell my brand’, to show who I am and what I’m doing in a professional way and my personal website is the first place people will refer to when looking for me on the Internet, common sense wants me to include some basic things in my profile:

• Professional profile picture: the first thing people interested in you will see on your LinkedIn profile is your profile picture, and we all know that appearance matters. I still can’t understand how people can upload pictures of them wearing a bikini, low-necked tops or huge ski sunglasses that cover all their face. A profile picture in a website like LinkedIn which aims to represent you as a professional and responsible worker should be chosen carefully and wisely.
• Name and surname: the second most important thing is to include your complete name, not just a silly nickname but your actual name because people will know you and recognize you according with the name they see in your profile.
• Current occupation: where you’re working, what you’re doing and for how long you’ve been working there.
• Professional contact details: your email address and your mobile number that will allow people to contact you if interested in you for an interview or consultancy purposes.
• Qualifications, achievements and summary: to have a LinkedIn profile means you can write about all the things you want to show off about yourself. In other words it’s a summary of your professional story including your records, publications, projects, collaborations and qualifications, but also your interests and volunteering activities.

In conclusion, I think that to have a professional profile in a well known website such as LinkedIn is one of the best ways ‘to sell my brand’. It is like having an always-updated online curriculum vitae, that people from all around the world can see and read and then know who you are, your story and what you are doing.

Scheduling and collaborating tools

This week’s tasks have been quick and easy because I am well acquainted with most of the tools described. First of all, I was used to make Skype meetings with my Italian master thesis’ supervisor during my Erasmus last year, since I was placed in the UK while writing my thesis and hence there was no way to arrange proper meetings and meet him in person. In addition to this, I have needed to make video calls with more than a person involved simultaneously because of many group projects I had to complete during my Master. Especially under exam sessions, when trying to find a slot of time where everybody can be in the same room seems to result harder than passing the exam itself, to own a tool like Skype sounds more like a miracle than just technology help. About other existing tools such as Webinars and Goole+ Hangouts, although I have never needed to use them, I have heard other people used them especially to gather different academics from different universities around the world for discussions and paper writings. So, maybe and hopefully, I’ll need to use them during the upcoming years of my research carrier.

Thing 19 was quite useful since it looked at tools for scheduling and organizing meetings. In particular I gave Doodle a try and it turned out to be a very simple and quick way to send event/meeting invitations showing my time preference too. Because I was used to manually try to look at my supervisors’ calendar and combine their availability with mine to arrange meetings and then send them an email, this new tool will be able to send them an invitation email and find the right slot of time when all of us are available without the involvement of hundreds pointless emails and stress coming up trying to make everyone happy and satisfied.

Last Thing this week introduced tools like Google Drive and Dropbox, tools that I have been using from more than five years now. They are incredibly useful instruments to share, store and edit files. When files or media are too big to be sent by email, they can easily be uploaded on a shared folder and be downloaded and seen by the other participants. Moreover, I am used to store my own documents on Dropbox such that I can have access to them every time I want and wherever I want without the need of remembering to bring hard driver or memory sticks with me every time or living with the fear of losing my work if my computer crashes and breaks. To allow different people with a gmail account to edit the same document online is also very useful during group projects, when more people work on the same shared file and modify it in order to obtain the final version of it.