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academic tasks sorted by difficulty (least to most hard):
editing a chapter/article/paper
drafting an outline for a chapter/article/paper
giving a conference presentation
writing a chapter/article/paper
developing a theoretical framework
writing a conference presentation
making the powerpoint for a conference presentation
opening the doc with peer review comments
reading the peer review comments
doing anything about the peer review comments
First postdoc hurdle feels got me like:
Seriously though. It felt like a victory lap of science until the problems started. And now it seems like, no matter how hard you want to solve those circumstantial problems, people cannot seem to get out of their own way. I unfortunately need to be vague. But goddamn is it frustrating.
I live in Amsterdam now
and I have a cute apartment with a couch and other assorted furniture that I put together myself and also I just got a washer/dryer combination and i'm looking into getting plants :)
So the state requisitioned the freaking WHOLE ROOM I WORK IN (and the next room over as well) to set up 16 PCR machines for diagnosing Corona Virus. They could have fit 16 PCR machines in approximately 1/3 of the discs they just stole. They could have used one of the seven rooms the Virology department already has, or put them in the COMPLETELY EMPTY FLOOR UPSTAIRS but no! It had to be space that was already occupied. So now we have 15 people and four rooms worth of instruments and equipment in three 14x14" rooms. My best friend/benchmate got sent to a different lab across the building because there wasn't anywhere to put him, two rotation students had their work period with us suspended, and two new graduate students lost their desks. One of them also had her whole project cancelled and lost her work bench.
We were informed at 5:00 yesterday that we had to remove everything from my room by 5:00am this morning so we all had to put in about three hours of uncompensated overtime to accomplish that.
And SOMEONE SPILLED ACID IN ONE OF MY BOXES OF MATERIALS while we were frantically packing last night. So when I started unpacking it today I got ACID BURNS ALL OVER MY HANDS AND ONE OF MY ARMS.
I really hate working for the state and I really extremely hate the whole department of Virology. They now have nine rooms for their dozen staff scientists and techs while we're packed in like sardines
I'm so angry I feel like I've transcended to a different state of being.
Expert Note-Taking
Last post was about how to manage any references you gather during your research, so this time I’m going to focus on another important related factor: keeping track of important information obtained from references. Even though you can do this in multiple ways and preferences will determine what you go for, there is one factor you’ll definitely want to consider before choosing an option.
It all comes down to the question of how long your project will last and how many references you’ll need to collect in order to complete it. For me, these fall into three categories that boil down to the terms small, medium, and large.
◆ Consider small projects as those that are fairly short or not requiring many references. If the project only lasts a few weeks or you need under 10 references, you can probably get away with printing articles before highlighting relevant information and scribbling notes in the margins. If you prefer to keep things digital, these options are also available in most PDF reader applications.
◆ For medium-sized projects with up to 20 references or ones that last up to a semester’s worth of time, you may want to consider transferring that information to a notebook or onto note cards that you can flip through or putting it all into a single word processing document. At the very least, this will reduce each reference to its relevant information instead of having to skip past extraneous information. Since you should have a PDF copy of all your references saved for easy access, you will always have the option to return to the full piece for details you may have missed previously.
◆ And then there’s the large projects. For any projects that require more than 20 references, you will likely want to be able to search and sort information more easily, and this is where software options can be immensely beneficial. Similarly, any projects that last longer than one semester’s worth of time is likely best suited for digital notes so you don’t misplace work and have to do a close rereading of any references. As graduate students, this is where your main research project will definitely end up, though other projects may as well.
Of course, your cutoff point might be different than mine, so don’t feel like you have to stick to these values. If you have a better memory or fewer things to juggle, you may get away with stretching to longer time periods or larger quantities of references. If you’re liable to forget things easily or have a lot of responsibilities, make sure you account for this! You know your own limits better than I do, but do try to err on the cautious side. And by no means should you push yourself to keep everything in your head, because you will definitely forget information or mix up sources and details if you do!
So let me spend the rest of this post talking about what some of the best options are out there for digital academic note-taking. Just like you did in choosing a reference manager, spend a little time testing out your choice to make sure it’s a good fit for you and your style. If you thought the idea of transferring your references from one manager to another halfway through a project was daunting, consider how much worse it would be without the automatic export and import options they offer and you’ll have a sense for what transferring your notes to another platform halfway through a project would be like.
Digital note-taking options have two distinct advantages over paper and print options, which are intertwined. They are the copy and paste function and the search function. ◇ Whether you’re copying a specific quotation into your notes or grabbing a screenshot of a figure or table, this is invaluable next to having to hand-write or draw out anything. Even if you were to underline, highlight, or physically cut out the relevant part of a paper, each of these options are more time-consuming in the long run. Cutting up a physical copy to paste pieces into a notebook is completely absurd and does you no benefit when it comes time to use that information, and neither does underlining or highlighting because you’ll still have to go back to the whole reference. Finding highlighted or underlined phrases after the fact is hugely annoying, if for no other reason than having to flip through countless pages to find the right sentence. But any images you put into your digital notebook will be accessible to copy and paste out of it later on, just as any quotations will be. Searching for information will also take significantly less time and effort, because you won’t have to flip through physical notes to manually identify relevant phrases. Instead, all text in your digital notebook can be searched using the search function in the program if it has one, or CTRL+F if it doesn’t.
Now, I’m a little biased in note-taking options and I’m sure that will come across, so do keep that in mind. For me, there are really only three viable digital options at this time that are well-designed for academic note-taking.
A word processing document: ◇ It’s important to start by recognizing the tried-and-true, long-standing option of a massive document. This can of course be a browser-based document like a Google Doc that you can access anywhere with Internet or it could be application-based like a Microsoft Word document that is saved locally to a hard drive. But no matter how you design and format it, a giant document is the most basic of the digital choices and therefore has the fewest benefits. This means that as long as you include something to identify where any information comes from, it can work but it has distinct limits. However, the more references and information you add to the file, the harder it will become to pick out specifics or draw connections between several references. Consider for a moment the limitation of your monitor screen size. While it may sound silly, remember that if you copy several figures or take a lot of notes on one reference, the space taken up could easily take up more than what you are able to reasonably read on the screen. If you then want to find a key phrase or concept that appears in multiple references, there’s no way to find both that key information and the reference it comes from at the same time, even with a search function. Taking notes for small or medium projects may be feasible with a word processing document, but should definitely not be used with large projects.
Evernote or Microsoft OneNote: ◇ So what if you don’t want to use a word-processing document, or you have a large project to do? Both Evernote and OneNote are great options for you to keep all your notes together. They’re fairly similar, so in large part your decision will come down to personal preference. Evernote is distinctly business-like in its design with a relatively drab color scheme. In contrast, OneNote is a bit more colorful and creative in its design. This may not matter to you, but then again, it may be depressing or distracting for you if you choose the wrong application. The most significant difference between them, however, is the cost. Evernote has several levels to it, including the individual use options of basic and premium. Basic Evernote is free, but comes with the limitation of only being accessible on a computer rather than having the mobile access option that comes with a premium account. It also restricts your account in terms of the number of devices that can be linked to it, which may be problematic if you’re likely to work on multiple computers.For $8 a month, however, you’ll have Premium Evernote and be able to get rid of both of these issues while bumping up your abilities in some other areas, too. It’s also worth noting that a school email address can grant you a full year with a Premium account for free. OneNote, on the other hand, is completely free. No pay levels and no differences between account abilities, just full access. So, what can you do with these softwares? Since both of them are designed specifically to be note-taking software, there are some distinct benefits that mostly appear through organizational features. - While the terminology is different between them, both Evernote and OneNote let you organize your notes very well. Remember back in middle school when you had a different binder for each class, dividers within each binder for different sections of material, and many different pages within those dividers that contained your notes? That’s pretty much what you’ll have again through these applications, but with the added benefit of being digital. Each project can be the binder, while subsections within it will become folders, like the dividers, and all of your notes for each reference will go onto a different page. You can even create subfolders if needed. - Another key organizational feature here is one that I pointed out as a weakness with a word processing document, which is keeping more information on one screen. To continue the metaphor, unlike your middle school binders, you can see the name of each page in a folder without having to flip through them so you can identify and find information more easily. You’ll still have to click through the pages to see the notes, but if you use a search function to find a key word or phrase, you’ll much more easily identify which references have that information in them.
No matter what route you choose, regardless of the project size or duration, keeping track of which source any information comes from is easily the most important thing. By doing this, you will save significant amounts of time in not having to look back through multitudes of documents to find a specific statement or figure in one of them again.
Be clear about your training plan and goals to boost your chances of a favourable outcome, say Crystal M. Botham and Tanya M. Evans.
Nice tips from Nature on how to write graduate student and postdoctoral fellowship proposals.
This week, Andrea and Mike answer some of your questions about finding and starting a job.
Hello all!
We are back with episode two! Aren’t you proud? What is our posting schedule like? Who knows yet! This is Curriculum Mortis, the podcast where spouses and physics academics Andrea and Mike talk about what life is like in academia and try to answer your questions.They discuss:
1. How to cold contact a potential advisor 2. How to boost your CV/Resume 3. What are some jobs outside of academia
Submit your questions to [email protected] or on Twitter by following @CurricMortisPod
got back full internet access and submitted reimbursement request + sent emails + opened the diss chapter that needs to get reworked into a 4k word article and then reworked AGAIN into an 8-10k revised book chapter, please clap
