Last week I attended the mini-seminar on creating an online professional persona. Given that I’m starting to think about applying to graduate schools, I’ve been wanting to develop my online presence to suit this purpose. This seminar was really ideal for what I had in mind.

In the seminar, GRF Sam discussed the ways in which you could use social media for professional purposes, as well as more mainstream professional networking sites like linkedin or academia.edu. He also gave instruction about how to write professional bios, and which kinds of information and phrasing might be appropriate depending on the site. Bio writing is something I always struggle with, so it was great to get some direct tips and feedback from Sam about my content. I also learned that academia.edu is more suited to my needs than linkedin, which was a really valuable piece of information. For me, it was great to get professional advice like this from someone who was more familiar with academia as opposed to other sectors. In this way, the seminar was really suited to my needs.

Overall, I found the seminar helpful, and have been equally satisfied with other seminars on related professional development topics I have attended at Rose in the past. I have found these events to be very valuable and strongly recommend others check them out in the future.