
Your personal and professional profile
There are now a variety of social networking sites which allow you to maintain both a professional and personal profile. This allows you to keep the two activities separate. Be very careful how you set up the privacy settings on your pages. Some of these services still keep your data long after you sign off from their service, for example, you can still be tagged on facebook, even if you have closed down your own site. Some people will use the same service, like Twitter, for both a professional and personal profile.
Your professional profile may also be enhanced if you appear on any of your Academic Institution's web pages, for instance those for a research centre. You may also be active in a professional association, so you may also be mentioned there. The table below suggests some services and the different uses for them.
Activity: Google yourself! What have you found? Would you want a future employer (or your parents!) to see it? Try Googling one of your lecturers and compare the results.
Why bother? This YouTube video should make you think! Can't see the video? You can either watch it on the YouTube website or adjust your browser settings.
PILOT by Imperial College London, modified by Marion Kelt, Glasgow Caledonian University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.