I want to share a few reasons why I took the time to build and maintain this website. I thought it’d be an interesting exercise to clearly define my motivations.
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Professional landing page. I think there is a lot of value in consolidating your presence online and making it easy for interested people to find you. I wanted to embark on my career with an infrastructure in place to facilitate this. With this site, I can easily share biographical and contact info, publications, and anything else in a searchable database.
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Improve my thinking and writing. Writing clarifies thinking. I specifically intend to use this space to write pieces which I will contemplate, write, edit, and share in hopes of expanding my own cognitive abilities. Not all my posts are like this, obviously, but it’s worth it for the ones that are.
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Track my development and habits. I view the current season in my life as a very formative time. I think it will be very interesting to chronicle the lessons I learn and the evolution of my habits (personal/professional/spiritual). A personal anthropological experiment, if you will.
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Live an honest and transparent life. I aim to live with integrity, so I am choosing to “put myself out there” and expose people to my thinking and life. I believe this will benefit me personally and professionally. I hope that by following my blog, people will see my character and the reality of my Christian spirituality, building trust in my word and work ethic.
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Develop a resource for new graduate students. Graduate school has been a great but undeniably difficult season in my life. There are many things I wish I had known going in that would have saved me much grief. By writing about these aspects of pursuing a PhD, I hope to encourage and support others embarking in this process.
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Infrastructure for hosting various things I occasionally need to document or share. There are all kinds of queries and topics I regularly deal with in my life, either from friends, students, etc. It’s nice to have an online infrastructure to host files, my latest software or DIY hack, or write up a response that others can read.
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For fun (the biggest reason?). Tinkering with websites and technology is a lot of fun to me. I enjoy playing with new designs and code as much as writing content. So tweaking things on the blog can be a fun way to engage some down time for me.
So, these are my motivations. I hope this site is informative and entertaining to anyone doing me the great honor of following along.