MyActivities

MyActivities allows you to generate a public profile (UICollaboratory), CVs, and BioSketches. To populate the Biographical portions of those documents, you must manually add this information to your profile through MyActivities. This includes information such as:

• Your education, academic and non-academic employment and language competencies.
• Your photograph
• Links to public-facing scholarly pages like a personal website, Google Scholar profile, ResearchGate page, etc.

The following is information that can be added to your profile to enhance your public profile.  

• Overview Statements: Add Statements about yourself, your research interests, and a teaching summary
• Highlight your Expertise: add your UIC Expertise terms, Mesh, and Fields of Research
• Indicate Availability: Available for mentoring, advising, media inquiries, speaking event
• Experience / Employment - enter UIC appointments, current and past professional appointments/ employment
• Education - Degrees, Certifications, Postgraduate training
• Language Competencies
• Addresses - Mailing, websites, social media
• Make your profile Live.   Go to http://uicollaboratory.uic.edu/ to view your public profile.

Also see:

• Hide or Highlight activities   Guide
• Change name displayed (i.e. use preferred name)   Guide

To add your photo and contact information to your Elements profile:

1. From your MyActivities homepage, click on the “Go to your profile” button under the photo placeholder.
   • Click on "Manage photo" to change your photo.
   • Click Add a phone number if you want your phone number on your profile
2. When you finish filling out an entry, click the Save button at the bottom of the entry box to save.

You have the opportunity to write 3 statements.  Overview, Research Interests, and Teaching summary.  

• Overview will appear on the About page of your public profile
• Research Interests appear under the Grant tab on your public profile
• Teaching summary appears on Teaching and Supervision page.

It is ok to just write an Overview statement and include all content in the overview statement.   

• To add a statement(s) - From your MyActivities homepage, click on the “Go to your profile” button on the right of your screen, under the photo placeholder.    
• Click  "Add "next to Overview, Research interests, and/or Teaching summary to enter a summary of information about yourself.  
• When you finish filling out an entry, click the Save button at the bottom of the entry box to save.

Highlight your expertise by adding expertise terms to your profile.

To highlight your expertise and increase the ability for others to bring up your profile by adding relevant terms to your profile.  You can add UIC Research and Professional Expertise, Fields of Research and Mesh terms to your profile.

To add your expertise to your profile:

1. From your MyActivities homepage, click on the “Go to your profile” button on the right of your screen, under the photo placeholder.
   • Go down to the "Labels" section of the page
   • Click on "Manage labels" next to the Research and Professional Expertise, Fields of Research or Mesh 
   • Search for the term you are looking and and when you find it, click on the term and click "Add" 
2. When you finish adding terms for each label, click "Save Changes" at the bottom of the entry box to save.  Repeat for each label type.

Label Types

• Expertise - Research and Professional Expertise (UIC defined terms).   
  • This is a list of expertise maintained by UIC.   If you find a needed expertise is missing from the list, please email  your suggestion to myactivities@uic.edu for consideration.  
  • To view a current list, see UIC Expertise Research and Professional Expertise
  • Selected expertise terms are visible on your public profile and can be used as filters on UICollaboratory.uic.edu
• Fields of Research 
  • Although these selected terms are not visible on your public profile, they work behind the scenes to provide additional identifiers to help retrieve your profile.
• MeSH terms
  • Medical Subject terms are developed for the national library of medicine and are primarily used in MEDLINE.  You can add these terms to your profile.
  • Although these selected terms are not visible on your public profile, they work behind the scenes to provide additional identifiers to help retrieve your profile.
• Geographic expertise
  • If you have cultural or research knowledge of a country, you can add geographic expertise to your profile.  The purpose is to let others know that you have expertise in a specific country and others can contact you for collaboration or information.

Use availability to indicate the reasons why others may contact you.   Currently available options include:

• Advising (masters)
• Advising (PhD)
• Advising (postdoc)
• Advising (professional student)
• Career advice
• Collaborative projects
• Industry Projects
• Join a web conference as a panelist or speaker
• Mass spectrometry analysis
• Media enquiries
• Membership on an advisory committee
• Mentoring
• Research supervision - Masters or PhD student
• Research supervision - Professional or Post-doc
• Research supervision - Professional student
• Research supervision - Undergraduate student
• Software development

To add your Availability to your profile:

1. From your MyActivities homepage, click on the “Go to your profile” button on the right of your screen, under the photo placeholder.
   • Go down to the "Labels" section of the page
   • Click on "Manage labels" next to Availability
   • Search for the term(s) you wish to promote related to your availability.  Click on the term and click "Add" 
2. When you finish adding terms for each label, click "Save Changes" at the bottom of the entry box to save.

UIC Appointments

Entering your UIC Appointments  

Because institutions and departments are used as filters, please follow the standardized format to enter your UIC appointments.

• Position - enter your rank/ track and any specific title in the same entry for regular faculty positions
  • List administrative appointments separately  
  • If you have multiple appointments, enter each separately
• Institution Name
  • Please use: University of Illinois Chicago
• Department
  • List your college first followed by a dash (-) prior to entering your official department name.   (do not add word department)
• Examples
  • Janet Doe. Clinical Professor. College of Nursing – Biobehavioral Nursing
  • Robert Smith. Associate Professor and Health Sciences Librarian. University Library
  • Jane Albert.  Professor. College of Medicine - Anatomy and Cell Biology
  • Javier Rodriquez, Assistant Professor, College of Medicine, Rockford - Family Medicine
• For additional information on entering your UIC appointment, please see: Entering your UIC Appointments 

Academic appointments (non UIC)

Enter your academic appointments held at other academic institutions.  Enter only professional appointments since earning relevant degree(s).

Non-academic employment

Enter your non-academic employment held since earning relevant degree(s).

To add your Experience to your profile:

1. From your MyActivities homepage, click on the “Go to your profile” button on the right of your screen, under the photo placeholder.
   • Go down to the "Experience" section of the page
     • For UIC appointments, click on "Add an institutional appointment" 
     • For NON UIC academic appointments, click on "Add an academic appointment"
     • For non-academic appointments, click on "Add a non-academic employment"
   • Fill in the fields related to the position.   * fields are required.   Click on the down ˅ caret to view additional fields to enter.
2. When you finish adding the information for a position, click "Save" at the bottom of the entry box to save.
3. Use the arrow button to put the positions in the correct order.  

To add your Education to your profile:

1. From your MyActivities homepage, click on the “Go to your profile” button on the right of your screen, under the photo placeholder.
   • Go down to the "Education" section of the page
     • For Degrees:, click on "Add a degree" 
     • For Certifications, click on "Add a certification"
     • For Postgraduate training, click on "Add postgraduate training"
   • Fill in the fields related to the program.   * fields are required.   Click on the down ˅ caret to view additional fields to enter.
2. When you finish adding the information for a program, click "Save" at the bottom of the entry box to save.
3. Use the arrow button to put the positions in the correct order.  

If you would like others to contact your related to your language expertise, add your Language expertise to your profile:

• From your MyActivities homepage, click on the “Go to your profile” button on the right of your screen, under the photo placeholder.
  • Go down to the "Language Expertise" section of the page
  • click on "Add a language expertise" and search for the language.
    • When the language appears in the search, click it to select it and indicate competencies.   
  • When you finish , click "Save" at the bottom of the entry box to save.

• From your MyActivities homepage, click on the “Go to your profile” button on the right of your screen, under the photo placeholder.
  • Go down to the "Addresses" section of the page
    • To add a mailing address, click on "Add an address" and fill in the appropriate fields.
    • To add a web address or social media, click on "add a web address" 
      • select the type (personal, blog, RSS feed, twitter, google scholar, and more)
      • Fill in the appropriate fields.
  • When you finish , click "Save" at the bottom of the entry box to save.

• Learn how to Enhance Your Profile, highlight certain activities, or hide certain activities.   Only activities in specific categories will appear in the UICollaboratory, if they are marked as "public" in MyActivities.   Any activity in a category not set to appear in the UICollaboratory, will not appear publicly in the UICollaboratory.  

There may be activities, such as specific publications that you would like to highlight in your public profile (http://uicollaboratory.uic.edu/).   There may also be activities that you do not wish to have appear on your public profile.  You will manage this through MyActivities.

To Highlight your publications as Featured:

• Click on the link to your list of publications.   
• Click the Heart that is found to the left of the title of the article to identify it as a "Featured".  It will go from a white heart to a black heart once it is clicked.    A black heart will appear next to the title of the article once it is selected as Featured.  
• In the UICollaboratory, these items will appear at the top of the list of your activities, and appear with the word Featured

To Highlight your professional activities, grants, or teaching activities as Featured, 

• Click on the link to your list of professional activities, grants, or teaching activities under My Summary.   
• Click the Heart that is found underneath each item in the list that you would like to identify as a "Featured".  It will go from a red heart to a white heart once it is clicked.    A red heart will appear next to the title once it is selected as Featured.  
• In the UICollaboratory, these items will appear at the top of the list of your activities, and appear with the word Featured

Individual activities in certain categories, such as journal articles, books, funded grants, honors & awards, memberships, and courses taught will appear by default in the UICollaboratory.   These are activity categories where the activities are set to appear in the UICollaboratory.  (see list of  Activities appearing In UICollaboratory).   By default, the individual activities in the categories are set to public, and thus will appear in the UICollaboratory.  If there are individual activities  that you do not want public, you may hide them by making them private.   Activities in other activity categories are defaulted to private.   You can choose to make them visible in MyActivities, but unless they are in a category set to appear in the UICollaboratory, it is not possible to make them public.

To hide your publications, professional activities, grants, or teaching activities from appearing in the UICollaboratory or MyActivities

• Click on the link to your list of publications, professional activities, grants, or teaching activities.   
• Click the world icon that is found to the right of the title of each item in the list that you would like to hide.  The entry will have a private icon to indicate it is invisible on your public profile.
• Private items will still appear in your personal reports or reports for your department or college, but they are not visible to others.

Go to http://uicollaboratory.uic.edu/ to view your public profile.

The personal name that is displayed in My Activities and the public profile tool are imported from Banner.   If you have a preferred name, you can change your displayed name by doing the following.

• Log into MyActivities

• click on Menu (found in upper left corner - looks like 3 lines) and under My Profile click on About Me

• under Preferred name enter what you want to see.  

• click update preferred name.