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Curating your Online Presence: Home

Interested in boosting your visibility online? This is the guide to get you started.

Introduction

An online presence will help you develop your professional profile and reputation; participate in global conversations with other professionals, and  have the tools to research and grow your professional network. Managing your online presence is about creating content that informs people about who you are and what you do, shares details, and often invites others to contact you.

This guide is for faculty, students, and staff wanting to learn about how to distinguish themselves academically or professionally online. 

This guide provides:

Your Online Presence

If you have a thoughtful, curated, and professional academic online presence, your research is more likely to be found, read, and shared.

Before you start building an academic online presence, consider:

    Your goals: for example, are you creating an online presence to promote your research, connect with potential collaborators, or contribute to scholarly discourse?
    Your audience: what communities do you hope to reach, and what platforms are they on?
    Your privacy concerns: what do you want current and future colleagues, employers, students and others to find, and how can this be managed?
    Your time: how much time do you have for developing and maintaining your profile(s)?

A few rules of thumb:

  1. Consider your goals and select the tools that are best for reaching them. 
  2. Have concerns about putting yourself "out there" online? Select the tools that address your concerns.
  3. Choose tools that you can prioritize to keep fresh and up-to-date in order to meet your goals.  
  4. When building your online presence, it is critical to create a unique research profile to distinguish your work from that of others with the same or a similar name, and to make sure all your scholarly work is accessible in one place.

The underlying understanding in the above rules is that you do not need to be on every site. Be strategic!

Your WPI CV

The WPI Committee on Appointments and Promotions (COAP) and the Office of the Provost offer guidance on formatting your CV/resume.
 
The Committee authored a document, that includes information such as:
  A.2.7 "Maintaining your CV(s) Imagine: It is now time to put your promotion packet. Have you updated your CV recently? Or is your most recent version the one you put together for tenure? It could take several weeks to find and record your many accomplishments over the years since you earned tenure, and it will still not be as good as a CV that has been maintained regularly. While it is a good idea to update your CV as things happen, e.g., a new publication or a reflection on your latest course revisions, not all of us are that organized. At minimum, you should update your CV every year. One good time to do that is as you do your annual report – first update the CV and then create your annual report. Another good time is in May after classes end. Updating your CV serves as a means for reflecting on the past year and your progress toward promotion. It also serves as a basis for planning your next year. As such, an annual meeting with your mentors might also be a good time for updating your CV. You might keep your CV in COAP format, which avoids the need for conversion at promotion time and ensures you capture all the information COAP wants. On the other hand, you may want to keep it in some other format if you need to distribute it occasionally. If you do that, be sure to track things COAP wants, but are not typically in a professional CV, such as courses taught each term, class sizes, teaching ratings and associated university averages, grants not funded, teaching innovations, etc. All of these can take days to weeks to reconstruct if you do not regularly track them."
 
You will find the COAP CV template listed in section E.3 COAP-format CV Template  - of this 2021 document from the Committee.
 

 The COAP CV template is also in the WPI ADVANCE Canvas site , in the 'modules section'  - https://canvas.wpi.edu/courses/14049/modules at https://canvas.wpi.edu/courses/14049/files/3484081?module_item_id=548549   Example CVs can be found in the collection of successful promotion dossiers on this site as well.

Additional information on formatting your CV can also be found at https://canvas.wpi.edu/courses/14049/pages/cv-formats-from-coap-and-ctaf?module_item_id=601833  

Questions?

Have questions or need assistance?  Contact us at: gr-faculty_support@wpi.edu