My name is Jay McMullen and I am a senior at George Mason studying philosophy. I intend to pursue my Ph.D. and will proceed straight to a Master’s program after the fall. I am interested in applied philosophy – ethics, bioethics, public policy, the law, epistemology, and philosophy of science. I intend to teach but prefer to work in advising public policy matters.
I worked for twenty years in legal technology. As such, I have a limited online presence via LinkedIn – which was critical for my work as a consultant and contractor. Now, I am curious about how I will transition to a more academic online presence. I have no publications to speak of and am merely an undergraduate so my options are limited. I may start some sort of blog for my own entertainment but I am wary of doing to insofar as being underqualified to speak authoritatively about my areas of study.
Jumping the gun with content like that could be damaging in the long run so we’ll see how I navigate those waters. I am certainly interested in managing my online representation going forward though. Currently, to my relief, I have little if any Google presence so I should be able to dictate going forward how that proceeds.
I will also have to rewrite my LinkedIn site and my resume to better reflect my new direction. A lot of my professional experience may translate well to other disciplines – data mining, database management, etc – so I need to rework a lot of language and proprietary content to be a little more universal or otherwise focused.
Mostly I am curious about how I will curate my public presence since I haven’t done much of it. With regard to site design, I haven’t made many interesting decisions. Academically, I don’t have much of a pedigree yet to espouse, so there’s not much in the way of content to be had. Aesthetically, I prefer things to be simple and sparse so I am trying out the current them. I may add more bells and whistles as the need arises.
