Hey there, I'm new here.
Nowadays we are spending more time in the digital world than in the real one. I'd like to know your opinion about who should have a website. I mean... web developers should have their sites to show their portfolios, maybe artists to show their masterpieces... So in your opinion... who should create a personal/professional website ?
Thanks in advance,
@bileuze
I was just in a discussion about this with _refugee_ who was wondering if it was time that she had a website.
- Who should create a personal/professional website?
Here's one way to look at it: If there is anything that you do in the real world that would be enhanced by this sentence:
"For more information, see . . . "
Then you should have a website.
Hi bileuze - I used to do talks that were sponsored by various organizations. They'd put a brief bio or brief workshop description on the poster or e-mail notice. At the bottom they'd put For more information, see ...website. it helped people get -- more information, which they seemed to want before signing up for something.
The website was also useful for job applications.
At graduate schools, they encourage students to have a departmental website so people could see their research areas. I can see lots of reasons to have one.
I've done a really bad job, though, of keeping my website up to date.
doesn't Facebook cover that in theory?
Edit:
I wasn't thinking in context of business. Of course if you are trying to promote your writing to get it in a commercial field with aims of selling/getting published, i think you should have a website presenting yourself to do that-- or at least profiles on a few websites dedicated to that field (I used to sell photography on society6.com, for example). I took the "for information see.." idea too literally.
Facebook is personal. Or at least, it used to be, maybe it's changed for you whippersnappers these days, but mostly, you connect to people on Facebook because you: -want to be friends; -are trying to flirt/hook up with them; -pretend to be friends; -are related or otherwise socially tied to a person in a way that you feel like you should accept their invitation when it comes.
LinkedIn is business, but as I mention later on I think it's best at what it does for industry businesses or, to put it differently, "jobs where people will hire recruiters to help them find staff." I don't think LinkedIn is as appropriate a forum for artistic stuff, but I haven't tried very hard at it and I may be wrong. I have a LinkedIn profile for my day-to-day work, I don't have one for writing.
I think in part because of the privacy controls and the walls Facebook has put up against casual, non-friends viewing your Facebook (with good reason), Facebook isn't friendly to the casual web-wanderer. Moreover Facebook promotes low-quality, low-effort content as it pushes for daily users providing daily updates. If you write, like me, "Notes" are in a weird place and nobody much uses them any more, but they're probably the best spot for writing...Except mostly they get used as personal blogs.
There is an option of a Facebook page but again, for some reason, Facebook just doesn't strike me as a good option for casual web-wanderers. If I'm trying to find more information about a business and all I can find is their Facebook page, my thought is generally: "Oh. They can't afford to have a real website." I don't always find the information I need on Facebook (for some reason, businesses don't put down their hours anywhere. or a restaurant won't have their menu) which I think is in part due to bad management of the website and also the capabilities of Facebook. The lit journal I work for has a Facebook page and I think it's good at getting people to see content as it goes up but I'm not going to get many new views or users from it. Maybe Facebook is for people who already know and are interested in you/your product/output?
Anyway this is a great discussion as I'm trying to grapple with whether or not I need a website for writing. It would provide a place for a digital resume; I've been published a couple places now and I could provide actual links to these websites, for one. I don't really want another blog though because I've already got the Kenning blog and it is a fair bit of work as it is. But if people read one of my poems and google me, I figure having my own personal website come up at the top of that search could only benefit me.
humanodon, you write and have a writing website. How's it work out for you? Pros, cons?
P.S. thanks lil! i didn't get a notification for your shout-out (weird) but this is a great thread to come up as we really were just discussing it.
I've been lax about my website recently and I'm trying to retool it as a place where I post published stuff, but I'm in that limbo of waiting to hear back about submissions. Once I have a decent amount of things published, I figure a website is a good platform for poetry chapbooks.
The pros might include that it can add visibility to your name or your projects and the cons are that it takes time and effort to create content and to keep traffic steady (which mine is not). Still, it's nice to have that space and in a way it's kind of like having a plot of land somewhere. Yeah, you might not build on it, but you could if you wanted to. Of course, that comparison is vulnerable to criticism on a number of fronts, but for you it might not be a bad idea. The Kenning blog does feature your voice, but in a very focused way. For you, a website might be a way for people that follow the blog (and your content) to get more of that without derailing the focus of the blog.
When lil said
- Here's one way to look at it: If there is anything that you do in the real world that would be enhanced by this sentence:
"For more information, see..."
Then you should have a website.
I wasn't thinking in context of business. Of course if you are trying to promote your writing to get it in a commercial field with aims of selling/getting published, i think you should have a website presenting yourself to do that-- or at least profiles on a few websites dedicated to that field (I used to sell photography on society6.com, for example). I took the "for information see.." idea too literally.
Everyone should, really.
Web developers aren't the only ones creating portfolios on websites. I have a writer's portfolio of my own on a website. Everyone has an online persona that they have to cultivate professionally, and a website is a good way of showing that.
It's a good thing to pursue no matter what avenue your interests, because the internet is for everyone.
Those with something to gain.
That might be nothing but pure enjoyment. There's a charm to staking a claim on the horizonless frontier. That might be remuneration. Maybe your clients will find you. That might be expression. Blogs are like diaries that you deliberately leave lying around. I think it starts to unravel when the page owns you - and you have to update it because that's what you do, not because it's fun.
My wife had a blog attached to her professional website because the SEOs will tell you to do that. Wrote articles for it and stuff (and this is a person who has been published more than a few times). What you discover is that if you're not feeding it regularly the "failure to thrive" is evident from a mile away.
And then we didn't worry about it for a while and then we killed the links to it and then you could only get to it if you had the URL and we still found mountains of spam. and a Romanian hacker running a phishing operation off her cPanel, I might add.
My wife wouldn't have a website if she didn't need something for clients to see. I don't. I'd rather my clients call me on the phone.
- What you discover is that if you're not feeding it regularly the "failure to thrive" is evident from a mile away.
But in a blog you don't have full control of the code, so it does look like every other one. It's not showing you, and if it is your website I think it should show yourself, your personal or professional side. It is much better when we can do things our way.
I've only recently taken the step of making my own website, but I plan to use it as a 3D modeling portfolio/resume site. A friend of mine made one of his own, but all he's written about is butts.
In other words, as long as you use with purpose, absolutely. An old colleague of mine started reviewing dildos and over time started to get some recognition for it. It's a strange world.
Everyone that need to deal with people, as you said, we (and our customers also) are spending more time in the digital world than the real one, so it's good touch these people in this world too.
I'm not 100 percent sure what one will gain me, given that my currency is mostly just my CV, which I can email, and my publications, of which I have one.
All else has a good probability of being pissing into the wind. Not because all my ideas are bullshit, because I don't think they are; it is because a lot of scientific professional networking seems to be done through email or in person, and I work with squishy things, not things you can put in a file. Putting it out on the internet just seems haphazard.
I have a LinkedIn profile which has done approximately squat for me right now.
Also there's something off-puttingly hipster about having a painstakingly curated "online identity".
LinkedIn got me a $60,000 job offer last year, might wanna give it another shot. I didn't take it because, you know, still in college and they needed me to go full-time, but yeah.
Curating an Online Identity isn't really hipster, it's actually one of the most important things any entrepreneur can do in the internet age. Not every profession requires it, but it can be absolutely necessary for those professions that do.
Got a friend that works for a pretty big Indie videogame company as their sales rep/marketer because of his online persona, making game reviews on his website, establishing a twitter following, contacting other people with that "online identity." Just did it, like that, and he's the happiest I've ever seen him.
But you're a compsci major. Compsci/IT jobs thrive on that shit, man. It's internet, it's tech, it's digitaltastic Google Facebook Github binarific. Got a Google Glass on your head and an iPhone in your pocket and an iPad and a netbook in your bookbag. I have a standard-ass Lenovo computer (though it has a touch screen and Windows 8) and a phone that is so dumb it would qualify for disability if it was made of cells.
Also your friend must be one of those people who can stomach Twitter and has a sales rep/marketer personality. I don't. It feels forced, ungenuine, and like there's a grinning Enzyte Guy face that gets plastered on... well, somebody in that equation. I'm not a hard introvert, but I lean introverted-of-center and have a low bullshit tolerance too.
LinkedIn got me my past 2 jobs (great, well-paying, benefits, 401(k), all that shit) and I work for a bank in an area (compliance) that really has nothing to do with technology. LinkedIn works for my dad and he works in project management for insurance companies. I think LinkedIn is really great for people in given industries. Of course I can't speak for all science jobs but I bet there's a corporate science industry that uses LinkedIn. Part of it is a matter of whether you'd be willing to work in corporate science - big companies that aren't too personal and wouldn't give you freedom to do all the science-y shit you might want to do. And...in case you're curious...right now I have a stolen, zombie laptop with mostly broken USB ports and a disk drive so fucked up that I just pulled it out of the computer so now there's a big ol' hole. I admit I have an iPhone, but it's because the company pays for it. I wouldn't choose to pay for that on my own.
LinkedIn is where recruiters go when they're trying to find people. That's why it works well for corporate industries. It's very much not a computer science/IT crowd sort of thing. It's much more digital networking. I get soft job offers there probably once a month. I'm just saying, don't knock it as the realm of tech professionals. It can really help you in the long run. I nearly doubled my salary with my first LinkedIn job...and I wasn't even looking for jobs at the time. A recruiter emailed me and asked me if I'd be interested, and I said yes.
You may have a point there about industry science jobs; there's kind of three separate 'worlds' when you talk about science; academia, industry, and government. The culture is different in each one, though academia and government are similar in more ways than each one is to industrial science.
I've applied for both academic science jobs for this upcoming year and government science jobs. I'm avoiding industry unless I get desperate, because from what I know of it, the culture and I just aren't as compatible, and that's not where my goals are anyway.
Academia and government don't really use LinkedIn, from what I can tell. So it's not like LinkedIn would benefit me much.
In my opinion and in part because I've had to deal with a perpetual grad student for my roommate this year, I feel that people are too afraid of working in the industry. They view it as "selling out." Why? What are you selling out? My roommate claims she "couldn't survive" if she got a corporate job. Well, with nearly 200k in student loan debt, she's not going to survive on an adjunct's salary, either.
You probably know more about corporate science culture than I do - it might vary from the general corporate culture that I do know. Maybe there isn't a lot of creative freedom to it, or maybe it's very very boring. Maybe your heart is set on research and you couldn't do that in a corporate environment. I'll tell ya what though, I find the corporate world almost completely painless, and being able to pay my bills will never be boring. It's not what I want to do with my life, but I fail to see why something I do for 40 hours a week should be considered what I'm actually doing with my life, either. What I'm doing with my life is what I achieve during the rest of the time. (And during my down time at work...whistles innocently )
I'm not afraid of working in industry, I just don't want to.
Why shouldn't something you do for 40 hours a week not be considered what you're doing with your life? I have a strong inkling that many of the people I've called my supervisors over the years have considered it a (very significant) perk that they get paid to do what they love most, and the pay isn't like what doctors and engineers get anyway - nobody goes into the lab for the money.
Microbiologists come to mind. I was at Woods Hole in the summer of 2012. My roommate got on my nerves sometimes when she got up in the middle of the night and left the room, and when I finally asked her what was going on, she said she had to incubate bacteria. Microbiologists work the weirdest hours but I don't think they would have stayed in this subfield if they didn't positively love working with the little buggers.
Paying the bills is obviously a necessary part of life, but I'd rather that be a side effect of my job rather than the purpose.
Screw a job, I've got a vocation and a calling. Which happens to pay the bills.
I think when it's a viable option, go for it. My frustration is mostly directed at my roommate, who just got her Master's in Communications, has the aforementioned 200k of student loan debt, and is determined to go on to get her doctorate in Communications despite the fact that she was turned down from every one of the 10 grad schools to which she applied (an astronomical number and cost when you consider application & transcript fees). She now plans to take a year off, teach or something - probably making about $20k for that year if she does teach because she will be an adjunct - retake her GREs (more $$), and reapply to schools (even more $$) that will not fully fund her schooling (more and more and more $$$$$$) and then after that she is determined she will get a full-time, tenure track job in Communications when every article out there that you read about academia warns would-be professors that calling the tenure-track job market "slim" is being kind. The most memorable article I read on the subject crunched the numbers and concluded it was more likely for a kid to become an MBA star than a tenured professor.
And she's trying to do it all...in the Communications field, which strikes me as a field that probably has extremely low demand for professors.
I have a friend who's getting a doctorate in some kind of biology at Harvard. I don't know that much about biology, he worked on this in undergrad, maybe you would find it interesting. I know he's got publications out there but I can't find any; I don't have access to the big publication databases any more, not here. Idea of this is that STEM fields seem to have actual options that pay actual money post-grad degrees. He can keep on doing his research. There's interest in it. He's discovering new things...that maybe companies will turn around and incorporate into the industry at some point.
If you don't have to work in the industry and can do something you love, by all means go for it. But I see a lot of people like my roommate who fight the industry while going hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt to pursue a dream that is not going to reap the paybacks she will need. It's frustrating because I feel like they rebel against the industry without having any real reason besides "it's not what I love." YOu can't pay student loans like hers based off of jobs that don't exist.
- ...and the pay isn't like what doctors and engineers get anyway - nobody goes into the lab for the money.
Dude, I think you should look into the NIH investigator pay scales. Tops out at about $181,000. You gotta pay your dues in biology, but you can make a lot of money in the lab. There aren't a lot of PI's out there who are starving, just the grad students and post-docs.
Oh, I know the NIH investigator pay scales are huge. It's really hard to get a lab there unless you're super-established, well-respected, and sort of a field household name. I hear some stuff through the grapevine from a relative who works on the 'other side' in extramural grants.
It's also pretty hard to get a tenure-track job right now. My 2012 supervisor has been a postdoc for like seven years.
It takes some real major justification and long-time work to justify that huge of a salary in your grant package. Here's a table of average salaries by field and rank. The average for a full professor in biomedical sciences - FULL - is about half that.
Also NIH's paylines are shit. There's a guy named Yuntao Wu - brilliant HIV investigator, mentioned in the textbook of the HIV class I took last summer - who is basically preparing to move to China because his money went down the crapper, last I heard. (He may have changed his plans. I don't know. He's still in the United States.) Relative in NIH grants says that handwringing and complaining is de rigueur in Bethesda these days.
I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to linkedin. A recruiter found me there, I landed a job that has been incredible for me and my family.