Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 3 seconds
I just can’t get over the beauty of this blogpost by the wonderful Lisa Hammershaimb (one of our earlist Virtually Connecting team members). She talks about how, as a grad student, VC offers her opportunities to see academics as they are (unplugged) rather than just their polished publications.
This quote is amazing:
One of my favorite parts of Virtually Connecting is its casual immediacy and spontaneous insight. Seeing the kind of “unplugged” version of people I’ve previously only encountered in highly polished + edited perfection is so refreshing. Perhaps it’s just me but…I think this modeling of open sharing and community amongst participants as all are willing to jump into an experience that is fully unpredictable and emergent is so inspiring because it reminds me that behind all of these ideas are humans who actually aren’t all that different than me. If they’ve done it…perhaps someday I too will find my way and be able to help others along.
What I love most about this is that Lisa is actually sharing a perspective that O had actually never THOUGHT of before. It was never my aspiration to provide what she’s talking about because I personally tend to have access to the unplugged versions of others. It had never even occurred to me that VC was a way to expand that kind of access to others in that way. I am grateful that many successful academics have been willing to let down their guard during these conversations (and of course onsite and virtual buddies help facilitate that) such that this little thing that we do with VC can mean so much to early career academics.
On a context note, Lisa wrote that prior to a presentation we did jointly (Autumm Caines, Rebecca Hogue, Lisa and me) at #T3Blaise conference this week in which only Autumm was onsite and rest of us were virtual (I was actually on recording because timing was too close to iftar time. I joined silently while doing the dishes etc – otherwise I wouldn’t have had enthusiasm for the dishes; my husband and daughter must have thought i was made for doing all the dishes lol).
Anyway here is the recording of presentation (and my part in the beginning may not be working on the recording so here it is first followed by the rest