It’s been two months now, since I came across that Unitemps job post and decided to take the opportunity to join the Piirus team as one of the correspondents (along with Arun Verma and Siobhan O’Dwyer). And so far, I’m enjoying being part of a creative team! My role mainly involves tweeting for Piirus, work that I immensely enjoy because I tweet and retweet like a madman! I also commission guest blogposts, like this post from Kate Maxwell, and I carry out interviews, like this one from Phil Baty. On occasion, I also write for other blogs, to spread the word about the Piirus service, for example I’ve explored the question of whether there’s a dating site for researchers on The Love Report (a post inspired by the Science Business’ interview with Fiona Colligan), and I’ve written about the benefits of teamwork and collaboration on Welldoing.
Aside from the simple joys I get from tweeting and writing blogposts, being part of the Piirus team has introduced me to new tools, like Slack, which my fellow correspondent Arun blogged about. Another fun part of my role is that I’ve also been handing out Piirus goodies at various events, to spread the word and help Piirus to grow.
More recently, I’ve attended the BPS 100 Years since Shell-Shock: Psychology and the First World War and the lecture of Richard Wiseman on Deep Impact: How to Engage and Energise the Public with Psychology. I took this chance to spread the Piirus love by handing out mugs to…
Piirus is certainly more than just a platform for researchers to find their collaborators — similar to its sister service, jobs.ac.uk, it also has a thriving community, with its wide range of blogposts covering topics on research, collaboration and other higher education themes. We would like to hear and share more from the research community, so if you’d like to write for us, feel free to get in touch. With its steady Twitter presence, Piirus hosts Twitter chats and Twitter campaigns like #piirusvoices, #letscollaborate, or even #ScaryPhDstoryin5words.
So, if you are not a member yet, don’t forget to join. Membership growth is important to Piirus because the more researchers are on the network, the more likely it is that we can all find people who meet our collaboration needs there.
I look forward to connecting with lots of you in future!