My work in Progress
What if my childhood friends see this and laugh? What if my grad school colleagues see this and think it’s cheesy?
These thoughts and much worse raced through my head as I debated creating a personal website and public writing portfolio. As my own harshest critic, I ran through countless scenarios in which having this website would hurt my chances of breaking into medical writing or give a bad first impression to potential employers. Moreover, I was terrified of what colleagues or former supervisors would think if they stumbled upon my website. Caught in a never-ending cycle of “what-ifs,” I decided to do what I have been trained to do: research and gather evidence to prove or disprove a hypothesis.
My research started with a simple Google search. I typed “personal website for medical writers'' into a new tab and read through opinion pieces on the advantages of an online presence. The search results covered everything from advice on how to build a portfolio to what content to include on personal websites. Satisfied with a list of reasons why a personal website was a good idea, I set out to gather evidence of the opposite. I typed “personal website hurts job search,” “online footprint hinders hiring,” and other related phrases. My searches led me to discussions forums Reddit and Quora, which shared a common theme: a personal website wouldn’t hurt my job search, unless I was sharing inappropriate or divisive content.
I had gathered evidence that, at the very least, this website wouldn’t hurt my job search. The next step was to bring the site to life. I purchased my first and last name as a domain, but had no clue how to build a functional website. Well, a hallmark of PhD research is to observe a problem, determine how to solve it, and then get to work. Thankfully Squarespace had website templates that were quite easy to customize, so the “how to solve it” and “get to work” phases were pretty straightforward. Then, one evening after some encouragement from my partner, I decided to publish this website.
The manufactured embarrassment and “what-if”s were still lingering, but a small confidence was starting to take root as well. The perfectionist in me wanted to wait until every last detail was fixed, but I had to remind myself that the goal of this website is to serve as an online writing portfolio. As long as that section of my website was ready, the rest could be a work in progress. So if you’ve made it this far in the blog, welcome to my work in progress!