My Interviewees on Social Media

In this blog post I will address the social media lives of my interview subjects. This project will see where professional fields and social media combine and come together. An interviewer can tell a lot about his/her subject by looking at what they have been doing on social media and what interests them.

One of my interviewees is Yao-Jan Wu, a professor of Transportation Engineering at the University of Arizona. He can be found on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Youtube and possibly Facebook. My other interviewee, Dean Papajohn can be found on LinkedIn only.

Yao-Jan Wu's twitter page is very empty, with only three posts; his Facebook page only has a few pictures of cars and no real way of knowing whether the account is actually him. His LinkedIn page profiles his educational background and his working experience and his Youtube page features videos of things in his field, including smart transportation systems and video interviews of him working on local projects. Dean Papajohn's LinkedIn page also features his professional career and education as well as groups and organizations he is a part of (all engineering related).

Quite honestly, these social media accounts of my interview subjects do not differ from their reports much. In both instances, the interviewee talks about things that interests them as well as furthering exploration in their field. Both the journal articles and the social media accounts feature some development of ideas and concepts in the civil engineering field. Only Yao-Jan has a little less professional experience through his brief exploration into the world of Twitter where his posts were only about how he did not yet know how to use twitter and why everyone was so interested in twitter.

Matthew Gain, "LinkedIn Logo", via Flickr, CCO License