In this episode, I’ll share how I built my personal brand in STEM, including
- How I learned that my story, experience, and expertise were valuable
- How I overcame my anxieties about building a personal brand and leveraging it to gain new opportunities for myself
- How I built a personal brand that works for me
Through building my personal brand in STEM, I went from wondering if my story mattered to not only believing that my story mattered, but that my experience and expertise are valuable. When I started out with my first website when I started 2017 I really did not know if my story mattered or if my thoughts and experiences were of any relevance to anyone and this really prevented me from sharing my opinions and experience for almost 2 years.
It took me almost 2 years of trial-and-error before I committed to building my personal brand.
In 2017, I switched from chemical engineering to chemistry at the end of my junior year. Somehow I learned that chemtwitter was a thing, so I started building my online presence with Twitter. I wanted to share my experience as an undergrad researcher, and at the time I thought science writing could be in my future, so I started my first blog on WordPress.com.
My first few posts were about my experience being an undergrad in the lab, applying for grad school and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and working in the chemical industry after I graduated. I drafted out a few blog posts, but it took me weeks to press publish a post. I obsessed over every tiny grammatical error and started overthinking about the sentence flow and word choice.
When I finally published the post, I didn’t tell anyone about it. The only people who knew were my family and some close friends who checked the website occasionally. When they mentioned it to me, I was a little embarrassed because I was unsure if what I wrote was worth anything. I didn’t know if my story mattered to anyone.
When they did mention the blog to me I actually felt a little embarrassed because I wasn’t sure if what I wrote was worth anything. I felt shy about it and was half-heartedly doing it. I remember feeling sometimes really motivated to write and then sometimes not at all motivated because I was just afraid of what people would say.
Now thinking back I feel kind of sad because my friends and my family were reading it and they cared and they were interested and so my story already mattered to them. So now I think about that and I’m like okay so my story is important even if it’s just the people closest to me. I wish that if I could go back I would tell my younger self to keep going and to believe that what I was writing was good enough and that I had a story worth telling.
Something I realized is that we can think our lives are so ordinary because we live it everyday that we become numb to our own story but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have anything to share. I was caught up in trying to shape my writing in a way that it could help somebody else but I wasn’t really doing the things needed to share it out there.
The other thing I also wish I realized is that it’s great if I could help others by sharing my experience but it also doesn’t have to be for anyone else’s sake. It could just be for my own records or a way for my loved ones to get to know a little bit more about me and there’s a lot of value in that.
That’s part of the reason why I want more people to create personal websites and that’s why it’s also called a personal website: it’s personal so it’s yours and you can do whatever you want with it.
It’s a bonus when you share your expertise, you build your personal brand, and you get paid for that, and that’s what I want to help more STEM leaders do.
Even when I created my personal website, I was hesitant to call myself a website designer because I was really nervous about that. I was wondering if it was pretentious of me to call myself a website designer when I don’t have a degree in it and it’s not my “real occupation.”
I know a lot of academics also struggle with this as well, especially now that personal academic websites are getting more popular. A lot of academics, especially those who are still in grad school are also hesitant to have a website, because they don’t have the credentials of a PhD yet, and so they think “I don’t “deserve” one,” or “When I have the PhD, then I can make my website.” By then it’s time-crunched and stressful because they’re in the process of writing their dissertation, preparing for their defense, and trying to look for a job.
On the other hand I’ve also heard a lot of academics really against having a personal website because they say things like “I’ll NEVER become a personal brand.” I’ve also heard them be somewhat suspicious of people of other academics that have personal websites for some reason. I think this could be related to the fact that personal branding can seem fake, which can be true for some people because you’re putting up a persona online, but it doesn’t have to be that way for you.
Before we go any further I want to clarify the difference between personal branding and personal brand. With personal branding, that’s how you position yourself so that could be what your skills are or what your values are, or what your occupation is. Personal brand is how people see you.
To pull the definition from Wikipedia, it says “the process of personal branding involves finding your uniqueness, building a reputation on the things you want to be known for and then allowing yourself to be known for them and then ultimately the goal is to create something that conveys a message.”
Whether or not you’re intentionally doing it, you already have a personal brand because that’s how other people perceive you. When you are being yourself every day and creating reputation for yourself in real life or online that is your personal brand. Ideally your online presence is similar to your real life self so that you don’t feel like you’re being fake.
You can still build a personal brand even if you feel nervous about showing up online.
On the other hand I’ve also heard academics express anxiety about becoming a personal brand because they think that suddenly everything in your life will become public. I also felt that way as well when I was first starting out. I was really nervous about being judged and seen as a personal brand but in a bad way like I was going to be shamed for creating content and then selling my services online. It took me a long time to get used to being online.
Whenever I wanted to speak to the camera my voice and it took me a lot of tries to record anything. Whenever I posted content about my services I would rewatch the video multiple times because I was trying to find every little thing to be self-conscious about to make sure that there wasn’t something someone could point out about me that was weird. I was also really so conscious about people seeing my face and also hearing my voice which is really funny now that I have a podcast. A lot of content creators create a personal brand that revolves around their entire lives and that can work for them, but it also probably doesn’t work for a lot of people including myself but I’ll get into more detail about that later.
I decided to get over this fear and to create my website and start building my personal brand anyway because my desire to design websites and also get paid for it was a lot greater than any of my insecurities or my fears. Because my desire was greater than my insecurities or fears, it allowed me to move forward despite whatever thoughts I had.
I saw that my personal brand could just become a tool that I can use and leverage to get what I want, which was making money from a skill that I had and also making connections with people who will know me for something other than chemistry. By May 2020 I decide to start showing up online more. This is when I invest in a business coach and I do all the social media trends. I’m making graphics on Canva, posting Twitter threads, Instagram stories, and carousel videos. I was always thinking about what I can do to make content.
My notes and my voice memo apps were full of ideas that I would record while I was at work or commuting. At the time this was really fun and energizing because it gave me something to think about other than work. At this point I felt like I was sharing a lot about my life like my day today because that’s what I saw a lot of content creators do and I wanted to be like them.
I never imagined that people wanted me to speak or write about what I knew about websites. I obviously did not have a degree in web design and people knew this but they still wanted me to talk about it and this really helped my confidence a lot to know that I was being paid for a skill that I gained outside of school. Now I realize that the reason people work with me it’s not because of my website design packages or my skills or my portfolio. It was because of all those things that I did all of that added into my personal brand or reputation that I built.
You can leverage your personal brand to bring awareness to something that you really care about.
Building a personal brand really did take some time. This did not happen overnight. It happened over the course of a year or two years. It’s because I started then that I could now have this reputation of being a website designer for people in STEM. I didn’t have a super strict or clear-cut content plan as I’m building my personal brand. I was posting things that I thought were informational, educational, or helpful. Sometimes I deleted that stuff I would think, “I don’t like this anymore,” but it didn’t matter.
It was continually showing up and being seen visible and then people connected the two together: “This is Brittany and she loves talking about websites and she’s going to share me a tip today or I’m going to learn something about chemistry.” There was no plan for me, I didn’t make plans to post certain topics for next month or I’m going to get on this podcast. People eventually noticed me and then they invited me to those things so don’t feel overwhelmed about having to do all that the important thing is to just slowly start becoming known for whatever it is you want to be known for to share more about that and just share about it in the most like authentic or real way that you feel is best for you.
For some people it’s their science, like what they’re doing in the lab. They love to share their day to day like vlog about what they do and explaining all the different techniques or papers they’re reading and the ins and outs of their field to the general public – those are usually the science communicators.
Maybe you’re very passionate about advocating for graduate students, postdoc pay, science policy, like what happens in Ohio with the train derailment, climate change, vaccines, or public health. I know that y’all as stem leaders are passionate about so many different things and that you have a lot on your mind that you want to share and so I really want to just encourage you to take all of that energy and then connect that with the online space and combine those two and use that to build your personal brand because there’s nothing better than using the internet as a tool to bring awareness to something that you really care about.
Building your personal brand can look different for different times of your life.
I also want to acknowledge that showing up and building your personal brand can look different for different times of your life because that’s something that I learned recently. In July I felt more drained by posting online and this coincided with the fact that I was leaving my job and then packing to move to Madison to pursue my PhD in chemistry. I was starting my PhD orientation and then starting classes and teaching and it was just all too much I was trying to keep up with making content everyday like posting Instagram videos and stories but I just did not have the capacity for it anymore or rather I just wanted to save my energy to do other stuff that I needed to do or wanted to do and making content was not one of them anymore.
In addition to that I was also quite stressed or homesick or sad at the time and I really didn’t want to include that in my content and it just didn’t feel right to share all of those emotions. I also decided to pause my business and slow down a lot of the marketing. I started to feel less pressure to post content regularly and it took most of 2022 for me to figure out the boundary that I wanted to share about my life online. You can also create an online presence within the bounds that you feel comfortable with.
Right now for me I’m slowly easing back into Twitter and Instagram and sharing small snippets of my life. Sometimes I use it to share about my business and things that I’m interested in creating. I mentioned I don’t have a content plan, I don’t batch anything, I’m not really interested in curating besides deciding what is or is not appropriate or comfortable for me to share. I’m still being myself online and I’m still finding clients through referrals or getting invited to speak on panels and for graduate student organizations.
All of this would not have been possible if I continued to make decisions based on my insecurities or my fears back then. It would not have been possible if I didn’t practice showing up to share my ideas and my opinions. I mentioned this is a learned skill. There was no way I could have created this podcast without doing all that stuff before and sometimes I do look at my old content I do cringe a little bit because I see that I did some things I didn’t really make sense for me or I don’t agree with it anymore or I just do or think about things differently now. But I had to go through that phase so I could practice showing up and building that muscle.
Final Thoughts
To just wrap this all up I want to say that it takes a lot of courage to show up online and to share your ideas and opinions and your experience and expertise. It’s definitely not easy but it can change your life like it did for me and I really want to encourage you especially if you are someone in STEM or any other field and you want to make some type of change whether that’s in STEM, in the world, in your field, a cause you care about, whatever it is that makes you a STEM leader, to consider that you building your brand is a way to amplify the good that you want to do in the world.