Carving Out a Slice of the Academic Pie
Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking about my plans for the future. I haven’t gotten too tied up in the details because I still have a few years left of my program, so I’m not getting ahead of myself. As I see other people creating more of an online academic presence, I’ve been playing around with what I want my footprint to look like. I saw my peers creating scicomm Instagram accounts, webpages, Youtube channels, and I wanted to get in on the action.
Last summer I decided to create a YouTube channel to share my experiences and insights into life as a graduate student. As a young millennial, I remember YouTube’s introduction, where most of the content consisted of babies falling down and cute cat videos. I always wanted to get into that space and create whatever I could. But I was always afraid that no one would care. No one would watch whatever videos or information I wanted to share.
And that might still be the case. I don’t have a large following on YouTube. I posted my first video on September 1, 2020, and it was just the contents of my backpack and me. I started posting what I would have liked to see while I was looking for information about graduate school. I get clicks here and there, and I don’t expect much.
The academic landscape has been and continues to change. In a time with so many opportunities to connect online, it made sense for academics to embrace the growing online community to show our work and to network. My future career could be in academia, but I also flirt with the idea of continuing to practice in community settings as a health service psychologist. As these goals form and change over the years, I want to be able to have a space to 1) keep track of my journey and 2) share the journey with others who may be feeling the same way that I am.
In this space I’ve created, I hope to continue sharing my journey, share my work (in an accessible way), and take some of the stuffiness that is so common within academic spaces. As a Black woman in these spaces, I want to provide support to prospective students by being open about my experiences and how I am attempting to navigate academia.
