THING 1: Getting Started!

Hello, and welcome to 23Things International 2022. If you’re ready, we’ll begin!

This is your first THING: Getting Started

To do this you should make sure you are fully set up on the website and are in contact with your pod.

1) THINGS: Make sure you have subscribed to the blog, so that you will receive notifications of updates and new Things. Just complete the box at the bottom of the homepage and click ‘Subscribe Now’.

Each Thing is a blog on a topic relevant to researchers in any discipline, written by experts from one of our partner institutions. Some blogs will invite you to discuss a topic with your pod, some invite further reading, and others will have an optional individual task. Most of these are short and simple, but others will repay more investment if you have time, such as designing a basic website of your own, or blogging about your experience or research.

2) FORUM: Create a member’s login for the site and take a look at the forum. This is a space for people to share ideas, discuss the Things in more detail, and meet the rest of the 23T community. Come and say hi! If you click on ‘Members’ on the home page you’ll be invited to log in or create a new profile. Tell us a little bit about yourself, and maybe even add a photo.

The forum is your space to socialise and discuss. Feel free to start new threads or comment on other people’s posts. We’ll add a thread for each Thing with further resources, but the discussion doesn’t need to stop there. We’re up for cat pictures, promoting your events and publications, or swapping advice, too.

3) PODS: Introduce yourself to your pod.

You should by now have received an email from Mike Rose connecting you to your pod members. Please introduce yourself and decide between you how you are going to communicate over the course of the programme. This can be by whatever means you prefer – Teams, Slack, email, WhatsApp, Discord or Twitter, for example. One person in your pod will have been nominated as the chair, which means taking the initiative for first meetings and setting up the group. Everyone should feel free to chip in with ideas and chat, however; the more you communicate from the start, the better your 23T experience is likely to be!

Our engagement mentor Jeetendra is on hand throughout the programme to facilitate your pod interactions and the forum.

If you have not yet received your pod introduction (and have checked your junk mail), please email Mike: M.Rose@surrey.ac.uk

For other questions, please contact the representative for your organisation in the first instance.

Now What?

First of all... Are you able to attend our launch event?

Then... We know many of you have already been in touch with your pods, or may even have had your first meeting. It’s been great to see such enthusiastic beginnings! If you’re meeting on Zoom or similar, we’d love a screen shot of your team on the forum. (If only to make our photo look less lonely.)

Finally, we invite you to have a little think about your aims for the programme – what you’d like to have achieved by the end. Whether you’re aiming to blog consistently through the programme, finetune your networking skills, or build a social media empire, we recommend talking it over with you pod – there’s often nothing better than a supporting group of colleagues to help you stick with it.

We’re delighted to have you on board the good ship 23Things! Things 2 and 3 will be released Monday next week. You can see the upcoming topics here, and some live events here.

A metaphor for ...something in academia... can't quite put my finger on it...