Last week, we made some suggestions for the development and maintenance of your professional networks. Among others, we mentioned the importance of building an online presence, via virtual networks. Today we would like to take a look at the most important platforms in Switzerland that are useful for this purpose and reflect on their advantages and limitations.
Please note that this post does not concern mediasharing (e.g. SlideShare, YouTube, Vimeo...), datasharing (e.g. Dryad Digital Repository, Mendeley...), codesharing, nor traditional office tools (email, shared agenda, slack, MIRO...), nor blogs.

Establishing and maintaining a professional network is essential for doctoral candidates – not only while studying, but also for their professional future whether in the private sector or in academia, as we recently discussed in one of our last posts.
Networking is based on sharing and exchange, voluntary collaboration and the principle of reciprocity. It allows you to develop your career and to create cooperative partnerships during the entire professional life, and not only just after the end of the PhD. In addition, discussing and collaborating with colleagues from different cultures and backgrounds is an extremely enriching experience for your own personal development. Here, we propose some suggestions and ideas to proactively build, grow and maintain a professional network. Please also note that a specific Transversal Program workshop (Proactive Managing Relationships and Networks) has been conceived to improve your skills in networking!

In one of our articles, we underlined the importance of reflection time in order to develop new ideas that could be useful when returning to campus. Indeed, creativity is closely linked to research process when it comes, for example, to developing new hypotheses, transmitting acquired knowledge or building the foundations of a project. The innovative process is vivifying, vibrant, sparkling, stimulating, but generating ideas and organizing them is sometimes complicated, messy, even frustrating. Did you know that as early as the Middle Ages (Quaestiones disputatae) there was a concern to facilitate and stimulate exchanges between scientists in order to generate original answers to theoretical questions? The aim here is not to retrace the history of brainstorming or freewheeling, but to propose some concrete tools to structure the production and organization of new ideas, in groups or solo.

Feverish and phlegmatic, dense and empty, slow and quick: managing our tasks is now a real challenge. Time perception has become blurred and the rhythm of our daily life is completely disrupted.
In our previous articles we offered some tips to ease the transition to smartwork.
Here we collect some good practices to optimize video conference meetings. These tips are based on our personal experience: feel free to complete them and post your comments and ideas!