It’s hard to believe that I started this blog fifteen years ago on April 2, 2007. Here are some milestones in the life of the blog:

• I published 762 posts.
• I started 105 drafts of blog posts that I never finished. Most of those drafts are a quick idea I saved to finish later, but inspiration for finishing the post never came.
• I updated the blog theme at some point, but I do not remember when. It is perhaps due for another update.
• The blog was nine years old when I introduced its logo, which I absolutely love.

Over the years, I am frequently asked why I started a blog. I started the blog. Here is the history.

In October 2006, Mike Trick gave the keynote at the INFORMS combined colloquium dinner at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, where he encouraged everyone in the room—which was almost entirely filled with PhD students—to start an operations research (OR) blog.  I toyed with the idea of starting an OR blog since starting my first tenure track position that began two months earlier, but I was hesitant about starting a blog at the same time as my tenure clock. However, I was drawn to blogging and decided to give it a try a few months later.

My motivation for starting a blog was to use it as a platform to somewhat selfishly evangelize students about operations research. I found it difficult to find students inclined to study OR in my department. At the time, I was an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the department of Statistics and Operations Research in a college of humanities. The number of undergraduate OR majors in the department was generally in the single digits, and the department did not have a PhD program at the time.  I naively thought that if I started a blog, students at my university would read it and want to perform research with me and pursue an MS in operations research. That did not exactly happen.

What are the benefits of being an operations research blogger?

I didn’t fail in my quest to draw more people into operations research. In the past 15 years, some of my posts have reached students outside of and adjacent to operations research at universities and high schools throughout the world. I love meeting people who tell me how they were introduced to operations research by a fellow student or professor sent them to Punk Rock Operations Research to encourage them to consider operations research. For some, this nudge apparently worked. It’s an honor to play a small role in someone’s professional journey. It’s one of the best compliments someone can give me, and I’m blushing as I type this. It seems like my original goal of evangelizing students about operations research was realized. Blogging has been a very rewarding journey 🙂

Blogging has been extremely rewarding for my academic career, although not in a way that I had once imagined. Blogging has also helped me broaden my professional network, and it has led to opportunities to give research talks to a broad audience.

How do you find time to blog?

Blogging takes time. I do not consider blogging to be wasted time, although it takes a certain amount of skill to identify how to blog in an efficient manner.  I try to limit blogging to the evenings or to time when I need a mental break, so that blogging does not take away from productive time. This works because for me blogging doesn’t seem like a chore. Sometimes blogging can be a chore, like I when I feel the time pressure to write a post about something in the news before the 24 hour news cycle loses interest and switches to another topic. Once micro-blogging became popular, I found less need to blog when I can post a quick tweet about a topic. Writing blog posts has indirectly made me a better teacher and grant proposal writer, and in this way, it is synergistic with other professional activities. I have blogged less as I have taken on administrative positions and need to balance a larger number of professional duties.

Why are you still blogging like it’s 2007?

Starting a blog in 2007 was the most 2007 thing one could do. ABC News named Bloggers the 2004 People of the Year, and in 2022 I find science blogging to be relevant and important. Blogs provides content that cannot be conveyed in a 280 character tweet (and definitely more than the old limit of 140 characters) or short LinkedIn or FaceBook post. Blogs continue to be a good medium for an operations researcher like myself to convey information in different formats that can be accessed in the same place. I have been on several scientific blogging and social networking panels, and they have all confirmed the importance of blogs.

OR blogs are often—but not always—read by our OR colleagues. People stumble across OR blogs for many reasons, and often they stick around. Reaching out to these readers is a tremendous opportunity to improve scientific literacy in the general public and to bring new people into the field. I am often disheartened by the state of scientific literacy in the US. I even blogged about this recently. We need to continue to tell our operations research stories educate the world about the benefits from applying advanced analytics to making decisions. While I’m just one blogger in a large sea, over the years many journalists have reached out to me for my operations research expertise based on blog posts they’ve discovered. Together we can broadcast our message to the world.

I recently discovered an articles about academics who blog from Tim Hitchcock (a humanities professor). The title really caught my eye: “Twitter and blogs are not add-ons to academic research, but a simple reflection of the passion that underpins it.” Yes! We don’t have to create and maintain blogs, we do so because we love our disciplines and we love to share our passion:

The best (and most successful) academics are the ones who are so caught up in the importance of their work, so caught up with their simple passion for a subject, that they publicise it with every breadth. Twitter and blogs, and embarrassingly enthusiastic drunken conversations at parties, are not add-ons to academic research, but a simple reflection of the passion that underpins it.

I like this summary of how blogging goes hand in hand with other academic activities, contributing to them rather than detracting from them:

The most impressive thing about these blogs (and the academic careers that generate them), is that there is no waste – what starts as a blog, ends as an academic output, and an output with a ready-made audience, eager to cite it. For myself the point is that these scholars don’t waste text, and neither do I. If I give a talk, I turn it into a blog. Not everything is blogged, but the vast majority of the public presentations I make as part of my job, will be.  And while many of these texts will never contribute to an academic article, about half of them do. As a result blogging has become part of my own contribution to what I think of as an academic public sphere. It becomes a way of thinking in public and revising ones work, to make it better, in public. And knowing that there is an audience (whatever its size), changes how one does it – forcing you to think a little harder about the reader, and to think a little harder about the standards of record keeping and attribution that underpin your research.

In fact, this article was cannibalized from one of Hitchcock’s blog posts (on his blog called “Historyonics”) that summarized a message from a talk he gave with the provocative title “Doing it in public: Impact, blogging, social media and the academy” [Link].

The message in these articles resonates with me. Blogging is a labor of love, and this is one of the main reasons to blog. Maintaining a blog is a lot of work, and that isn’t possible without passion. I definitely agree that blogging  isn’t wasted time, but to be honest, it took me awhile to be more efficient with blogging.

I wrote about academic blogging in an article about blogging in the IFORS newsletter that summarizes my thoughts on academic blogging. Here were my final thoughts in that article, where my passion for academic OR blogging hopefully shines through.

Blogging has been a very rewarding journey. While our fame (notoriety?) has passed—ABC News named Bloggers the 2004 People of the Year—blogging is still relevant and important. Blogs continue to be relevant despite being somewhat displaced by the massive rise of microblogging. Blogging provides content that cannot be conveyed in a 140-character tweet or short FaceBook post. Certainly YouTube videos, podcasts, and slidecasts also provide content that rival those in a blog post. However, it is simple to embed youtube videos in a blog post while the reverse is not. Blogs continue to be the best medium for a non-journalist to convey information in different formats accessible in the same place. I have been on several scientific blogging and social networking panels, and they have all confirmed the importance of blogs over other social networking tools.

 

People stumble across OR blogs for many reasons, and often they stick around. Reaching out to these readers is a tremendous opportunity to improve scientific literacy in the general public. I am often disheartened by the state of scientific literacy in the US, where a recent op-ed in the New York Times argued for universities to abolish the algebra requirement for incoming students and where politicians often cite federal grants for conducting basic scientific research as a symptom of government waste. We need to continue to make operations research known to those who can benefit from the use of advanced analytics for making better decisions. OR blogging is important for making the case to increase competence in mathematics, as it is important for letting people know about OR.

HT Arthur Charpentier (@freakonometrics).

https://twitter.com/lauramclay/status/393403119465295872

I recently reached my 500th post on Punk Rock Operations Research! I have meant to celebrate, but I haven’t figured the optimal way to do so. At this point, this post will be my 514th blog post. I still haven’t figure out how to celebrate, but a celebration is not going to happen if I procrastinate any more.

In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think my blog is very important, but I hope it provides some joy to my readers. After 500 blog posts and nearly 7000 tweets, I’ve reflected on blogging and social media. Almost all of my reflections have focused on trying to convince myself that it isn’t all a colossal waste of time. It probably would have been if I didn’t enjoy blogging and social media so much. To be honest, blogging has never been a chore for me. I enjoy coming up with ideas for the blog and wish I had more time to devote to grand ideas for being an operations research ambassador. I can always do more, but I think I have found the right balance for me.

Blogging isn’t just about writing and reading:

• I take great pride in doing my tiny part in increasing attention to our field of operations research.
• I would not be as good of a teacher if I didn’t blog. Writing helps me break down a complicated idea into a series of steps that flow together to make a cohesive point (I achieve this most of the time). I often  think about my students while blogging, and I rewrite until I can envision newcomers to OR understanding my post.
• And most importantly, I’ve met so many people through this blog who I might not have met otherwise. At the end of the day, relationships with friends and colleagues are really important. I’m grateful for how blogging has helped to enrich my social network in this way. I’m not much of a hugger, but if I have to hug someone at an operations research conference, I prefer to hug fellow OR bloggers and tweeps.

Blogging tidbit: I’ve signed exactly one autograph in all these years of blogging (way back in 2007 soon after I started blogging). I still smile when I think of it, but I’m not eager to sign any more.

Thank you for reading!

https://twitter.com/lauramclay/status/421013011193925632

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog. They found that people came to my blog looking for cookies instead of operations research. But I’ll take it. My blog received 84,600 hits, which is my highest annual total so far.

Thanks to my readers for making this happen! Special thanks to my top commentors: @parubin, @JFPuget, and @drmorr0.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 84,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to write an article about academic OR blogging in the latest IFORS newsletter (here’s the link, see p. 4). The article is more or less a FAQ about my blog: why I began it (I blamed Mike Trick), how I maintain it with a busy academic life and three kids, and why I do not think blogging as a untenured assistant professor is career suicide. The last question, I admit, is truly the most frequently asked question about the blog.

Here’s a link to the article [pdf].

If you have any additional questions about blogging, ask them in a comment below. Or better yet, ask them at the social networking session (Monday at 11am) at the 2012 INFORMS Annual Meeting: