I signed up to Twitter somewhere in the middle of my PhD studies and it was like discovering a new world. It actually helped me feel better as I discovered all these people sharing their difficulties in academia and sharing so many tips. It’s also a great platform to follow academic news and even academic positions offers. However, like the famous account Shit Academics Say summarized in one tweet, each social media has its own bias and Twitter tends to have a lot of negativity and political voices:

Therefore, my most important tip for Twitter is to compensate the overwhelming academic stuff by following accounts like @EmrgencyKittens or @EverythingGoats, you’re welcome! :)

Second important tip is about one feature that I overlooked myself for a long time: Twitter lists! Indeed, with time my Twitter became a mix of so many different information that I sometimes lose sight of what I really want to see, like the people I want to follow closely and the news that are more closely related to my university. Now I see a Twitter list just like a folder where I add the accounts related to one particular interest of mine. Lists can be private or public.

For example, if you’re in Switzerland you could be interested in my list of Swiss Universities, Graduate Campus, Transferable Skills programs, Research Foundations, and CH & European programs, and for more European linked programs you could follow the list from the Euresearch Network 🇨🇭🇪🇺

 

@ Twitter accounts to follow:

  • Me, obviously => @AcademiacNet 👍
  • Humor (dark):
    • Shit Academics Say

The account Shit Academics Say @AcademicsSay is not only one of the most famous academic accounts to follow (over 300k followers as of May 2019), but is also a social experiment by Prof. Nathan C. Hall (@prof_nch ) who is a professor at the McGill University in Canada studying Achievement Motivation and Emotion in academia. His @AME_Research group published many interesting papers and long reviews. In particular, they published a large review entitled “The PhD Experience: a review of the factors influencing PhD students’ completion, achievement, and well-being” (Sverdlik et al., 2018) but it is so long that most of you won’t read it, so I wrote a highlight of it here in my blog, you’re welcome again!

 

 

  • If you’re in Switzerland:
    • @cuso_skills = transversal program of the CUSO
    • @MT180ch  = Ma thèse en 180 secondes Suisse
    • @CH_universities = swissuniversities
    • @snsf_ch = Swiss National Science Foundation
    • @SwissEuresearch  = “Euresearch is the Swiss information and advisory service on the European Research and Innovation Framework Programmes.” sharing info about Horizon2020, Marie Curie Actions, and other European research programs.

 

# Twitter hashtags:

Like mentioned in my previous article about Instagram for PhD students, one difference between Instagram and Twitter is that on Instagram you can follow hashtags easily while on Twitter you can’t. To help with that, some accounts are manually or automatically retweeting tweets with some specific hashtags.

The account @AcademicChatter is playing a key role in the success of #PhDchat and is not a robot, people can now even take over the account for one week to discuss their own subject of interest. A must follow!

 

For science communication, @Scicommbot is a robot automatically retweeting everything with the #scicomm hashtag.

 

If you speak French:

 

Thanks for reading my article today ! :) Have a look at the other resources on my blog, I’ve been writing about YouTube and Instagram for PhD students, and also about Project Management for PhD students and supervisors!

 

More readings: