Raising Your Profile on Campus

Raising your profile in the workplace can feel like uncomfortable self-promotion, but it is an important part of professional life that we often put aside.  We need to learn to articulately explain who we are and what we do, our experience and aspirations, to open up opportunities. Building strong connections with key people raises your profile.  Some do this through networking, and others blog or use other forms of social media.  

What do you do to raise your profile on campus?  

Mary Churchill, Boston University, Boston, MA

This is a great set of questions and an ongoing challenge for many of us. Unfortunately, I think that women are more uncomfortable with self-promotion than men. We are also more critical of other women who do the work to raise their profiles. I have never had a man question my use of social media or marketing/communication to get the word out about the work I've done. However, I have heard many women complain about the self-promotion of other women and that’s discouraging. I love the practice of amplification that women on Obama’s staff employed to support one another in meetings. I think that we need to do something similar on campus. When a woman self-promotes, we need to cheer her on, not shame and silence her. 

Part of what we’ve tried to do here at University of Venus is create a space for women to celebrate their success and the success of other women. 

Meg Palladino, Yale University, New Haven, CT

Like many women, raising my profile feels uncomfortable.  I’ve been thinking about how to promote myself more, and my first step is to improve my elevator pitch to describe my role, even as I interact with others around campus.  I’ve also been observing what others do to promote themselves, and talking to women I work with about how they amplify their achievements or the successes of their departments.

Jeanne Zaino, Iona College, New Rochelle, NY

We should not only support women who self-promote, we should also do a better job promoting each other. One way to do this is to develop networks of women (or those who identify as women) who promote and celebrate each other. One good example of this is “Women Also Know Stuff” https://womenalsoknowstuff.com/  Their mission reads in part, “Our goal is to promote and publicize the work and expertise of scholars in political science who identify as women.” It is vitally important that our work is shared with a broader audience and reaches those not just inside, but outside of the academy as well. Too often our voices are drowned out in the popular media by those of pundits, reporters, commentators, etc… and this has had serious consequences (i.e., less support for governmental funding of research in the field, etc...). 

What do you do to raise your profile on campus?