I’ve been thinking a lot lately about personal branding and how to best market my skills and experience. Here some questions I’ve been processing extensively of late:
- To what extent should I link the personal to the professional?
- How can I best express the breadth of my experience?
- What can I do to more clearly articulate my priorities?
- Is it really so dangerous to walk the line between the academic and professional communities?
I decided quite recently to seriously begin working out where to position myself within highly related worlds of work and self-expression. For me, this means articulating a research philosophy, a teaching philosophy, and what basically comes down to a philosophy of creation in general.
I decided to share the development of my various philosophies publicly simply because I’ve never really heard from anyone else how they came up with their own, and frankly I’d love some feedback.
I’ve begun here with my research philosophy because I only recently really came to terms with my passion for research; I always found it interesting, but wasn’t sure that it was for me. In the past few years I’ve discovered that I find the process of questioning, designing, analysing and reporting research deeply intrinsically rewarding. The whole world is a puzzle, and it seems as though we’ve only recently gained the processing power and vocabulary to piece it together meaningfully–to express its beauty not just to the research community but to doers and thinkers from all walks to life …
Before I present what I’ve come up with so far, here’s some inspiration from a self-styled ‘scienartist’ whose tumblr I find interesting:
Without further ado, here are some thoughts:
- Science is a service.
- To best serve society, science must be transparent and context-aware.
- To best serve the field of education, social scientists must develop literacy in multiple approaches to understanding how and why people interact with information.
- No single approach, and no single study can yield a comprehensive understanding of how individuals interact with information technologies — each individual exploration contributes modestly.