PhD actually

Just a girl, standing (sitting) in front of a computer, asking it not to distract her from her PhD...

[phdstudents]

when my advisor wants me to be more precise in my writing

[emmachandler47]

Things 4, 5 and 6

Last week’s things were to a) explore our personal brand online, b) find out a bit about Twitter, and c) explore images online (Pinterest, Instagram etc.)  This is quite an easy week for me as I’m very familiar with all of these things.  

I’ll start with my personal online brand – I googled my name, and unsurprisingly the things that came up about me were my Facebook page (which is set to the highest privacy settings so all you can see are my profile pics, no issues there), my University profile page, and myself amongst a list of other Emma Chandlers on LinkedIn.  When I search for images of myself my Twitter profile photo comes up, but that’s about it.  As I used to work in social media marketing I understand the importance of having a good online brand so I have made sure that my online presence is something that I wouldn’t be embarrassed about a future employer seeing, or perhaps even a future boyfriend! Future boyfriends, however, do not seem to be as concerned.  For example I recently went on a date with someone who seemed very keen and arranged a second date, only for me to find out via Facebook that he has a girlfriend. An epic social media fail if ever I’ve seen one, perhaps I should have pointed him in the direction of a 23 things course.

For the next thing we were asked to explore Twitter.  I have used Twitter in a variety of different ways over the years so I didn’t need to really spend much time on this.  I’ve used Twitter much like everyone else to follow brands that I like, and people that I know, and to search for hashtags on trending topics, and to keep up to date with breaking news.  I’ve also used it as research tool a number of times, mainly to send out online survey links for members of the public to fill in.  In terms of using social media for research I think that Twitter would be high on the list – you can find out pretty much anything on Twitter if you know how!

From a marketing perspective I used Twitter a lot to engage with prospective students for the University. I was actually surprised at how well used twitter is amongst 16-18 year olds, I guess I thought that it was a bit out dated for the younger generation! Younger people seem to use Twitter quite a lot as a messenger system, talking to their friends openly via Tweets for everyone to see. I personally don’t think this is the best idea as I wouldn’t want everyone knowing my business! What with iMessage, Facebook chat and Whatsapp I think that there are plenty other platforms that are better suited to private conversations…

The final thing was to explore images online, specifically Flickr, Instagram and Pinterest.  I use Instagram and Pinterest a lot – in fact these are my two favourite social media platforms to use personally, but I don’t think that I would use them for research purposes. Flickr is something that I’m not too keen on to be honest, for some reason I don’t like the feel of it and it’s not something that I would choose to go to, however I can see that it might be useful for finding images for posters/presentations etc. (assuming that they are copyright free of course!) Personally I would use Getty images or something like that if I needed some good snaps for my presentations.

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[emmachandler47]

Smoothies & my MacBook: my favourite PhD companions

[emmachandler47]

Pretty stationery makes PhD life so much better - fact

[emmachandler47]

I probably shouldn’t have bought this mindfulness colouring book… Another PhD distraction!

[emmachandler47]

When your notebook matches your bed covers you have no choice but to work from bed

[emmachandler47]

23 things

So I've decided to create this blog as part of the 23 Things course which is running at my uni (University of Surrey). If you’re not sure what this is, basically it’s aimed at researchers to get them to engage with social media and other digital platforms a bit more – more details at https://23thingssummer2015.wordpress.com/about/

Each week we’ll be given a ‘thing’ to complete – this week is thing one, and we've been asked to set up a blog and write our first post about our social media experiences and what we hope to get out of 23 Things – so here I am!

I wanted to take part not because I'm a digital novice but because sometimes I need a good reason to be consistent with using digital platforms – especially blogging! I actually used to be a social media coordinator at Surrey so I'm quite confident in the online world but I just don’t do enough personally. I've recently started using Instagram quite a bit to log my weight loss and healthy eating progress (follow me at put_down_the_pizza if you’re interested!) which I love, although it has become yet another distraction from my PhD, as will this I should think!

I've mainly set up this blog to track my 23 Things progress, but I will also be posting my PhD life in pictures, which will no doubt mainly consist of me trying and failing to do some PhD work (mainly from the comfort of my bed). I’m currently in my second year of a Forensic Psychology PhD so I thought I’d try and focus my blog on something a bit more light hearted than my actual research…. enjoy!