Should a PhD Student Have a Website?
Absolutely! Because of multiple benefits:
- Craft Your Professional Identify
- Enhance Visibility
- Facilitate Sharing
- Broaden Your Audience
1. Craft Your Professional Identify
Your website showcases and summarizes your research expertise, achievements, and experience. Since you design what to present on your site and how to best present it, you develop your personal “brand” that aids internship mentors, industry employers, and academic institutions in understanding your current and future contributions.
2. Enhance Visibility
In today’s digital world, people often search for relevant research. Your website provides an important channel for sharing your work, especially if your university officially hosts or links to your site, giving it credibility with an .edu domain.
3. Facilitate Sharing
Your website makes it effortless for others to spread the word about your work by simply sharing the URL of an article or demo on your site, amplifying the reach of your research. No need to send large paper PDFs!
3. Broaden Your Audience
Through creating the website, you learn and practice how to present your work for a much broader audience (e.g., the general public), extending beyond your technical peers. This practice not only enhances your communication skills but also significantly broaden the impact of your research.
Example PhD Student Websites from Our Group
Every PhD student in our research group, the Polo Club of Data Science, has a website. Additionally, our group has its own site, serving as an additional platform to showcase our collective innovations. My former PhD advisee Dr. Fred Hohman’s website provides a fantastic template that uses a clean, easy-to-configure design (open-sourced on GitHub, so you can just fork it!). Design variants from his academic siblings that have extended his design include: Seongmin Lee, ShengYun (Anthony) Peng.
