Social Networking at Grad School

[Hugh10]

Hi - Does anyone have a take on using social network sites while at grad school? Will you friend colleagues - professors? Is any one deleting their facebook page - or starting one? Anyone heard of network sites specific to their field of study?

[DJLamar]

I will definitely friend grad student colleagues and treat them like I've treated any other friends of mine on those sites. I'll also friend professors, I'm sure (I have my current research advisor friended on my Facebook, although he almost never uses it), but I'm also sure that I'll be adding them to a special list of "people that don't need to know when I'm drunk" to hide certain status updates and photos from them from time to time

[ScreamingHairyArmadillo]

I've been poking around academia.edu - it seems pretty helpful unless no one you know uses it.

[oldlady]

Good manners is about helping others feel more comfortable, and I think it's important to respect professional boundaries. Having taught at community college for a couple of years, I've had several students who have invited me into their social networks. It's flattering, but also awkward because I didn't want to hurt their feelings by declining/ignoring. Moreover, although I hate to admit it, I felt that because those students had crossed the awkward line, I wanted to create more distance between us and keep them even further at bay. The stakes are much higher in grad school, of course, and I would not want to be on the receiving end of the professional cold shoulder just because I made a social faux pas. So I don't expect to friend professors while in school...

[rising_star]

I'm friends with all of my grad student colleagues on facebook. This includes people at my university, people I know from conferences, and people at the university where I did my MA. I'd friends faculty too if they requested. But, I don't friend undergraduates ever.

[VictorianTess]

I will be keeping my facebook account, and I will likely friend classmates with whom I am friends. There are two guidelines that I've followed with my facebook. First, there are no drunk pictures of me that are available to more than a handful of people. I wouldn't want all of my classmates or many of my professors to see that. Second, I base whether or not a friend a professor on my level of familiarity with them and on who they have as friends. If they do not have my classmates as friends, I definitely don't friend them, because they may be trying to maintain that boundary. On the flip side, I really haven't decided if I will accept friend requests from undergrads. I didn't accept them from my high schoolers when I taught high school, but I don't think that I care as much about maintaining a distance between myself and undergrads.

[coyabean]

I've been poking around academia.edu - it seems pretty helpful unless no one you know uses it.

Ditto.

I think it's just impersonal enough. LOL

To the OPs question I have been thinking about this, too. I'm very much an internet person so it's my preferred method of communicating. However, it is rife with potential landmines. I don't see putting anyone on my FB. I am...very much myself there. And all the filtering gives me headaches.

However, I do like to send along CFPs, grant, fellowship, conference information and the like. I currently keep an "academic" email list but I've been thinking that it would be great if that could be in one central location online.

I am thinking of doing a more public FB page but something about FB invites you to be reactionary and to overshare. I don't know if I could resist. Plus, if I have to choose an account to login to every time I can see myself just never logging in OR getting the purpose of each screwed up.

So, I don't know. I definitely cannot imagine a scenario where I'd ever add a student. I have a former prof who has become a true real life girlfriend: we gossip, we share secrets, I'm in her wedding, we know each other's families but we're still not hooked-up online.

[rising_star]

On the flip side, I really haven't decided if I will accept friend requests from undergrads. I didn't accept them from my high schoolers when I taught high school, but I don't think that I care as much about maintaining a distance between myself and undergrads.

My university encourages TAs not to friend undergraduates, particularly not those who you know from classroom interactions. I am facebook friends with some undergraduates, but they are all students I tutor on the side and hang out with socially. One of them actually came to my birthday party and was like "Holy crap, this room is full of people that used to be my TAs/instructors". It was kinda funny and only sort of awkward.

[Jae B.]

I would happily friend fellow grad students. (I'm already adding potential peers I met at a welcome event.) But I would never add anyone who was currently grading me or I was currently grading. That just wouldn't smell right.

Basically, this means you have to be extra careful when you join sites that import your e-mail contacts to find relevant users.

If I am very close to a professor, I might add them once I'm well out of their classes. This has worked for me so far in undergrad. If I wasn't sure it would be okay, I'd either refrain or, if for some reason I really wanted to add them, I'd check to see if they're friends with any other students. Same policy applies with administrative officials.

Generally, if I socialize with someone, I add them on Facebook. But if we mainly have a working, professional relationship, LinkedIn is more appropriate and respectful of boundaries. But there is some cross-over, of course.

I'm the most relaxed when following people who post publicly on Twitter. People in my field tend to focus on posting relevant news and events, so there's usually no harm in following and it's a good, casual way to stay in touch.

Edited April 1, 2010 by Jae B.

[UnlikelyGrad]

I would never add anyone who was currently grading me or I was currently grading. That just wouldn't smell right.

My thoughts exactly.

I have friended one former student on Facebook. However, I did so not because of our interaction as TA/student, but because he's good friends with a couple of my officemates (Chinese Student Association) and therefore hangs out in my office all the time. It's been nice, getting to know him as a person, not just a student. (He asked me if he could use me as a personal reference for an internship--not an academic reference.)

A practical reason not to friend current students is that it eliminates your ability to mock their stupidity in your status. Ditto with current professors and complaining about classes.

[wordslinger]

I didn't accept them from my high schoolers when I taught high school, but I don't think that I care as much about maintaining a distance between myself and undergrads.

I teach high school currently and never friend anyone at my high school (although now I have some former students from several years ago as friends). Like you, VictorianTess, I am not sure how to handle my future undergrad students. I know profesors who never ever never friend students, but I also know professors who do friend their students and actually communicate with them in that way.

Does anyone have any words of wisdom or warning on this topic?

[urbanchic]

The limited profile options will come in handy!

[NorthernStar]

Most of the circle of grads I'm friends with in RL are also my FB friends. So are a couple of my profs and other scholars. I just won't friend my undergrads.

[Bumblebee]

Having undergrads as friends is not a good idea at all, specially if they're current students. You lose part of your authority and it's harder to give a student a bad grade if that student is a friend. The same way, I wouldn't want to be good friends with a professor, at least while at grad school, since I expect my professors to be fair and honest with me. Being nice and approachable to students is great, but there must be boundaries.

Having said that, I'm "allergic" to Facebook and all those social networking sites, so I don't have to deal with that problem.

[tourist]

I'm extremely allergic to fakebook too. Although I see multiple benefits in having a page, I will not be starting one just for 'social networking'. Just can't do it. There's other ways to do that.

[000]

I've found it's really, really good for keeping in touch with people, and surprisingly enough, is actually pretty good for building professional connections. I completely ignored Facebook for most of undergrad, but after graduating, I've found that it turns into a great resource when you want to keep in touch with people who are now scattered across the globe. A few neuroscience interviewees spearheaded a sort of Facebook movement to get most of the students who were on the "interview circuit" at the top-tier programs into a group, and I can already see it being useful as we're launching our careers... it's like a small forum, where every member is a colleague in the same field at the same stage of their career.

I'm careful not to post any information I wouldn't want public anywhere on the internet... because of that, I don't really pay attention to who I do and do not friend and I keep my privacy settings open.

[psych21]

In my culture, "closeness" is a necessary part of respect. Teachers who are distant from students are not as respected as the ones who share more and are more genuine. So, I am friends with some students on FB. (I teach high school juniors and seniors) My guidelines are: I never add them, they add me; and well, I never post my drunk stories or embarrassing things. It helps me keep my "public" life and self-disclosure in check: if it's safe for my kids to know, it's safe for the world to know. It's only been positive so far. They're stupid enough to publish when they procrastinate, so then they won't come up and try to make excuses! But I will definitely check with my department first before adding undergrads--I don't want to go wrong there.

[red_crayons]

Generally, if I socialize with someone, I add them on Facebook. But if we mainly have a working, professional relationship, LinkedIn is more appropriate and respectful of boundaries. But there is some cross-over, of course.

YES. LinkedIn is key. It's maybe not as popular in academia - this thread, at least, is giving me that impression - but it's HUGE in the private sector, and also very popular among public (=governmental, public university programs like extension) sector folks, too.

I'm working on a project that designs trainings for different community groups through partnerships among universities, HUD, USDA, and EPA (kinda). LinkedIn is really useful for the project director. She's added me and coaxed other colleagues onto it. It's increased her visibility and the visibility of our project. I think she might have even gotten some contractual work through it, although I'm not positive about that.

It's used as a recruiting tool, too. My boyfriend is using it to contact HR people at companies he wants to work at. His father, a veteran marketing guy, used it in his recent job search and ended up with a cool position in a start-up.

If you have any thoughts about working outside academia, or collaborating with people from industry/government/etc, it'll be a good way to make yourself more visible to those groups. Personally, I'm still not sure if I want to go the academic route long-term yet. Even if I do, I KNOW I want to work with non-academics and maybe publish outside academia, and so I want people to have a way to see what I've done and why they should work with me. If I end up out of academia, I want that profile to be up to date so that people from outside can find relevant professional information about me and see how awesome I am and hire me at their big corporation.

Because it evolved primarily as a business tool, unlike Facebook, it's much more professional, too. I never friend people I respect professionally on Facebook - I think of it as very separate from work. But I'm connected to some Facebook/college friends on LinkedIn - the ones who have ambitions and are already building Careers. Generally, LinkedIn is geared toward linking coworkers, so the kinds of information people put up is different, and useful.

[poco_puffs]

I've already developed some boundaries on Facebook that I think will apply to graduate school as well. FB is my primary means of communicating with a lot of my friends, and it will become even more important to maintaining contact when I move away to attend graduate school. My updates are rarely PG or worse, but they DO reveal a lot of my personal views, some inflammatory social and political statements, my somewhat less presentable quirks, some off-color remarks/links etc. I haven't added my parents or any of my older relatives, because of the potential for mutual embarassment, and as an undergraduate I only friended one professor with whom I had grown pretty familiar-- he had already seen the more uncensored side of my personality outside of school, so it wasn't going to be a shock when he read my updates.

My plan is to add grad school colleagues, but I think the grading/graded boundary previously mentioned in this thread sounds like a good guideline for other friend requests.

I WOULD be interested in developing a more professional page on another site, especially as I start teaching and attending conferences, but my Facebook won't be changing anytime soon.

[SeriousSillyPutty]

I'm refreshing this thread because I recently joined LinkedIn. I was trying to get info on potential profs by a google search, and their LinkedIn pages came up, so I decided I should go ahead and join. (I don't know when I'll try adding the profs, but it should be sometime after we have a working relationship, I figure!)

I would HIGHLY recommend joining some LinkedIn groups. I joined one for "STEM Educators and Researchers", made a post asking for advice on research topics related to informal science education, and lots of people have given me leads. Especially for niche fields, this seems to be a great way to find out about work I'd never know existed! Plus it's a way to ask people in my field, without bugging any particular individuals.

PS- This thread is from 2010. I bet the use of Facebook has changed significantly just in the past two years!

Edited May 5, 2012 by SeriousSillyPutty

[UnlikelyGrad]

Not really. I still wouldn't 'friend' a current student (though I have friended two past students at this point--both of whom came into my office hours for serious conversations/advice/whatever in addition to homework help). I will not friend any professors who are either in my department or on my committee until after I graduate.

[Tall Chai Latte]

I do add fellow grad students and post docs as my facebook friend, but if a PI wants to friend me -- I would think twice about that. You don't want occasional rants to go on their time line

[SeriousSillyPutty]

I agree that the need for boundaries hasn't changed, but I think the use of Facebook has. Two years ago, my boss wasn't on Facebook; now she is. Because we don't have access to work email from home, the easiest way for her to get a message to all of us during off hours is through Facebook. Because I have a collection of nerdy friends and websites I follow, Facebook is a top source for leads to interesting science stories that I write about for work. I don't anticipate "friending" my professors, but I think it's good to be open to the possibility that it might be a useful tool in a professional context. (Yay for limited profile views!)

My main point in reviving this post though was the talk about LinkedIn, which I think is more universally accepted as a business tool.

[bedalia]

It's also important to remember how Facebook has changed over the years - what you posted several years ago, perhaps before you ever considered going to grad school or developing professional relationships, used to quite quickly get buried on your wall and become inaccessible; however, with the new timeline format, it's easy for newly added friends to quickly access that rant or those party photos from first year undergrad, for example.

[rising_star]

I'm FB friends with several faculty from both my MA and PhD departments, as well as faculty that I've met at conferences. I'm lucky in that there's a similar political bent among those that I'm FB friends with (and I know this before adding them) but I also keep my FB status updates to a minimum. I actually wish FB were more like Google+ and made it easier to post something to several lists/groups of friends but keep it from others. In that sense, I find G+ more useful but, alas, so many people aren't on it.

I also use FB to keep in touch with people I meet while doing fieldwork (people traveling, people doing research, people that helped me, etc.), which is nice, especially when you return to the field later. That said, I sort of wish I had a separate account for that but FB doesn't make it user-friendly to do that. Fieldwork and my main hobby (capoeira) account for at least half of my friends on FB at this point.

(It's probably worth mentioning that I have a separate FB account I created in college that I don't friend anyone on that I didn't meet in high school or college. So all the crazy stuff that's easier to find with Timeline? That's buried via a separate account.)