In these last two weeks, I have been trying to implement my Kanban routine and self-reflect on it. Two major things come to my mind about this period: (1) I re-structured the Kanban design because the post-its kept falling and some of them were repeatable and had to jump around too much, so I transformed them into fixed statements in the whiteboard that I can check and erase as needed, and (2) my post-it-tasks, the not repeatable tasks, can be split into “real” work tasks and educational or social tasks. Overall, these distinctions are helping me visualize my work better but I am still struggling to control them since the work in progress is impaired by so many side tasks (such as meetings).

I had an opportunity to reflect more on the repeatable tasks, because of the ability to visualize my work. Visualizing my work has proven to be much more impactful and fruitful than I had expected at the beginning. I understand my routine better and my work is flowing better overall, which allows me to think about strategies to improve my work and my professional development more effectively. One of my main repeatable tasks is a “Week Re-cap”, which I do every Friday afternoon. That is when I erase the repeatable tasks and get rid of all the “done” post-its. I put the post-its on my archive and make comments, I also write down comments about the repeatable tasks. It was at this re-cap that I was able to identify the issue with the flow of post-its related to the repeated tasks and modified it as I mentioned above. This week, I am starting to see that the repeatable tasks not just flow differently but they also feel different and require different sorts of attention and mental energy from me. Most of them are book-keeping or managerial tasks that have to be done – which is good and bad. It is good to have the tasks that don’t require a lot of concentration because I can fit them into small time slots between meetings or when I have to wait for something. The bad part is that these tasks have this “set on stone” nature and I don’t have to “pull” them into my work in progress I feel more alienated to them, I feel a lack of ownership and no reward in completing or doing them. Nonetheless, recognizing the machinery aspect of performing these tasks also removed some of the burdens of actually doing them. Some of these tasks, however, require more effort – such as preparing for meetings. One strategy I am trying involves breaking the burdensome parts into other tasks, I can create active tasks related to preparing for them it became just a matter of prioritizing them in my pull requests into the working in progress. I also created a somewhat independent set of repeatable tasks related to learning: reading textbooks or papers. I record the tasks here to be able to reflect at the end of the week and visualize them as work, as well as to keep track of my progress regarding these tasks. I have clear goals for increasing my knowledge of specific or broad topics related to my work since I identified this as a weakness in my IDP. But I am still struggling to transfer the reading into actionable tasks. I hope that I can use the Week Re-cap and the creation of new tasks to support me in transferring the reading into tangible outcomes. The cycle of repeatable tasks has solidified a little better in my mind, but the non-repeatable tasks not as much. 

About the non-repeatable tasks, or the “post-it” tasks, they involve a lot of social interactions as well as the experiments and analyses that will ultimately be transformed into publications and what I need to finish my degree and get a good post-doc position. I have been spending a significant amount of time on the non-work work (the social stuff), things like organizing seminars, preparing for and meeting invited speakers, the climate and diversity committee, etc. Even though fulfilling, these tasks are not really the reason I joined the graduate program and don’t contribute to any progress towards graduation. I am not sure how logical this conclusion is (I know networking is important, I know that developing a community and sense of belonging is important, etc), but that is how I feel now, like I am not prioritizing my time properly. I have been very stressed lately and thinking about home a good amount, which always makes me question all my choices up to now. Additionally, I have been here for 5 years already and I don’t really feel close to an end, which contributes to the feeling that I need to focus on the more concrete steps forward. Luckily, my week re-caps also show me that I have put a good amount of work into coding a script to curate my pictures and into extracting DNA for library prep. These are two small entries in my whiteboard and archive, which don’t reflect the amount of time I dedicate to them in comparison to the time dedicated to the other tasks. I know rationally that I did a lot of “work work” as well, but maybe I need a better way to have the number of hours dedicated to different tasks reflected on my archive and workflow. I will add that to my backlog.

I know the kanban isn’t a silver bullet to solve all my problems in graduate school, but I am glad it seems to be working very well so far.

This week I attended my first meeting at the department’s Climate and Diversity Committee. It was the committee’s second meeting as a whole and it seems like we all have our own conceptions about things we would like to see and get done but very little consensus on how to move forward. The discussions were very passionated but mostly very off-topic and distracting. We did manage to go home with a few “homework assignments.” Mine, alongside another committee member, a department staff, is to research mission statements from other departments and help design a mission statement for our department. I did that a little bit but decided to read more about climate and diversity in general, which I will now be calling diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), although I am not sure if these things also encompass the climate aspect of my committee.

Following the trend on my posts so far, this discussion is something I never formally had while in college and I never formally developed the set of skills required to tackle this topic. My training was very science and biology oriented, learning content and methods and not stopping to think much about the social aspects of what I was doing. I had more exposure to social issues on my teaching classes, student activism groups and by living at a housing cooperative that I am very engaged with. Now, I will attempt to centralize my thoughts and develop a plan of actions to further explore DEI in the academic environment.

A potential starting point for a mission statement, as per homework assigned to me, is: “We strive to have diversity and inclusivity permeate the fabric of our department, aiming to create a welcoming environment in which all students, staff, and faculty are valued.” A mission statement should serve as a guide line and reference for the actions we take as committee and the actions department members take on their daily activities and committees. Based on this mission, we will need to assess our weaknesses as a department and ways to deal with them permanently. Arwa Mahdawi’s TEDx talk suggests that structural changes are required to make hirings (and recruitment) more effective and less biased and that there is no easy way “out” of the DEI issue, solutions must be radical. Most people thinking on the issue make it clear, however, that increasing diversity is not enough and that creating inclusive environments is the key to creating successful welcoming environment to all. 

Our committee aims to create surveys to identify DEI issues that we could tackle. I wonder how effective the surveys and our response will be. Dr. Marilyn Sanders Mobley’s TEDx talk makes it clear that acknowledging and addressing biases are at the root of making progress on DEI. She raises self-reflecting questions we could ask ourselves: Who am I? What is my work? How will I contribute? In addition to using these questions for self-reflection, I think we could use them as department-wide self-reflecting tools: Who are we as a department? What is our work as a department? How will we contribute as a department? I definitely have thoughts and ideas about to answer the department questions, but they would be one-sided and would definitely not encompass the thoughts of other students, staff, and faculty. I will try to answer my own self-reflection and also put in words my thoughts about my ideal answers for the department-wide questions.

Who am I? I am a far-from-home Brazilian, black and gay biologist. I am not used to the weather or the culture in Madison, WI. I am not used to the professional interactions I have engaged in and I am not comfortable speaking my mind about science sometimes and even less about non-science issues in the lab context. I talked with my advisor about my time-managing research, how I am attempting to implement it in my working schedule and how I was feeling about the way it was affecting my work. The conversation was awkward and I didn’t have the skills to explain more clearly what I had tried to say, but I forced myself through it. In the end, he asked me to send a short email to the lab with a summary and some links about Kanban. I procrastinated that task but ended up doing it at some point, as short and as detached as I could, but reaching out to the whole lab to talk about non-science issues felt like a transgression, as if I was wasting my time and their time. I guess that is who I am, I have always felt as a out-of-place black, gay, nerd in my social circles, so the only novelty is the increased cultural barrier.

What is my work? As of now, I would say that my only work is to do research and search for academic positions to start applying to during the summer. Gather data. Publish. Work on the skills that will make me more hireable. Learn the specific and broader field better. Gather data. Publish. I still do a bunch of “outreach” – organize the Evolution Seminar Series, attend the ECC meetings, attend the Climate and Diversity meetings, but all those feel like less my work. Maybe my side job. I also have my side side job, then: housing cooperative. In addition to my work at my own house, I am also a part of the personnel committee of my organization at large. 

How will I contribute? Honestly, as a student I just want to get done and out of here. The Ph.D. is a very stressful time for me and I wish I could be doing something less stressful. That is barely an answer, though. In my work work, I am contributing by training undergraduate students in scientific tasks and serving as a role model to some extent. I occupy spaces that are not designed for people like me. In my side job, the Climate and Diversity committee is my main space to help, as it is very new and we are all exploring what we can do, I won’t create high hopes, but this post outline my thoughts and some of the ideas I would like to implement and could use this committee for that. In the ESS/ECC, I have intentionally made choices to increase the diversity of speakers at our seminar and will continue to do so. I wonder if we should try another diversity panel soon or maybe just get funding to invite an underrepresented minority (URM) speaker to talk about their work and not about diversity per se. For external speakers, it might be interesting to always try to organize a lunch or breakfast event in which they could talk about their career trajectory and choices. In the housing cooperative, I have asked to join the united people of color caucus (TUPOCC) and will at least pay attention to their actions even if my time and energy won’t allow a further commitment, I will also look into RH traininings and employee training, as an organization we always have DEI in mind during hirings.

For the department, my ideal answers to those questions would go in this direction:

Who are we? A research and teaching department striving to provide the best education and high-quality science. As outlined by Puritty and colleagues (2017), to achieve high-quality science we will need inclusive and diverse environments (Bumpus 2015). DEI is not altruism, it is a necessary step in the road to generate better science and scientists, more minds thinking differently from each other will outperform more homogeneous groups. DEI is necessary to become more attuned with societal challenges, teaching, and problem-solving. That touches question number 2: What is our work? Our work is to produce quality-science and to educate undergraduate and graduate students. This work needs DEI (Woolley et al 2010).

Lastly, how will we contribute? Hiring and recruiting more diverse people is one important step, and to succeed in this goal and retain these people we will need drastic structural changes. It is thought that one of the challenges attracting and retaining URM scientists is that many of us are also passionate about social justice issues and this work is viewed as lesser, not scientific, not validated, a waste of time, by the university. This needs to change. We need to encourage and reward this kind of work. Maybe provide grants, consider it highly during tenure evaluation, create connections with social justice organizations in town or in the state and so serve as link for students, faculty, and staff interested in working with these groups. From everything that I read, this idea of opening space for social engagement for academic positions was the one the hittest closer to home to me. I have thought multiple times about switching to a more socially engaged program, working with education or policy, being more useful to people in need. 

When I was working on my IDP part of the questions were related to my personal values and that was used to guide my choices in which career to pursue. After reading about diversity today I am staring at these thoughts again. Are my values are poorly aligned with a faculty position in a research intense institution? I am aware I would like to continue researching and teaching, working with students to solve problems and guiding students in their scientific trajectory. But I also would like to have an impact on the lives of people in the communities I care about. I also would like to have time for myself and my family and friends. There are careers that aligned better with my values but wouldn’t allow me to be in the classroom when students are learning or be in the lab discussing scientific challenges. This might be the conundrum that many URM face during the pipeline to become a scientist. The answer might be that the problem is not that I don’t have the set of values and self-sacrifice to become a scientist, but maybe academia needs a reshape in the values expected of people climbing their ranks. We need people with diverse values and ways to allow them to fulfill these values with intellectual support and in a structured, professional setting – and by that, I mean that we need training on how to act on the things dear to us and not as amateurs. I feel like an amateur right now trying to self teach myself DEI issues, how to engage and how to approach DEI issues, how to find resources, how to think about what I can or cannot do, how to make sure my ideas and projects won’t fall through for being badly designed and low-prioritized in front of my “real work” that needs to get done to get me my degree. We need people with diverse values and also need ways to reward them for the effort and time put into this work. This might be crucial to bringing science outside of the ivory tower. Reshaping the values expected of academics in STEM might work towards bridging scientific knowledge and methods to the general population, tackling anti-science feelings in a genuine way that respects people and invite them into the conversation. 

Luckily, I think my attempt to answer these questions from two perspectives touched and summarized a lot of what I read and thought this weekend. Moving forward:

1.  I will look into what resources are available at my department and campus to get engaged in social issues,
2. Think about ways I could use my research, time, and knowledge to collect or analyze data about DEI and how to apply it to the URM communities around me,
3. Consider creating spaces to discuss DEI on campus: ESS event? iBio event? Informal conversations?
4. Look about possibilities to work with DEI at scientific society level – GSA, Evolution Society,
5. Decide whether is too late to start doing it during my Ph.D. or not. Maybe it would be wiser to just focus on working on things that will get me to the finish line and well poised to a postdoc position and then think about DEI at the new institution. I have been here too long, I have done a lot of non-scientific work already.

Last but not list, the Harvard EdCast seems like an amazing resource to think about higher education, the discussions about higher education and how to position myself in that universe. Here is a brief piece about one of their episodes on DEI.

This week I set up to improve my critical reading skills. I felt like I was not absorbing much from the papers I was reading and having a hard time identifying the key points, goals and potential caveats of a study. I mean, I still think I am having a hard time with all that, I don’t think my one-week effort solved it perfectly – but it did help. Long story short: have questions in mind going in, take notes and be prepared to spend a few hours.

It is important to keep in mind that reading an article from beginning to end like a book is not advisable by any of the sources I read. I patched a bunch of ideas from different websites (links at the end) and created a set of questions to guide me throughout the reading as I take notes. Here, I will comment on them in order.

First, before starting, the question I need to answer is “why am I reading this?” – that is an important question to set my mindset as I go through the rest of the activity. Interestingly, I answer that even before deciding what I will read, as it will guide my decision making about which paper I will choose. Which is the second task: what to read? I know what I need to get out of the reading from the first question and that should be enough to make me decide if I will search for reviews or original articles or something else. Then, I browse through titles and open a few potentially interesting articles and go check their abstracts briefly. That should be enough to have a good sense of whether it is worth reading for my purpose.

With an article chosen, I am still not committed to it, but now it is time to start taking notes. The first step of notes and question aim to get an overview of the article and will be taken more systematically. In a notebook, I will write the basic information about the article: citation (authors, title, year), where the authors are from to start developing a sense about which research groups (and where) are doing what. I would also take note on the kind of paper (review/original research). Then I would write the answer to my first question “why am I reading this?” 

The set of questions I will try to answer from the abstract and potentially from reading the figures:

• What are the major ideas?
• Why was the study made? How was it made?
• What are the findings and what is the kind of data/evidence supporting it?
• Where was it done/who are the subjects?

This should have summarized the major points and told me whether my goals for reading the paper will be achieved. For now, I am still playing around with the order in which to read the section of the article. I will try ADIRM for now: Abstract, Discussion, Introduction, Results, Methods. I will also be taking notes on which reading strategy I use. 

This is the questions I will keep in mind for the discussion:

• Were the results interpreted appropriately?
• Are there other ways to interpret the results?
• Have the methods been discussed?
• Are the theoretical claims justified? 
• Are the hypotheses addressed? Have they been rejected or supported?
• What are the implications of the findings?
• What suggestions are made about future research?
• Are there any good ideas that could have other applications or extensions? Can they be generalized further? Any possible improvements that might make important practical differences?

Some might be challenging with the ADIRM structure, but if the session is well written it should be fine. It is advisable to take a look at the discussion again at the end of reading the paper. The last question will be repeated often, it is part of the idea of not only developing a critical reading but a creative reading – trying to get inspired by the text to go beyond what is being discussed. This could be interesting to start thinking more critically and creatively about science as a whole. It is hard, though. I need to try it again, I have applied this method to a paper about reading (it was not a research article, more an opinion/thought exercise) and the most creative I got was the idea to put together a set of questions from different sources to make my own guide – hardly could be called creative. I also applied to a pivotal paper that is the base of my current project, so I guess the creative side of it had already been thought and designed to create my project. I will try again and comment more on a future post.

For the introduction, these are my questions:

• What is the purpose of the paper?
• How is the story going to be told? (skim over pictures if needed)
• Why is it relevant?
• What is already known about the topic?
• What are the knowledge gaps?
• How will it address the gaps?
• What specific predictions or hypotheses are being tested?
• Are there any good ideas that could have other applications or extensions? Can they be generalized further? Any possible improvements that might make important practical differences?

I like reading introductions, it always felt like the more passive part of the paper just being fed the information. Applying these questions has changed that…

For the results and methods these are my questions:

Results

• Do the results support the predictions/hypotheses?
• Are the results reported unbiasedly?
• Are there any good ideas that could have other applications or extensions? Can they be generalized further? Any possible improvements that might make important practical differences?

Methods

• What research techniques are used?
• Are the methods a valid test of the predictions/hypotheses?
• Has any confounding or extraneous variable been overlooked?
• How do the methods compare to the methods from similar studies?
•  Are there any good ideas that could have other applications or extensions? Can they be generalized further? Any possible improvements that might make important practical differences?

Not much to comment about these questions, the results ones could be refined I think, they don’t guide me much. To finalize, I take another look at the discussion and at my answers and go to my final questions:

• 1 to 3 sentence summary:
• Citations in the paper that I should read in the future
• If you were going to start doing research from this paper, what would be the next thing you would do?

That is it. Think all the time, use the reading as a thinking exercise!

Below is the list of articles I read, in the order that I read them. My questions came from these sources, as did much of the reflection I made:

• Kresser Institute (geared towards health professionals, has two approaches to critical reading that could be used, mainly changing the order in which to read the sessions of an article)
• Entomology, Penn State program (most of my questions came from here, tailored to biology students and closer to my reality)
• Michael Mitzenmacher’s lab (Harvard Comp. Sci. prof) (emphasizes the importance of taking notes and brings up the importance of creative reading)
•  Art of reading a journal article: Methodically and effectively, by RV Subramanyam. (that is the article that I applied the first version of my questions. Emphasizes the importance of being systematic and was the inspiration for me to put together the list of questions instead of simply using the one from Penn State without making any additions)
• This is a cool Reading exercise for college students (I liked the teaching aspect here, might use one day)
• Purugganan & Hewitt – how to read a scientific paper (this article added the dimension of reflecting and asking questions before reading, the “why read this?” and “what to read?” I talked about at the beginning. 

This week I decided to work on my individual development plan (IDP). I am using Science’s myIDP, which has a group of articles related to it. The body of literature related to IDP was very impressive and got me motivated to take it seriously and reflect on my skills and goals – which might be responsible for the inception of this blog as well. Upon reflecting on my skills and previous work I realized that my time management and ability to get work done is likely my most lacking skill. I used to be extremely good at that prior to college, very goal-oriented and focused. I think my time management got worse due to a combination of decreased attention span, aging effect on my ability to learn new things, and less clear end goals. I am still researching and thinking about how to handle this issue, so I will likely write about it again in a future post.

Bad time management is a big, ongoing issue since my Master’s work. It took me three years (five if I count the time I spent working on that project as an undergraduate student) to collect and analyze all the data on that project. That work is not published, yet – but was finally submitted last year. That was my first paper submission after working with research since 2009 (10 years until the submission). Now again, during my PhD, I have been struggling to write a project that has been finalized about three years ago as well as with the progress on my current projects. I have roughly 1 year left and I would like to get four more publications out. Daring and very unrealistic given my progress so far. I hope that focusing on this blog and studying time management will help me with that (instead of just being an additional source of distraction). I have decided that I will try my best to fulfill these goals, though. Especially as I have another clear goal and am set on applying for competitive post-doc grants and remain in academia. 

In the past, I have tried many, mostly devised by myself but also things like the Pomodoro method, changes to my routine and approach to academic work. I would be able to stay focused on a task for a few days but then return to my lack of direction and motivation. I have mostly moved from deadline to deadline stressing with pressure to get things finalized. 

Now, looking at my habits to try to understand my behavior and how to move forward, I see that I work a lot from my computer. I always have WhatsApp and Telegram group chats open and constantly buzzing with lively conversations. Although very distractive I am reluctant to let them go – they keep me grounded and in close contact with the people I left in Brazil. Trying to interact with these groups less is definitely a goal, but I won’t try to completely ignore them during my working hours (I have tried and failed, so I will try new approaches accepting them there and trying to analyze when and why I switch to their tabs). Actually, they are not all distraction, I brought up the time management issue in one of these groups and got very good suggestions about how to deal with it (as many people in that group are also struggling graduate students). 

In the group conversation, I mentioned that in the last week I approached my work by subdividing it into small, clear tasks that I could do in a few hours or days. Using to-do lists the main idea was to have concrete things I could do and see that I achieved something. The small tasks acted in opposition to staring too long at a larger problem, which inevitably would paralyze me for weeks with a large dose of anxiety and stress at a minimum. The smaller tasks were things that will hopefully guide me to solve the large issue but at smaller steps. If the small steps are stead enough I won’t face the paralysis too long anymore and I will be done with large problems. When I brought up the small tasks and my thoughts to my friends, some of them who were more familiar with computer sciences mentioned the existence of management methods for software developers such as Scrum and Kanban. They sent links to websites and videos and I was hooked, those seemed like great methods that could help me organize my own time better. 

I spend a lot of time afterward reading about these two methodologies and concluded that Kanban would be more translatable to manage my own time – they are geared towards managing groups. That said, it is worth noticing there was a cool article about using Scrum to run a lab as PI. Back to Kanban, after getting a sense about what it was I decided to read a book called Personal Kanban, which seemed like something that would be helpful to organize personal schedules (from work to personal life – and why not PhD research?). The book was very enjoyable and direct, explaining Kanban, discussing its core principles and ways to implement it, always illustrative examples. Putting it shortly, Kanban can be summarized in two things: (1) visualize your work and (2) have a limit on work in progress (WIP). I will definitely try to adapt and adopt it on my work routine starting this upcoming week. Got my whiteboard and post-its and I am ready to go!

I will do it all with physical objects, but obviously there are websites for that stuff too, I made a sketch on Trello. My approach will be to create a backlog folder in which I will write in a list all the stuff I have to do, using as short and simple tasks as possible (at this time I won’t record the date, but for any new task entering this backlog file after its first creation I will write the birth date (born) of the task as well). On the whiteboard I will have lists and post-its in these lists, each post-it is a task and some additional information relevant to the task – not much. The first list will be a Ready list which will house the post-its containing tasks I am ready to start at any point, I have all the information I need to start them and a tentative priority in which they will be done. When I post-it joins this list is pulled from the backlog and bring along the birth date and gains a begin date. The next list is a Repeating list, for the tasks that recur often on my schedule, such as many different weekly meetings, buying fly food, sorting flies and so on. Post-its here won’t have dates. The next is the Doing list, this list will house the tasks I am currently working on. A post-it is pulled to this list from the Ready list and gains a WIP date. There is a cap on the number of tasks that can be here – no more than 3! This limits my WIP and is one of the crucial Kanban principles. Next is the Waiting list, with tasks that require external input (such as asking a question to someone or waiting for a reply) and tasks such as already scheduled, non-repeating meetings. Next is the Today list, every day I will pull tasks from Repeat, Doing, or Waiting to this list, representing the work I want to get done that day. This list was created to accommodate the nature of the repeating tasks of things that need to be done bypassing my Doing list. Lastly, the Done list, housing tasks performed to completion. At this point, they gain a conclusion date. Additionally, there is a second folder, the archive. At the end of every week, the archive is updated with the completed tasks, at this point I have a chance to reflect on the tasks and evaluate how they moved through the Kanban flow and what could be improved.

This summarizes my tentative Personal Kanban for my remaining time in graduate school. I aim to start my week and every day with quick plannings, re-assessing priorities and identifying bottlenecks and obstacles to the traffic of tasks through the whiteboard as needed. My week will end with a time to reflect on the performed work and ways to improve it. The dates on the post-its and eventual notes will allow me to identify patterns later on. The goal is to reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed by how much I need to do and create a plan and a flow to get it done. By pulling tasks through the pipeline a more positive approach to work is generated instead of reacting to the pressure of an evergrowing to-do list. I will try this time management strategy for now and write more about my experience with it in a future post. I will leave this topic behind for a while as I experiment with my Kanban to try to make sure I am not spending all my time trying to learn how to manage it.

About the blog

The main intent of this blog is to allow me to reflect on a topic that I worked on during the previous week. It can act as a PhD journal and a catalog of my experiences as I approach the end run of my graduate studies. How much I will stay on the topic remains to be seen. Memetic is used here in its original sense described on Dawkins’ Selfish Gene. The genetic basis of a given trait is a common scientific pursuit for geneticists, aiming to understand the number, effect, and identity of genes underlie a phenotypic trait. My goal is to reflect on my weekly routine and take a look at the memes, the ideas and challenges that arise as I work on my research.

About the author

I am a Brazilian biologist interested in evolutionary biology and biodiversity. As an undergraduate student and a Master student, I work on phylogeography of birds from the Atlantic Forest. During my PhD student I am studying population and quantitative genetics underlying rapid adaptation, mainly the genetic basis and interactions governing melanism in D. melanogaster. My research has an experimental component handling live animals, basic bench work to acquire genetic data, and bioinformatics to analyze such data. Requiring knowledge on the basic biology of the organism and trait being studied, molecular biology and genetics, population genetics and statistics, as well as computer sciences.

I also believe that my identities shape our interactions with other researchers and my approach to science. I am a queer, black, Latino, non-US citizen male researcher. I am a first-generation college student, and the first person in my family to pursue an academic career. In addition to my scientific pursuit, I always strive to foster community interactions in an attempt to increase my sense of belonging to a vastly foreign environment. I have been part of several university groups, assisting in the organization of events on campus, participating in administrative committees and groups fighting for students rights within the university (the realization that administrators and faculty or not always aligned with students goals was quite shocking at first, true in Brazil and in the US).

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
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The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

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You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.