Hear me out--(This is sort of like the time that I told my the dean of the med school that I thought that social media and online presence is going to start becoming an issue for faculty seeking tenure and grants. He may or may not now think I am a teenage moron, but I still go out of my way to say hi when I see him on campus.)
But here's the thing. Me, early-20's, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and all of my peers are online all the time.
And, as much as anyone would hate to admit, we're the future of science. Logic would follow then, that you would want to reach out to us. Grab our attention. Mold us into images of yourself.
I'm starting to look at grad schools and while that whole subject is deserving of a post of itself, here's what's really frustrating.
A lot of PIs don't update their websites regularly, and that's a problem. Sure I can find someone's most recent publications through PubMed, but what if I can't get to them because of access issues? (I know--this can also be turned into more of an open access discussion too.) One of the nicest lab's I've looked at, the PI had a list of publications and some of them had an asterisk at the beginning of certain citations, indicating that this paper had come from a graduate student in the lab. This is something that I think people need to, if they don't already, take note of. There are probably few better indicators of a productive and plentiful learning environment than if a lab is producing paper. Notice I said a lab. I've started to become wary of PIs that tend towards review papers, or ones where they're part of a larger collaboration and it's only them, and no one else from their lab. (Gosh I want to say something really mean here OHOKAY I'll just say it, those who can't do, review!!) (I'm also acutely aware of the fact that I know absolutely nothing about anything and may all instances of snark and judgment act karmicly against me in later life--there, I said it for you.)
It's all about the internet.
I'm painfully aware that I'm part of this generation-can't-I-just-look-it-up-on-wikipedia, and if I hear one more disgruntled post-doc telling me that when they were in grad school they had to walk to the library and request a journal, I'll write a blog entry about it, but this is the way it is. Let's not fight it, embrace it. It's so hard to grasp for people that didn't grow up with the internet that you can build substantial relationships and communities online. Yeah, the usual arguments of "impersonal" still exist, but more and more those arguments are vastly outweighed by the enormity of good things that come from the internet.
Take my most recent example of photobleaching. I photobleached my cells. I had one meaningful face to face conversation with someone about the fact that I was probably photobleaching my cells, and then I was depressed and went home and went on facebook, and this happened:
Edited for brevity, and in short, I got tons of comments from real live people, all with real live experiences, with their own labs or microscopy facilities. I learned about 'pseudo-live view' and about different types of fluorophores, all on facebook. facebook!.
And here's the thing. I do know Wendy and Omar from real life, and hey uncle Ray!, and if I saw them at the grocery store I would definitely stop and say hello (if of course we weren't in different states), but my itty-bitty-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things-although-seemed-like-a-very-huge-deal-at-the-time photobleaching problem was not big enough that I would have thought to pick up the phone and call any one of these vastly-overqualified-to-be-answering-my-questions people. But facebook allowed them to do just that, on their own time.
The internet is this amazingly powerful beast that I honestly predict is going to allow a lot more people's voices to be heard, scientifically and otherwise. Of course, we're going to have to learn to filter, but you know, you have to filter in real life too, it's not like the crazies only exist on the internet.
But the advantages: an open access revolution, more transparency about authors on publications, PIs interacting with peers and students online and in real time? Scientific discourse over twitter? Tenure-seeking faculty might poo-poo this now, and half the people in my lab think I'm crazy for even having a blog, but these are really powerful things that the people in academia are going to start to realize are really important to my generation of budding scientists.
We're young, we're excited. We like to think we're cool, but that's only because we think that being nerdy is cool. If academia can start having real online conversations outside of an ivory tower that I can watch, learn, and maybe even be a part of, well, you'll have my endorsement. Even if that endorsement is in the form of a tweet. And then a grad school application.
Oh, and update your damn lab webpages more often.
ETA: in retrospect, everyone in my lab thinks I'm crazy for having blog.
