In August, Virginia Tech hosted the 2017 International Conference on Systems Biology. A few of my friends and I attended the conference and the idea of live-tweeting the conference came up. I had never done it before but thought I may as well try. While tweeting, I noticed someone had asked what the official hashtag for the conference was. Since I was volunteering at the time, I decided to ask one of the conference organizers about the conference and twitter. That’s when he decided that I would be in charge of the official twitter account for the conference.

Running the twitter was a lot more fun than I expected. Since I was maintaining the official twitter, I had to track everything everyone was tweeting about the conference. It was really exciting to see scientists, old and young, engaging in the conference in their own way, summarizing presentations and talks in less than 140 characters. Tweeting on my own personal twitter allowed me the chance to be noticed by other scientists in my field (and I even got called out by some). I got to see our community being built over twitter.

I’ll be honest in that before this experience, I didn’t think a small/unknown person such as myself would make any kind of impact online. Senior scientists would never notice me. But one of my tweets got four retweets and six likes! A tweet I posted on the official twitter had 12 retweets and 14 likes!

Networked learning, to me, is about connecting others in academia. In tweeting throughout this conference, I was able to learn about talks I didn’t attend, or got a small, condensed version of a talk. I can go back and reference the twitter account and all of the interactions to remind myself of what I learned. I found other scientists to follow on twitter and can stay up to date with their current works after the conference. I now feel a part of this field of systems biology and academia as a whole. I was contributing to this field, not through published papers, as is the traditional method, but through my own experiences that I was sharing through twitter. It made me feel connected.