For the past 15 years, I’ve maintained a web presence online to showcase my computer arts, source code, and designs. It’s common for software engineers, artists, and web designers to maintain a strong online presence, their own domain, their own blog, with a portfolio and downloadables, and I thought nothing of it while I was at UC Berkeley and while working in Silicon Valley. We students even had berkeley.edu web accounts on OCF (a student-run Open Computing Facility) where they gave away free webspace for our own websites.

But when I entered UC Irvine, I realized I was in a very tiny minority of students who had a website.

On the other hand, anyone can still have a web presence by maintaining Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles. Having a web presence doesn’t necessarily equate to having one’s own dedicated domain name. If you include the aforementioned social networking services, then yes — nearly all of my med school classmates have an online presence. For starters, all but one or two students have Facebook accounts. Some of them have private Twitter accounts (mine is public). And all of my MBA classmates actively, aggressively use LinkedIn.

Should medical students have a web presence? And what kind of content should they post? Whom should they target? Friends? Family? Professional contacts? I’ve started realizing that next year, I’m graduating and finally getting the M.D. degree. Should I include patients as a target audience as well? read more→