Selfie courtesy of social media specialist Kristina Doyle
Published: May 18, 2018
By Krisha Ravikantharaja
Kristina Doyle has worked in communications roles at all three campuses, and is currently the campus communications manager at U of T Scarborough. You will likely recognize her voice, via tweets at least – she has engaged the U of T community through various social media accounts.
“At U of T, you really can have a career that is interesting and varied within one institution. It’s easy to feel inspired by your work here,” she says. Doyle tells us what it’s like to work in communications at U of T and why she loves U of T Scarborough.
What might a typical day look like for you?
I work on a lot of communication planning, but every day is different. I could be writing a story about a faculty member getting an award or help out with other communications work for the campus. For example, if a department wants to start an e-newsletter they come to us and I work with them to show them the best practices so they can be self-sufficient. It’s a little bit like acting like a consultant on campus to figure out someone’s challenges and the best achievable solutions.
Having worked at all three campuses, what’s great about working at U of T Scarborough in particular?
I half grew up in Scarborough because my parents are from Scarborough. I’m also a huge foodie and you can get any food from anywhere in the world and the best of it is here. Our students work a lot in the community and a lot are from Scarborough so we try and emulate that through our online presence as well.
What’s the best part of your job?
The final part of a communications plan is always measuring to see if it works, and figuring out what you want to adjust for next time to make it even better. I would say that my favourite part is the analysis of looking at the performance of a plan and translating that into how we can improve that and feeling the victory of something working.
What’s the best part of working at U of T?
Number one is people. We have a super talented team and there’s tons of really inspiring people that you can learn so much from. Second is the variety of what’s happening, and getting to be involved in so many amazing initiatives like research. There’s one researcher, Andrea Charise, telling the story of aging in Scarborough through a digital method, and there’s another professor, Bernie Kraatz, developing models of molecules that have the potential to help us cure diseases. These are things I wouldn’t be directly involved with if I wasn’t here. The things you deal with here are so varied, and that’s really what gets me excited every morning.