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Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Your Online Persona

Is it at all possible to blend your online personal persona and your online professional persona?
I've been mulling this over for a while now, as it pertains to the Student Affairs field, and I'm sure some professionals could speak up and say "of course it's not possible!" and others might disagree.

I bring this up now because during my recent graduate school and job search, I've kept a close eye on what I post publicly and even watching the content of my posts, sometimes not being myself or as casual. It's not that I post anything inappropriate, I just don't want to post anything that might offend an employer/search committee trying to get a feel for my online reputation.

My Skype and emails have recently changed screen-names to become more professional; or should I say grown-up. I happen to still be using screen-names I created in middle school, and you can imagine how creative and embarrassing they were.

I just realized this is one of the reasons I love Google Plus. On Google Plus you can put people in different "circles" (for example, family, friends, coworkers, soccer club, etc) and then chose which circles you share the post with. But my personal issue with blending a personal and professional online persona pertains mostly to Twitter. Ideally, I would like to continue using it as a crossbreed account where I share posts both of personal nature and professional nature. I am just curious as to if this method is going to work in my future. I suppose it might depend on the universities I'll work in. But what if it means I don't get a job somewhere? Okay, so as a young one in the student affairs field this might be a bit of paranoia. But maybe someone can comment with feedback.

Here is a link to my Twitter, if you're interested!
https://twitter.com/#!/CatieHolker

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