Building My Professional Learning Network

I didn’t really think of Discord and LinkedIn as part of the same “network” until I started mapping it out for this course. LinkedIn feels like the formal the place where I connect with recruiters and alumni. Discord is more chill. CS study servers and tool-specific communities where people answer questions in real time.

What’s been on my mind lately is how “surface-level” my network is compared to what it could be. Most of my connections are online-only, which is fine for quick answers but doesn’t build the kind of relationship that comes from actually meeting someone. That’s part of why I’ve started paying attention to event platforms like Meetup or Luma. The idea of turning a Discord handle into an actual person at a local hackathon or dev meetup feels like a different tier of networking entirely, one that sticks.

The other thing I keep coming back to is how much of this is a balancing act. Reading the Digital Tattoo quiz made me realize how easy it is to overshare without noticing: Location check-ins, casual posts, things that feel harmless in the moment. But swinging too far the other way and locking everything down isn’t really a solution either; a network with nothing public to show for it doesn’t build much trust or opportunity. Robles-Carrillo’s writing on digital identity put language to that. Online Identity is simultaneously a risk to manage and a tool that opens doors.

Used Canva PlugIn in ChatGPT to create a template for map. Manually added the network points.