Author: Annet Nakkazi // Editor: Erin Pallott
Teaming up with the Doctoral Academy and the Researcher Development team, I organised a podcast episode about how postgraduate researchers can start building their online presence and researcher profiles. I talked about our blog, Research Hive, and how blogging is a great way to start getting your name out there in your research field, as well as gaining some valuable experience in science communication. You can listen to the full episode here.
Joining me in the podcast was PhD student Annet Nakkazi, and she shared how she uses social media to promote her own projects. Annet has also kindly shared with us a summary of her work supporting children through education in rural primary schools in Uganda.
My name is Annet Nakkazi, and I come from a small village in southern Uganda. I am a 2nd year PhD student, at the University of Manchester (UK), and my research is about understanding how radiotherapy damages the brain tissue. Apart from academic work, I am very passionate about promoting quality education, cancer awareness and basic science.
Thus, I founded Rural Great Minds scholarships. These are school-fee awards I offer to great pupils of rural primary schools in Uganda based on academics, sports, leadership, behaviour and hygiene. To support these projects, I mainly rely on income from my growing YouTube channel (AnnetMaya), my CRUK studentship stipend, and donations. I enjoy engaging and playing with kids, thus, I will always have time for running such projects, mainly in Ugandan village primary schools.
If you would like to support or donate to this project, you can do so here.
Apart from making content, I enjoy playing netball and volleyball, only if there is sunshine. While in my room, I spend my little free time TikToking, dancing and talking to myself and/or loved ones. I really want to practice ice skating, but I guess I’m just genetically lazy; I have planned to nth times, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. After my PhD, I would love to focus much on brain cancer research and serve my people in any way possible; let’s see how salaries for PIs will be in the near future.
Building Your Profile on Social Media:
From my little experience, raising your profile takes some time if your family line is not in the celebrity category. However, I am learning that widening your network can also be easy if the information you share is beneficial to a specific audience. My posts are a mix (personal achievements, opportunities, guides for international applicants, my madness/craziness etc.), and I have found LinkedIn very helpful in promoting this. On Twitter, it, sometimes, feels like your posts get stolen by a hidden AI for no reason. I find TikTok the quickest app to pass on my message to the audience (it really has great algorithms); I spend ages on that side. YouTube is great for me, but it requires a lot of creativity for certain types of content to reach a bigger audience. Well, I feel like I lost ½ of the brain cells that can help boost creativity in YouTube content, but I will always blame it on the algorithms (because my soul tells me, I do enough)!
The thing is we have different reasons for raising our profiles, and to some people, it is not so necessary. For those who need it, my advice would be: Post often, celebrate yourself, share knowledge, and focus more on platforms that give you attention.
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