The top answers on this Stack Exchange post put it really well when you start writing papers and giving talks, people will look for you! Speaking personally (and reflecting what I’ve heard at countless career panels), I find information about fellow researchers through their websites. The primary objective for your website is to make it possible for people – namely fellow researchers and potential employers – to find you and your work. Below I’ll expand a bit on why it matters, what you might put on it, and suggest a few ways to get started. The thrust of my advice on websites to a beginning graduate student in math (and the advice that was given to me) is summarized in the title of the post: you should have a website.

I’ve also heard “but I don’t have anything to put on it yet.” To these I would reply that it’s easier the earlier you start, it can’t hurt to have no matter what jobs you apply for, and you don’t need to put much on it for your website to pay off! Others may be seeking government or industry jobs, where having a personal website may be less critical. To be fair to my 31 currently website-less colleagues, several are in their first year (or their first year in-person) and may not have needed one to this point. Later, I did some digging on the Emory directory and Google to find that only 6 out of the 37 PhD students currently at Emory have a webpage - a number that I’d like to see grow! A few of us had yet to make one, so I joked that I could write a blog post on it, which was met with more enthusiasm than I expected. Some months ago, a conversation among graduate students at Emory turned to the topic of updating websites.

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