Happy Birthday to Me: 365 days of @academicswrite

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Well, here we are.  My one year anniversary of this account. I went from hating Twitter and not seeing much use for it, to being a serious convert. It has been an interesting ride here behind the scenes curating Academics Write. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure of the exact date that I opened this account. I know I opened the blog much sooner but didn’t write into it until over a month later. The date on the computer file of the photograph of my mother’s typewriter with the ribbon spilling out is July 23, 2016 so I’ll go with that.

I started with nothing. I was creating an anonymous account, so I couldn’t start gathering followers by following people I knew because I planned to keep the account anonymous for a little while. I am less anonymous now but I was full anonymous for about 9 months. So my following was a build from scratch. I think I had the account for 2 weeks and then went on vacation with 4 followers to my name. I was literally Tweeting into a void of nothingness, retweeting others, trying to interact, and hoping to get noticed like a wallflower.

I wasn’t going to pay to promote my account so gathering a following was hard work. In a year I managed to con 2298 accounts to follow me.  As my follower count has increased, it definitely lowered the effort I’ve had to put in to maintain its momentum. Things just run themselves now. When I started this account, my thought was if I got 200 followers I would be thrilled. And I got 2000 followers purely by tweeting and tweeting a lot: 9297 times, to be exact (if you are doing that math that’s an average of 25 tweets/replies/retweets a day). I once tweeted you needed to write 20 tweets a day to create an empire and 30 to create an evil empire so I’m sitting comfortably somewhere between good and evil, I suppose. Right where I want to be.

Here are a few things I have learned in the process:

  1. There are two key ways to gather followers — one is to get retweeted by another account that has a lot of followers. That, of course, is up to that person to like what you tweet. So really the actual key to make this happen is you have to write good relatable original tweets — I don’t have any secrets to tell you about that other than to point out that the word relatable is key. Riffing off someone else’s tweet in a quote can also work, because if they like your riff, a savvy twitter users of the original tweet will retweet it (that, by the way, benefits them too because it bumps their excellent tweet back to the top of the feed). My other not-so-secret strategy is to be myself, be genuine, be honest, and be original. And for God sakes don’t beg for a retweet. Write good stuff and the re-tweets will come. (Easier said than done on some days).
  2. The second key way to get followers is interact. And interact a lot. This requires having the guts to jump into the mentions of complete strangers and say, kind, relatable and affirming things. Positivity is the only thing that works here. Disagreeing with someone does not. So if you disagree with someone, disagree in your head and let it go. People follow people who think like them. Puns and humour are a good strategy as well. And by mentions I mean reply to them, not flat out @ them on something they don’t see coming, cuz I always think it is a little strange when people do that.  Have meaningful interaction with them about their ideas or interests. Most people love to engage back. Some will ignore you. Don’t take it personally. We are all busy people.
  3. Participate in popular hashtags. #ScholarSunday is one of the best. You use scholar Sunday to call out other academics that people should follow but when those call outs get retweeted, many people have followed me as well as the person I have called out. And do your call outs genuinely. Have something meaningful to say about why others should follow a particular person. It was @ShawPsych calling me out on Scholar Sunday (and @raulpacheco retweeting him) about two months after I started this account that took me from about 40 followers to 100 in about a week.
  4. There are other popular hashtags that pop up from time to time on the fly that trend for a day or two and then disappear. Like the #professorwatchlist one that happened around Christmas or #Rainbowrowcall. Get involved as the hashtag fits.
  5. What does not work to get followers is to follow a bunch of people indiscriminately. I would estimate that only about 10% of twitter users (and it may be less) do automatic follow backs. So follow people you think might genuinely make a positive contribution to your Twitterline but don’t expect a follow-back. You’ll have a much more enjoyable time on Twitter if you expect nothing from no one and you follow people that strike you as interesting and engaging. Earn your follow-backs by interacting with folk.
  6. Speaking of following and unfollowing, people will unfollow you. Expect that too. If not a single person had unfollowed me over this last year, I’d have closer to 3000 followers. That’s a lot of unfollows. Who knows, and it really it matters not, why. Some people only follow to get follow backs and if you don’t follow them back then they unfollow you. Some accounts follow you to get a follow back and if you do follow back they unfollow you just to keep their own following counts low — also, as a side note, means they don’t much care about you anyway, so “shrug.” Occasionally you will get unfollowed by someone that will surprise you. One week they like everything you post, the next week, they are gone. Such is Twitter. This isn’t Facebook. It isn’t your closest friend or ex-boyfriend unfollowing you so best not to take it too personally.
  7. Stay in character. Believe me, whether you are operating off an anonymous account or not, we are all just a Twitter character. The most popular accounts have something that identifies them. Have a “thing.” Have a “schtick” that you are known by. On academic Twitter it is easy because anything academic generally goes over well. I, for example, find that tweeting about writing works best (for obvious reasons), but I can tweet about general academia, research methods, my office space, drinking wine…. and those go over fairly well too. The occasional times I have tweeted about my other love, cycling, or other personal things, have generally gone by unnoticed.  Politics doesn’t work on my account either. I try to stay apolitical but any political allusions I have made have been pretty much ignored. I’ve also occasionally tweeted about anxiety and gender issues but my avatar isn’t a person so those kinds of tweets don’t seem to work well for me either. Stay in character.
  8. Anonymity has likely worked in my favour. People tell me all the time they love my quirky tweets (an actual description given to me by someone I met in person), but I’m convinced (and it could be imposter syndrome) my musings hold more weight coming from Academics Write than they would have coming from that nobody Kim Mitchell MN.
  9. When you have an anonymous account, people don’t give a damn who you are. Being anonymous on Twitter is a position people respect and no one asks for identification. I’ve posted things on my Twitter with my name on it and heard cricket sounds.
  10. My primary tweet formula? This is dumb…. but my best tweets are just regurgitating all the stupid things that run through my head while I am writing, reading, grading, and living the academic life. One of my more popular tweets

 

 

 

 

was written based on a frustrated thought I had reading, you guessed it, Barthes and Foucault one Saturday. This may have been my first tweet to break 100 likes. I always look for absurdities, ironies, and universal truths, and that’s what I tweet. I am not (generally) an advice giver. Sometimes I slip on that.  I don’t give tips on how to write. I believe you know how to write, you just have to be inspired to let go of your hangups and get words on the page, and figure out what works best for you. Trial and error.

People on Twitter are generally kind and supportive. It gets a bad (and justified) rap  for bullying, harassment, and trolls but I haven’t had any (major) issues yet.  The worst thing that has happened to me is I once tweeted that I was finished a paper and didn’t know what to do with myself and someone suggested I go masturbate. Again, I do think being anonymous helps. I don’t tweet anything trolls would care much about, but they can find you and it can change at anytime. The more followers you have the more likely that a portion of your following will be made up of people who will troll.

The most amazing thing about my first year on Twitter is the number of great people who have come into my life because of it. People I know who would help me in a pinch and have my back if I needed it, who were excited to meet me when I wandered into their cities this spring even though they had never seen a picture of me.  Thanks to all of you.

By a quick count I’ve met 9 of my Twitter connections in person, most of whom I never would have met otherwise. I’ll tell one story in particular because it is a fun story and happened at a time before I had outed my identity. I met Alex Clark, nursing scholar from U of Alberta in March. I wasn’t in Edmonton, he came to my city.  I had known since August or September that he was coming to my university to be the research symposium scholar. I was already following him (and he was one of my kind early followers) on Twitter and we’d interacted a little bit. He had no idea who I was, I don’t think he knew (or realized) I was in nursing. He didn’t know where I was located. I thought about telling him we were going to meet but I had two (rather contradictory) thoughts about that. First, that he might not care or even remember my account, and second, that, if he did care and remember, it would be FAR more fun to surprise him. So I deliberately made sure I looked for opportunities to interact with him over the next few months. (That wasn’t hard. We have lots of similar academic and personal interests). And surprise him I did.

 

 

I didn’t approach him in person at this event. I just Tweeted at him and waited for him to respond (which didn’t happen until much later that night).  It was a good response and so much fun.

 

So what will next year bring? More of the same I hope. Better things. More interactions. More learning. Twitter has, on more than one occasion made me look smart and knowledgeable in my PhD studies simply because some source, or conversation, crossed my path that had meaning within my real world.

I need to do better keeping up with the blogging though.  I know. I know. (Guilt).

Part II: The Study is Done. What’s Next?

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If you are coming to this blog first, this is part II of a three part series describing the story behind my research for this study:

Exploring Self-Efficacy and Anxiety in First-Year Nursing Students Enrolled in a Discipline-Specific Scholarly Writing Course

Part I is here.

Part III is here.

Dissemination and All that FUN Stuff 

Tom did the stats and, dammit, we ended up with a p = .051 significance for change in self-efficacy from pre to post course. Every researcher’s worst nightmare. You’ll note I do what most researchers do with p = .051, I call it non significant in the abstract but proceed to talk about it like it is significant. Take that as you wish.

I went to a conference in February 2013 and presented just a basic version of my findings. I focused the presentation on the course design because I knew that was what my audience would be most interested in. I was swamped after the presentation ended. Writing is a huge problem in nursing programs. Everyone is frustrated. After that conference, we almost “sold” (I wouldn’t have made a cent) the scholarly writing course to be used by another institution but they deemed it then too expensive for the size of their student group. It had taken me 7 years to perfect the design of that course which began when I taught it not-for-credit prior to implementing it as a credit course. A detailed description of the course can be found in the appendix of the publication I am discussing and is linked above. The party that had looked into buying it thought why re-invent the wheel? However, the decision makers at their institution said no.

Related, but incidental, the process the finance people use to calculate how much a course design is worth unto itself is pretty fascinating. They need to pay me more. My intellectual property is worth a lot of money to them.

I finished data collection in February 2012, but it took me till fall of 2012 before I did anything with the data. I presented at that February 2013 conference in Edmonton and then in the spring of 2013 for our faculty, and then I sat on it. I started another study in the fall of 2013 to replicate and improve upon what I had done in this study. So I started to read what had been published about undergrad writing in nursing because it was really time I did a more thorough job of reading. It was a sad state of affairs the writing research in nursing, and very limited or anecdotal. For the most part, what I was reading taught me that I had an instinctive knack for figuring out what kinds of questions researchers and educators had about student writing. Next thing I knew it was 2014 and I needed to do more than present, I needed to write the study up and see if someone would publish it.

And I was terrified. Yes me. Terrified of writing. The last thing I had published was the main study for my Master’s thesis. That one seemed to take a long time to go from thesis to draft. It went through (as I recall) 3 peer reviewed processes at the first journal of submission — 2 revise and resubmit requests and then a final smaller revision. This was in what I now call the “olden days” of publishing when you had to mail hard copies of your blinded paper to be reviewed and they snail mailed your reviews back to you. I had graduated with my Masters in 2002. I sent the paper out for publication in 2003. I had a kid in there somewhere because I remember being on mat leave, coming in for my baby shower, and picking up an envelope with my reviews in it. I don’t know when I finally dealt with them. I think it took me a long time because the paper didn’t reach publication until January/February of 2006. In fairness, it went to a good journal so I was pleased. But that was my last academic publication before the one I write about now. By the time I got that article published, I had written a novel. My marriage was on its way to falling apart. My marriage did fall apart. I wrote a second (shitty) novel. I was about to have a midlife crisis and spend about six years just riding my bike ridiculous distances. I didn’t want to write academically. The next thing I knew I woke up and it was 2011. I had done a stint on anti-anxiety meds, calmed the F down, and realized life didn’t need to be lived with so much agitation and competition and I should be enjoying its beauty not tackling it with a vengence. Ironically enough, I came back to my academic sensibilities through that epiphany. Yes, going back to academia actually mellowed me.  I had changed my name back to my maiden name. I decided to conduct a research study and it took me 3 years to get my ass in gear and write it up.

Getting my Undergraduate Students Involved

What’s the quickest way to get a lit review done? Assign your undergraduates to do it for you for credit. This is where authors three and four, Torrie and Holly got involved. I had this idea. My students wrote this paper in my research course where they had to find 5 primary studies on a topic. Not the same paper I use now but its predecessor. I knew enough at this point to know that there were barely 5 articles on my topic but there were some. I threw out an offer to the class in the fall of 2014. If anyone would explore writing research and writing self-efficacy, I would use their work to structure my review of the literature and I would give them authorship on the published work. Three students stepped forward with interest. One eventually dropped out. I helped them hone their topic. Torrie looked at the studies which had developed interventions to improve writing. Holly wrote about self-efficacy and anxiety. The additional articles that Torrie and Holly found began pushing my reading into the social science literature which is where my ideas on writing instruction and research really began to develop.

Fast forward into the future and when I was finally prepping the first version of the manuscript for publication in spring of 2015, the journal we first sent to required more than just manuscript involvement for publication credit so Torrie and Holly, the troupers that they are, agreed to explore the qualitative data I had for this study. I asked them to read through that data with a lens toward statements made that supported the quantitative findings. They did a wonderful job and identified some similar points to each other and learned the value of parallel data assessment and trustworthiness of qualitative analysis and I could now tick off “contributed to analysis” beside their names for project involvement. The findings of their analysis are mentioned briefly in the paper in the discussion section at the bottom of the first paragraph on p. 12.

I think of everything I did within this project, getting Torrie and Holly involved in this work is the part I am most proud of. These were two bright students (now nurses) who sacrificed researching something more glamorous and clinically based (the stuff students value) to gain a really important academic credential that they can talk about and use on their CVs for years. I was happy to give them this opportunity.

The final stage of this process was the publication experience which can be found in Part III

In Defence of 2016

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2016 was a pretty good year. Yes, it was shit politically in the USA and the Brits lost their senses. Lots of cool people died this year. Women’s and LGBTQ rights likely took a giant leap backwards and race relations are abysmal — if they were every improved from the days of slavery.

But for me, personally, 2016 was pretty good. This is the year that for me, things have started to come together, where all my wandering paths are merging.  Bear with, or not, in the stream-of-consciousness rambling that is to come.

I am an age that 20 years ago would have scared me to think I would ever be this old, and I know from years of nursing that I’m not remotely close to being old yet. I have enjoyed my 40s, with 4 and a bit years of them left. My 40s have allowed me to be who I was always meant to be without feeling pressured to keep up with some feminine so-called ideal. I don’t have to feel like I should keep quiet when I have something to say, or when some injustice needs to be corrected.  People have listened to me in my 40s. What was, in my 20s, labeled as rudeness or negativity is now called directness and criticism. Strangely, I don’t feel how I say things is different, but the perception and reception of what I say has changed. I choose my battles more carefully, perhaps, but I’m also less willing to back down when I take on a battle. It’s a trade off.

Academically, I’m hitting my stride and everything is coming together. I’m not your typical PhD student who hopped from undergrad, to masters, to doctorate.  In many ways, this route to higher education has likely been a benefit to my confidence. My path has been more meandering. I started with an undergrad in English lit (mostly the classics, Victorian, Romantic, Canadian lit, and creative writing) with a minor in History (mostly white man’s Canadian history and American history — I didn’t choose white man perspectives by choice. The white man part is just how it was taught back then). I was right out of high school, when I started university, with the intention of getting an education degree afterward. A plan I abandoned after volunteering in an elementary school and realizing what hell teaching that age group was.

So I followed up the English degree with a nursing degree. And nursing degrees demand practice experience if you wish to have any shred of credibility. Nevertheless, I was working in a hospital less than 3 months when I realized I couldn’t do that work for the rest of my life. The practice side of nursing carries an inferiority complex. The bullying behaviour is everywhere. And the practice community is anti-academic, and I’ve talked like an academic without knowing it before I became an academic. I did not fit in with my practice colleagues who had different values.

I began my Master’s a year and a half later. It took me 3.3 years to finish. I explored waiting for cardiac surgery as my thesis research project. I published everything I wrote in that program. I gave birth to child #1, 6 months before I defended my thesis. That child is now 15.5 years old. I began teaching nursing at a non-tenured college 6 months after graduating from my Master’s. Child #2 came 2.5 years after child #1. This is where the gap in my scholarship started. But to me it feels as if there was no gap at all.

Editorial Aside

Here marks the just over 500-word point of this blog. That’s exactly the length an editor gave me to write an editorial about writing in nursing education. This is one of the reasons why 2016 has been good to me. Pockets of my profession value my work. (Pockets of it doesn’t value my work and I’ll give examples of that too.) I’ve just awakened to how difficult 500 words will be on this topic. As the editor said:

screen-shot-2016-12-27-at-11-16-26-am

I am wondering how this editor might feel when my editorial says that the problem with student writing is far bigger than basic skills and grammar which is what the bemoaning is usually about at faculty meetings. The problem is with how we teach writing and how we nurture it across a curriculum. The problem is with our outdated beliefs that writing instruction ends at one introductory course or, worse, sometime back in high school.

End of Aside

I looked into starting my doctoral degree in spring of 2005 but there was no local nursing doctorate back then and the alternative non-nursing local program I looked into was going to essentially make me re-take all my master’s coursework. No thanks. I decided to write a novel instead. Then I got divorced. Then I did the carpe diem thing for a while. This is the rest of my gap in my scholarship. Then sometime around 2011 I started coming back to my academic ways.

The years 2006-2010 were not good years. That’s all I’ll say about that. 2011 is the year I turned 40. It was also the year I met my current partner, but we wouldn’t get together for another year and a half. 2011 is also the year I started planning my first writing self-efficacy study. I suppose it takes 5 years to settle into a new area of research because the article I wrote describing that study is due to be published in spring of 2017. In 2016, I did the project on writing self-efficacy instruments (which is a damn fine project if I don’t say so myself) with 2 colleagues — a close friend, and the professor who would eventually consent to be my PhD advisor. That project is getting published in summer 2017 and it is also the project that got me the invited editorial.

In September 2016 I started my PhD studies  at the same institution in the same nursing faculty where I did my undergraduate and my master’s. Familiarity is kind, but I can see in my 15 year absence from that faculty that not much has changed culturally around the building. The faces have changed somewhat… they are a little older, a little more experienced …. but so am I. I was told when I applied that I had experience that most other applicants do not have. I can see, three months into the program, that this is true. I am older than most of my classmates. I am much further ahead in my thinking about where I am going with  my studies than most of my cohort and perhaps the cohort a year ahead of me too. This is despite the fact that my first PhD course was something I had no experience with — philosophy. We went around the table the first class and were asked to discuss what theoretical/philosophical lens we applied to our focus area and everyone had a ready answer except me — 15 years out of my masters and I had no hot clue about theory/philosophy anything. Till the prof, who is also my advisor, prompted me with post-positivism — OooohKaaay — maybe it is? All I needed to do to catch up was read and read and read and read. I’m still reading. I am post-positivist. I’m also post modernist. My classmates, who appeared more philosophically grounded than me at the start, are all extremely smart women who amaze me everyday, but they are plagued with more uncertainty than I have about what they are doing and where they might end up in this program.

Sometimes my certainty in what I am doing makes me wonder what I am missing. I wonder if I am completely misguided and I’m not yet seeing it. If perhaps, I am really just an unworldly, simplistic, chump and no one has figured it out yet. I decided to try my hand at grant writing.  I had a brief moment of panic and almost didn’t go through with it, but the panic was allayed by a hallway conversation with my advisor. The grant application for this studentship required me to plan the design of my main PhD study — 3 months into my PhD I was required to be certain about how I would conduct my research. I think it turned out really well.

That may be naive. There is no way I’m getting out of this first draft of this grant without major revisions. Maybe I won’t get this grant, but I have a good start of a draft for all future grant submissions, assuming some of the other outdated assumptions of academia and doctoral studies don’t render me unfundable in the grant application process — e.g. that I didn’t bridge my PhD work from my Master’s, that all my publications are over 5 years old, and I have a full time academic job already 14 years in the making. Decision makers seem to assume a full time job means I am not dedicated to my studies. That I won’t finish as fast as others or be as productive.  It seems the expectation is that in order to qualify for grant money  I should drop my full time job, be supported by my spouse like many of my classmates have been able to do — which for me would mean needing to give up my house. Live in a tent, perhaps. Feed my children mush, maybe. Continuing to work full time seems to mean I shouldn’t need money. Yeah, I’ll be alright without grants to pay my tuition but likely my colleagues who can afford to be supported by their spouses could also be financially alright without scholarship money.  But they’ll still qualify for the money and the academic merits that come from being able to report winning that grant on their CV. I’ll get neither the money or the merits.  I have to accept the reality that granting bodies may deem me unqualified for student grants because of my employment status. No grant pays enough to give up my salary.  Maybe the solution is to just be better than the other applicants so that part of my CV is overlooked. Maybe there is no solution. Academia is what it is and what it will always be.

The not so good: My abstracted submission for a presentation was waitlisted for a conference I’ve attended and presented at every year for the past 4 years. My one-of-a-kind 3-year longitudinal study on writing self-efficacy and writing across the curriculum was waitlisted for a conference which tends to be weighted in anecdotal presentations about the “cool things we are doing in our classrooms.” I could take this personally but I know what I’ve produced with this data. The abstract did what it could with a 250 word limit. I’m trying to find out how they made decisions to accept or waitlist presentations (no rating criteria was posted as it is for most conferences) but I suspect, like most of my other emails to these organizers, I will be ignored or get some vague platitude as explanation. I declined the waitlist. I don’t need to be forced into last minute inconveniences, presentation prep, and travel planning. I can shoot for something better which will more benefit my learning. Maybe I’m arrogant and overconfident but… naaahh. There have been more things stroking my ego this year, than flattening it.

I wrote two amazing philosophy papers this term that have taken my thinking leaps and bounds from where I was when I started the year. The feedback from my first paper was encouraging and inflating and I’ve already submitted it for publication. I’m still waiting for feedback from the second paper, but this one will likely be the foundation for the design of the writing self-efficacy instrument I develop for nursing. Who knew I would come to think of the writing process as socially constructed? Maybe I did already but I just needed a label.

In July 2016, knowing I would be starting my PhD and wanting to document the process, I started this blog, and an account to participate in academic Twitter. I started it with nothing. I had no following and no plan. I just posted and people responded and retweeted and the followers came. I’ve been strategic about it. I am an astute observer. I learned what tricks worked to draw followers. Like all good academics, I also did some research to help my strategy.  I’m heading into the new year — a little over 5 months into participation — with just over 700 folk, most complete strangers, watching what I do every day. I’m doing something right, I suppose. The plan for the account is still evolving — I will always be “Academics Write” but my real name may start popping up here and there over the next year. I have connected well enough with a couple followers that I chose to voluntarily reveal who I am. I knew the account would be primarily about academic writing (and it is), but it was bound to turn personal as well (and it has). I have blogged before but I did it with high anxiety. I would post something I wrote, often about anxiety, divorce, or relationships, and immediately panic that people were seeing me. I eventually quit blogging because of the sleep I was losing and the worry about what people were thinking and saying about me behind my back in my real world. That I haven’t panicked about my writer here as of yet, may just be a function of anonymity, but so far so good.

If I had to sum up 2016, it would be that it is a turning point year where I have spent many moments looking back at how far I have come and the many things that have shaped my life to bring me to this moment. In many ways, 2016 has been great because of how I am coming to life, coming to know myself, and acting on my dreams and desires. That, more than anything, has made 2016 a great year.

 

 

How Twitter Changed My Life

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I have a confession to make.  I hated twitter. I joined for the first time in 2010 (although I thought it was earlier than that) and for a while, I gave it the good old college (pun intended) try to interact  and make connections. I was also working on self-publishing this little teen novel I wrote but I couldn’t stomach the, “look at me! look at me!” required for self-promotion. The vast majority of people I followed (and who follow me) on the account that bears my real name, were people I was already friends with on Facebook, primarily my cycling peeps, or I followed professional cyclists none of whom followed me back and most of whom didn’t say anything very interesting.  We should not hold it against me that the first person I followed on Twitter was Lance Armstrong — who, by the way, people still voraciously bully or defend with verisimilitude.

My problem with Twitter was its narcissistic and attention seeking ways.  I preferred the safety of Facebook where at least I had a good idea of who my audience was.  I often said, “I don’t get Twitter,” because I didn’t see the point of interacting with strangers.  Being often verbose and in love with my own words, I also didn’t see the point of limiting myself to 140 characters either.

My introduction to Academic Twitter came innocuously one day winter of 2016 when a Facebook friend shared a post by a page called, Shit Academics Say. I scrolled through posts and it was like looking at my own life.  It warmed my geeky soul. SAS introduced me to other academic tweeters through posts of media articles about them. SAS’s curator, I discovered when he posted his CV one day, turned out to be someone from my hometown, who like me, carries three degrees from the same local institution but ultimately hit it big at one of the top universities in Canada, tenured and everything. I confess. I am a bit of a fan-girl.

(There you go. He is academic twitter famous enough. Now many of you can figure out where I live, where I go to school, and then likely, given I don’t work at the institution where I go to school, where I work can be teased out as well).

I had already applied to the PhD program (will be the 4th degree from same university for me) and had been having some interesting scenarios emerge at work related to student writing, grading, and academic assignment creation. I had a few things I needed to say, and wanted to share with like-minded folk, in perhaps a less politically correct way than my employer (and perhaps my institution of study, and my advisor who I respect beyond measure) would prefer. I have a rather bitter, sarcastic sense of humour. But I love to write.  So I started this blog in the middle of the summer. But the blog needed a place to be shared and it wasn’t going to be on my Facebook page or on the Twitter account that had my real name attached to it.

So I created the @AcademicsWrite account — not my first choice of name but it was what was available. I followed the academics I had started following on my personal account and then just watched the feed for other ideas and did some searches of hashtags and other key words, nothing different than others do. And between those tricks and being brave enough to occasionally interact, I managed to get a few followers. Now, as of today I have 140 followers (in 2 months on twitter, while using zero of my in person contacts to get started), only 2 of which are people I know IRL: my significant other, and one colleague — who I am not sure if she realizes it is me or not — but I think, at the very least, she suspects it is me. She was one of my first five followers, and I assume that happened through some logarithmic glitch that connected my two accounts, she found out about it by email, the same way my significant other got alerted I had created this account. Weird.

I had to post stuff too — beyond these occasional blog posts. I am better with comebacks than I am with being spontaneously funny. I am rather abstractly observant about absurdity. I like smart people. Especially smart funny people. I’m trying to be a-political but I enjoy watching the political discussion going on right now. I love media articles and how they influence the world.  I should have been a psychologist or a sociologist, but nursing is actually a pretty good back door into both worlds. I wanted this twitter account to be about more than just academic writing. Academic writing just happens to be what I teach and what I research, but it isn’t who I am. There was no way I would be able to connect to this community without injecting a little bit of my real self into the mix. I am female, but that isn’t why I am anonymous (although it may be helpful to be female and anonymous on Twitter).

I won’t be anonymous forever.  It may be a while before I display my name (although I have already said, once or twice, if you ask under appropriate circumstances and we’ve been communicating a bit, I’ll tell you who I am) but I have this publication coming out in spring 2017 and that will likely be my coming out party. I’m no one famous. It will probably, for the most part, be a “who cares” moment. There will be no, gasps of disbelief. I’m just your regular run-of-the-mill college instructor who is a very small fish in this pool of academics.

The hashtag #howtwitterchangedmylife prompted me to write this shortish blog. If you asked me 6 months ago if Twitter would ever have a place in my life, I would have made some snide remark. What I tweeted about Twitter changing my life was:

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And it is true. I have doctoral seminars to attend once a month and the topics are things intended to introduce us to the grand world of The Academy: Recruitment and retention of faculty, jobs outside academia, publication issues, mental health of academics — things I see discussed every single day on Twitter.

My goal was to write a blog a week. I’m going to continue to attempt to do that but I’m finding myself very busy with PhD coursework. I’m just as obsessive about writing a post like this as I am about writing an academic paper so these blogs take time and my time is limited right now.  I feel like I am reading 300 pages a week. Today I am going to sit down and begin to plan out the writing of my first PhD assignment, which excites and terrifies me, it is only 12 pages. I can write 1100 words about nothing (as this particular blog post demonstrates) so 3000 words about something is not long enough.