This post is written by Ian G. Williams, PhD student in Social Welfare and Program Social Media Fellow. Connect with Ian G. Williams on Bluesky@igraywill.bsky.social; Instagram@igraywill; LinkedIn http://linkedin.com/in/iangraywilliams

Over the last two and a half years, I’ve had the pleasure of working as the Program Social Media Fellow (PSMF) for The Ph.D. Program in Social Welfare. I manage scholarly communications and our social media accounts. PSMF is a three-year position, intended to support programs at The Graduate Center build their communications infrastructure and social media presence. Every program (and center) at The Graduate Center is unique; the PSMF team reports directly to their program or center, and also works with GCDI.

The Social Welfare Program started in 1974 as a professional, three-year Doctor of Social Welfare (DSW), and restructured in 2001 into a research-focused Ph.D. It was excluded from the Graduate Center Fellowship’s relatively uniform funding structure, and most of its students worked outside of school – often in nonprofit and government human services. In 2021, Dr. Harriet Goodman, the program’s previous Executive Officer, retired after over 10 years at the helm. Though the degree was always granted by The Graduate Center, it had a long-standing affiliation with what is now the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College. Informally, its branding and identity were associated with Hunter, and students took their required classes at that campus. Our current Executive Officer, Dr. Barbra Teater—tenured at The College of Staten Island—was the first EO from a different CUNY school. This triggered some reorganization. In Fall 2021 Social Welfare physically moved into The Graduate Center, while classes were still being held remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When hybrid classes started in Spring 2022, they were held at the GC campus. Dr. Teater started multiple projects and initiatives, including a newsletter, “In The Loop”, which I took over as managing editor when I came onboard (read the December 2024 issue here).

When I started as a PSMF in Fall 2022, I was in my second year. I had no experience managing public-facing media. I had ample experience with nonprofit and public sector administration and operations in my  career as a social worker. This primed me to the importance of learning the contours and rhythms of our program. To me, learning the contours and rhythms of our program was as essential to getting started as figuring out how to create a LinkedIn profile and to schedule posts with Fedica. That semester I was the incoming program representative for the Doctoral and Graduate Students’ Council. Social Welfare was also finishing up a once-every-10-years self-study, which involved an external review by the site reviewers, who conducted focus groups with students and staff before producing a final report. These other processes helped me, crucially, to identify audiences within our school’s communities, key stakeholders we were trying to build relationships with, and gave me ample messaging and language to work with. As a PSMF, I focused on internal capacity building to get the needs of our program known and on the agenda for upcoming years. We had a home, but we needed resources – namely, dedicated space and funding parity with other social science programs, which we are now working towards.

Start-up wasn’t as simple as creating accounts, announcing “hello, world!” across the Internet. Communications had to fit with our existing operations (often using legacy technologies, fitting the personalities and work habits of administrative staff), and had to make sense for our needs (which were often practical and modest). The marketing and business growth oriented metrics inherent in social media platforms and analytics were largely unhelpful – some degree of quantitative data, like number of followers or post engagements, were useful, but for an academic program of specialists, we’re not the ideal user for mainstream platforms. Figuring out and putting together the program’s communications infrastructure required asking a lot of questions.

Each year had an overarching theme. The first year was learning the rhythms and cycles of our program at The Graduate Center: mapping out strategy, setting up accounts (and reclaiming the inactive ones), creating a CUNY Academic Commons page, working with our APO to set up a program listserv, playing around with graphic design software (Canva and Adobe), developing a production cycle for the newsletter, and attending all program-related events such as faculty meetings and open houses. The second year focused on refining our processes, and brought on an MSW student intern focusing on community organizing at the Silberman School of Social Work to help with some of our community-building and advocacy efforts, the newsletter, and organizing our program’s first student symposium. I also sought to increase our documentation of and visibility at conferences, making us known as a distinct Graduate Center program not just within CUNY, but also within the professional and epistemic circles in which our students participate. In my third year, I’m refining these processes and increasing the quality of our visuals (see examples below), gathering more stories from students on their conference experiences, and working with another student intern on some student-led initiatives that help . I am also writing documentation and procedure manuals for the work, so the various tasks and processes can be distributed among students and permanent staff for our program.

Working as a Program Social Media Fellow is a very interesting and rewarding job. It has its own challenges and constraints, but it’s been pretty amazing to help build out our program in ways that I am confident will have a lasting positive impact. It’s extremely rewarding to cultivate a sense of community among my fellow students and promote their accomplishments. It’s also been a great way to learn about how a program at The Graduate Center functions. As someone who researches the politics of emerging technologies and digital life, it’s also been fascinating to be behind the scenes in the social media and scholarly communications world during the demise of Academic Twitter and diffusion into other platforms and spaces.

Want to learn more about Social Welfare? Check out our LinkTree and follow our socials from there.