Department Web Pages
As a follow-up to the last post: I’ve just been reading Zuska & co-workers papers on the importance of web-page design for science and engineering departments. It was very relevant reading for the end of a week spent looking at departmental websites, trying to see how I could "fit in" (yes, in quotes!) to the department and whether I could come up with anything interesting, relevant, and unique to that school to write in my cover letter. So far I have noticed: several departments with totally random, out-of-context pictures of women and/or minorities, seemingly designed to assure the reader that they do exist, one department with totally random pictures of what I guess are inside jokes, and one department with a mission statement that sounds like a giant inferiority complex (though I’m sure they didn’t see it that way). If I get invited to visit, I’ll be curious to see if the department matches up with it’s web page.
I dare you to find a North American department that is worse than this:
http://wwwdsa.uqac.ca/
Comment by Lab Lemming — December 13, 2006 @ 12:12 am
A department that I graduated from recently revamped their website and they now include photos and contact info for everyone in the department including faculty, research staff, postdocs, graduate students, and administrative staff. It makes it pretty easy to match names to faces and easier to get in contact with someone that you were talking to in the hall (or at a conference) even if you aren’t sure exactly what the person’s name is or if you know the first name but not the last.
Comment by J — December 13, 2006 @ 7:04 pm
Lab Lemming, are you kidding? That one isn’t bad at all. Sadly, I can’t send you the ones I’m thinking of as examples without outing myself. Let’s just say that sites that list professor’s webpages with vastly out of date reference lists and absolutely no lab webpages listing postdocs and grad students contact info… not good.
I liked what Zuska had to say about webpages. I don’t know how much you can tell about a department from its webpage though. Isn’t it basically just the handiwork of whoever they pay to be webmaster? Seems to me website personality is always in the hands of the creator, and appearance often says even more about them than content.
Comment by MsPhD — December 24, 2006 @ 8:45 pm