#TwitterTakeover: An Exercise in Brevity

GUEST POST: James Walker, PhD student (Centre for Doctoral Training in Fuel Cells and their Fuels):

If you ask any PhD student about their research topic, you’re likely to either get a response punctuated with “ums,” and “ahs,” and littered with discipline-specific buzzwords and jargon, or you can perhaps expect a three hour short course in Medieval Hungarian poetry or novel electron microscopy techniques. We aren’t really known for our capacities for distilling down our studies into concise, accessible nuggets of audience-appropriate engagement. Imagine my colleague Aimee’s horror, then, when I told her that I’d volunteered us to do a take-over of the @UoBEngage Twitter account for the day. We’ve been running the @FuelCellsCDT Twitter account for a couple of years now, and have used it to share snippets of our PhD experience, whether reviewing conference presentations or highlighting publications from our group. Realistically, though, we haven’t used Twitter to disseminate…