by Franziska Boenisch and Adam Dziedzic

Now that you’ve entered the world of academia, you’ll want to make sure that people can find you easily. This is helpful to find internships, establish research collaborations, and get noticed. Here’s where to start.

1) Setting up a website: Even though setting up a website sounds scary, it is actually no magic trick. The easiest way we found is to use a template, for example from github, such as https://academicpages.github.io. It lets you customize your page while already providing the features and pages you’ll need. Take a look at our pages for how it can turn out: https://franziska-boenisch.de and https://adam-dziedzic.com

2) Getting a domain: Once you have the website set up, you should get a domain. A good domain name is probably related to your name, to make it easier for people to remember. There are plenty of providers that you can rent a domain from on a yearly basis. Costs should be around $20 per year.

3) Filling in content: This is probably the most difficult part. Many new Ph.D. students struggle to set up a website in the first place because they think they have no content to share. But that’s hardly ever true. You can post your photo, links to your Google Scholar, and you can write a summary about what type of research you are interested in. You can also link to your Ph.D. institution’s and your advisor’s website. If you did some experience as a TA, you can also list that under a separate header. Additionally, but this takes a little bit more time: you could think about writing a blogpost. In the next weeks, you’re gonna read a lot of papers and learn a lot of cool things. That’s the best time to start a blog because you’ll have plenty of interesting insights into a new field to share.

Get started today!