September’s #TheLeveragedPhD Challenge

Over the past month, I’ve taken part in the 30-day #TheLeveragedPhD Instagram challenge. Every day of September was assigned a hashtag and each participant was asked to create a post that went along with that hashtag. Participants were encouraged to interact with each other by liking each other’s posts and/or commenting on particularly interesting or relatable posts. The theme of this challenge was PhD life, work-life balance, and healthy habits.

I’ll be honest – I didn’t do the full challenge. I skipped three days when I had a particularly rough weekend. There were also quite a few days when I posted a photo and I liked other participants’ photos, but I didn’t write any comments. But this challenge seemed to be pretty flexible. Some people were posting everyday and liking every post while others only posted sporadically. 

 

Overall, I enjoyed the challenge. I got to see a lot of PhD-based posts that I might not have seen otherwise, I’ve started following some pretty entertaining and informative accounts, and I’ve also increased my follower count and the engagement on my posts. But it was a lot of work to generate content every day. Sometimes, I felt limited by the hashtag assigned to a particular day. Sometimes, I was glad I had the hashtag as a guide because there was nothing I felt inspired to post that day. Sometimes, I just felt too tired to come up with anything “good”.

 

I’d recommend a challenge like this to someone who wants to push themselves to create content and who is interested in finding other similarly-themed accounts. 30 days is enough that it is in fact challenging but not so long that you completely lose interest. That said, I don’t think I’ll ever do a challenge that is this long again – 30 days was lot. But I would definitely do a shorter challenge if I was interested in the topic.

I learned so much this month and I’m excited to learn even more from the new accounts I’m following – but I’m also really looking forward to a less intense October!