PinkPsychologist

I am teaching three classes for the same course (~60 1st year students) this year. They had in-class discussions this week and they did SO well - even the group I was a little worried about. Both with regard to content and how they treated their team members and opponents. Anyone else always ridiculously happy when students do well?

Thanks for the replies, guys! Agreed on LinkedIn, I hate it with a passion. You can switch of the "viewed profiles" feature, by the way. I use researchgate for most things, better layout and I can upload my publications and see who downloaded/cited them. LinkedIn is a nice way to provide tons of unnecessary information on my research experience, which is nice for applications and I can show off course certificates for extra qualifications, though. My code goes straight on github (easier to import for others) and/or OSF (pretty much required for some projects). That being said, I can absolutely see why it would be useful in your case. My university pesters us until we put our recommends that we add CV, publications, etc. to our department profile, so that's covered. I think it might be a nice way to pull everything together, as your post would suggest. Just wondering if that's useful, in my case. Thanks for suggesting Reclaim Hosting, I hadn't heard of them before! I considered writing it up from scratch but I think I would be lazy to update it regularly in that case. Being as neurotic as I am, I cleaned up my digital footprint before I even applied for my undergrad and somehow managed to maintain it. Unless there is some revenge porn with my name on it floating around (doesn't seem to be the case), I'm only another academic who loves dogs and books. Think I might set it up to displays the 3D versions of results for some past projects. Either way, thanks for the advice!

I let small things slip - I don't need a "Dear Ms" for example and my time is too good to get hung up over minor issues. If things are terrible, I tell them to look up the section on email etiquette in the course guide or, if the course coordinator didn't include one, add a link on the topic. Many universities put guidelines up, too. I'm their tutor, not the lecturer and consequently, do not spend a lot of time on things like that. That being said, if the tone of their email is disrespectful I WILL lecture them on it. I have a "tough love" approach to teaching, though, which helps. The Miss/Mrs issue one of my pet-peeves, it either "Ms Psychologist" (listed on the department website) or "Hi Pink" and I will correct them on that but honestly, the worst they've done is to make me a Dr and I had journals and publishers do the same, so hey. To be fair, if it were a mass epidemic, I would probably set aside 10 minutes at the end of class to tell them off and let them know they have to read up on it. That is what I usually do when an issue affects the majority of a class because it saves me from having to tell them all individually. "It is disrespectful and I expect better of you" combined with a death stare seems to do the trick and takes less than 5 minutes. Maybe let them know at the beginning of their first class that you expect any emails directed to you to consist of full sentences and show proper etiquette? If they do not know what you mean, tell them to google "email etiquette". They are old enough to use the internet for the greater good. Do I think it is a TA's job to teach them email etiquette? Nope. However, it is our job to prepare them for academia and that real word thing outside of the ivory tower. Telling them that they do something wrong and where they can find the information to fix it takes less than 1 minutes. Sounds like a good use of our time.

Hi guys, I'm torn between setting up a basic website (wordpress static pages with, maybe, a blog?) and just continuously updating LinkedIn etc? The internet, i.e. other people with blogs, seems to think it is a good idea. However, the reality is that between my department page, the publications and researchgate, all the important stuff is already available online somewhere. I would probably use it to add some background information on projects but again, that is all online. I can recruit participants through twitter and have to use the university server for any online experiments, so linking back to that is not a priority. The few reviews I compose could potentially be published (i.e. not going to waste it on a blog) and new publications go straight on twitter in my case, so....why do PhD students have websites? I don't want to make a fool of myself for getting one but people seem to find it useful, and in a way I can see why having a central place for everything could be handy. Any experiences, advice or a good joke?