Building and Launching a Blog Made Easy - with Mentor Berfin Karaman
Berfin Karaman, who grew up in Turkey and pursued four years of global education for her undergraduate degree at Minerva University, has had a lifetime of experiences in her 23 years. With expertise in CSS, HTML, and Java scripts, Berfin knows her way around a website, to say the least! But Berfin’s friendly, approachable demeanor and broad worldview lend to her incredible teaching style, in which she makes coding, web design, and blogging intelligible and enjoyable for her students.
Berfin teaches from experience, having published her own writing on RCTs (Randomized Control Trials) to her Medium blog, and having shared her gorgeous photography from around the world on her Instagram feed.
Drawing on both her technical knowhow and her creative eye as a prolific photographer, Berfin helps her Curious Cardinals mentees develop their niche and bring their vision to life in their own blogs.
She starts with understanding the core goals of her mentee, and encourages them to work from there: “the first section is to understand your interests and your reason for your blog. What made you interested in creative disciplines–are you a writer type? Do you want to write short stories and get it out there, or are you a photographer? Maybe you make different kinds of art, but want to share it with the world, or you like to write interesting texts about something.”
She then breaks the blog-building process down into manageable steps, meeting students where they are at: “Then I will try to understand your focus regarding whether you want to start from scratch. But if you don't want to spend too much time coding, we would spend more time focusing on the creative arts. Maybe it will be better for you to go for a Wix or WordPress (the already established platforms), but if you're also more curious, you could start doing the HTML CSS or JavaScript part of it!”
In this way, Berfin curates her lessons to each student’s needs and interests: “the upcoming lessons will change more towards the content, and how you'd be able to skeleton it. Depending on what the student it most interested in will shape what they will get out of this great blog experience."
Beyond the diverse skillsets that Berfin has already mastered and can share with her mentees, she also advocates for an underrated benefit of mentorship–she has already troubleshooted possible issues, worked through glitches, and explored how to tackle a variety of hurdles. "My main expertise that I bring to the table is I have gone down so many rabbit holes that I will help you to not get into one of those, and provide better guidance. Like, oh you like this, maybe check this out!"
Do you want to check out what blogging is all about? Learn from Berfin or other mentors like her on how to launch a blog this summer by signing up here!
