Add Yourself to the Physics Grad Student Expertise Database!

Dear Physics Graduate Students,

We are excited to announce the official launch of the Physics Expertise Database! Many thanks goes to Erik Huemiller and the Physics Graduate Advisory Committee for bringing this topic up to the department after listening to what all of you were requesting.

There are several goals in mind with the release of this database:

- Allow physics graduate students to showcase the many wonderful skills they have learned and would like to share with others.

- Allow physics graduate students to more easily find other physics graduate students who may have skills that you are looking to learn about (for a project, or just to know).

- Be a great resource for new physics graduate students who may not yet have an advisor.

To begin, please go to https://my.physics.illinois.edu/physresearch/expertise-database/. Please note, you will need to be registered for a course for us to know that you’re a physics graduate student – so please make sure you’re registered before attempting to access the database. Let me know if you are registered and still can’t get into the database.

There are also links to this database on the right side of the Grad Student Blog and in the Grad Student Toolbox and under the Research menu heading at the top of my.physics.

The first section asks a little about yourself, whether you would like to enter in information about skills you want to learn more about, or whether you want to enter in skills you have and want to share with your colleagues. Also, entering in your LinkedIn profile, or research group page, or personal website, or Google Scholar link where people can then explore more about you will be useful as people search for experts. As an expert in anything, it’s very important to think about how to best represent yourself online, not only for future jobs you may want to apply for, but in general to tell people what you’re capable of – you’d be surprised how many doors of opportunity are opened once someone learns “you can do that?”! So it’s very important to tell people that you do in fact, possess that skill.

The second part of the Edit Your Entry section requests that you select a general category for each skill you’d like to list, the description of that skill and then which format(s) you are willing to provide information about that skill in. Even if you’re not exactly prepared to share that information immediately, please do mark the formats you would be comfortable in sharing your expertise in – you can always go back in later and upload the document or video URL later, but people looking for that skill may want to know you’re at least thinking about providing that information (and then be sure to follow-up with making that document or video if marked!).

Once each individual skill is entered, you will have the opportunity to enter in physics-related “tags”. These should hopefully be the more physics-related terms in which a person may want to use the skill you’ve entered (to help provide extra context for the skills you have listed). The Search page then takes into consideration information you entered in for the category, description and tag when searching for experts when bringing back results.

As the database gets used more and more, we anticipate several tutorials being organized, as well as coffee hours for free discussion on certain topics (Data processing, UHV engineering, Quantum Field Theory methods, etc.)

If you have feedback about the database or the stated intentions of the database, please contact either Ali Husain (ahusain6@illinois.edu) , Rebecca Wiltfong (rwiltfon@illinois.edu), or Lance Cooper (slcooper@illinois.edu).

Best wishes, Rebecca