I can’t believe we’re now over halfway through 2022 already!
Just like the first quarter of the year, the past three months have been incredibly busy for me and not particularly fun. Thankfully I have something to show for it which I’ll get on to shortly. But even more thankfully, I’m now not having to juggle two jobs (woo!) and things have settled down so that I can actually have some time off.
I hope that you’re also able to enjoy some time off before the undergraduates are back in September.
For previous monthly updates see here: Beyond the PhD Series.
Academic work
Postdoc 1: University of Bath
Spinning out a company
Last update I mentioned that I’d been on the ICURe programme and that we had been given some money to form a spin out company. Between April and June I was paid for three days per week to progress various things related to starting a business:
- Deciding on a name, buying domain names and working with the uni to register the company
- Writing a business plan and doing financial projections
- Presenting our business case for spinning out to the university’s top commercialisation committee, which thankfully they approved on our first go
- Applying for money to bring in an executive to help and potentially become the CEO
- Business-y stuff like deciding the equity (share) split between individuals (me and my boss) and with the university
- Applying for a £300k commercialisation grant
For now I’ll just dive into the final of these points: applying for a £300k grant. If you want details of the others let me know. I’ve learned a lot over the past few months, even just around equity splits!
Applying for a business grant
Because of the ICURe programme I recently went on, I was invited to apply for up to £300k to kick-start our new spin out. This includes employing some new staff to help “de-risk” the technology ahead of future investment.
It was stipulated that I as the early career researcher had to be the PI (lead) for the application, which is both a bit scary and pretty exciting. Thankfully the application went okay, I learned a lot through the process and then had about 7 weeks of nervously awaiting the outcome.
Fast forward to June and we found out that we didn’t get the funding. Until then we’d been on a bit of a roll so it knocked my confidence a bit. But we did get some feedback and also a second chance to apply. The next round of applications is already open and closes later in July, so by the time of the next update I’ll be able to share if we get the money or not.
If we do the project will start in Jan 2023 and I’ll be back to splitting my time between two jobs.
Leaving the university
By the end of June my contract at Bath officially finished. Unlike finishing up a normal fixed-term job in academia where I’d only expect minimal contact going forwards for technical help or paper revisions, this time is a little different since we’re starting a company.
Frankly I really hadn’t enjoyed the previous six months balancing two jobs and not having much free time. It will be interesting to see how much work, because of the spin-out, I still need to get involved with between now and the potential start of the commercialisation grant in January 2023.
Outstanding postdoc award (spoiler: I didn’t win it!)
Separately to all of this I nominated myself for a prize at the university for the most outstanding postdoc. I’d never nominated myself for something before and it sounds pretty self-absorbed, but I figured that I ought to start putting myself out there for things like this. I haven’t ruled out trying to pursue an academic career long term and such things can help to bolster applications.
I was excited to learn I’d been shortlisted for the prize and was invited to give a presentation to some of the top people in the university (pro vice chancellors and heads of departments!). By chance the presentation was just a few days before the end of my contract with the university officially finishing.
Giving an in-person academic presentation for the first time in years (and to top execs!) was nerve wracking but a nice way to reflect on my time at the university.
I didn’t win and was briefly pretty disheartened, in part because this was also around the time we found out we didn’t get our £300k grant. I also set unrealistic expectations for myself continuously!
Did I think I was actually the best postdoc at the entire university? Of course not, but I was only competing against the relatively small number of others who bothered to put in a nomination. The takeaway point here should be to grab available opportunities (see posts here and here)!
Other grant news
Although we didn’t get the grant and prize I described above, it wasn’t all bad news over this period. We finally heard back about a big grant I was a co-investigator on and we got it! The grant is for over £800k! I can’t share any further details at the moment since the outcome is embargoed. I’ll update this once we can share more details.
Although the grant includes money for a postdoc (specifically me at the time we applied!) I’ve decided to still leave, so my boss will be recruiting for someone else to carry on my work and I’ll help bring them on board.
Postdoc 2: University of Bristol
A slow transition
I applied for this job, my second postdoc position, way back in August last year. Initially I expected to start full time in December.
Because of the ICURe programme at Bath, and having an incredibly supportive boss at Bristol who was willing to wait for me, I’ve only now gone full time! From December I was slowly transitioning across, most recently between April and June doing 3 days per week in each job.
Being contracted to work six days per week wasn’t fun. Typically I like to be very strict with keeping my academic work to conventional office hours, and during the PhD actively avoided ever working on the weekends. Of course, this was unavoidable when getting paid to work six days per week.
I remain very thankful to have had such an understanding boss at my new job, because it required some flexibility at times.
Going full time
Now I’m finally full time at my Bristol job and my contract at Bath has officially come to the end. I’m absolutely loving being able to get stuck back in with research for the first time since about October last year.
I’m now working within a team of AI researchers so have learned loads just from working with others. This is one reason why I’d advise prospective PhD students to try and find a supervisor who’s both available to help and who manages a team of other students and staff who can all support each other.
Do you have any questions about postdoc life? Let me know because I’m thinking of writing some more post-PhD content and always enjoy getting suggestions for ideas.
The Savvy Scientist website
New posts
Since the last Beyond the PhD post, I’ve started a new PhD mindset series with two posts published so far:
- PhD Burnout: Managing Energy, Stress, Anxiety & Your Mental Health
- PhD Motivation: How to Stay Driven From Cover Letter to Completion
Also a reminder that this year I started a resource library which you can assess by subscribing. All free and I hope very useful no matter which stage you’re at in your PhD journey.
Website traffic
Over the period April-June this year the website received 28865 views (+8% compared to the previous three months) by 20580 users (+7%).
Learning new skills
DIY
We’ve now owned our own home for one year: time goes quickly!
I really enjoy making improvements to things and between March and June I managed to get on with lots of small jobs to make my life slightly better, such as installing:
- Sliding drawers for fruit and veg in the kitchen
- A cat flap, not in our door but in the garden gate. If our elderly cat wanted to go for a wander she previously had to climb over our pretty tall wall, now she can go straight through the cat flap
- Two new water butts. Despite buying some water butts last year, we had about a month without rain and ran out of rainwater to water plants. As we hadn’t yet reach the warmest time of the year, nor did many of our seedlings need much water, I figured we could do with some more capacity. I’ve now got 5 water butts all linked together collecting water from our house roof and I’m still tempted to add a couple more!
- Some hanging planters for strawberries
- The wooden planter I made from scrap wood last year. It now has some prized “framberries” (strawberry-raspberry cross) growing inside it. We had the first framberries from these plants and they were incredibly tasty, perhaps my favourite berry.
Fruit harvests
Talking of fruits from our garden, with the summer now here we’ve started being able to harvest lots of different fruits. Last year we bought a dwarf cherry tree and this year had a single cherry growing on it!
We can now regularly add fresh fruit to our breakfasts, such as in this picture from a recent haul: which included our single cherry. The cherry was pretty tasty, ideally we’d have left it to ripen for longer but since we only had one fruit we didn’t want to risk a bird, squirrel or anything else getting to it before us. Hopefully next year we’ll get some more fruit from it.
Duolingo
In June I passed 600 consecutive days of using Duolingo!
The app isn’t perfect and probably isn’t the best way to actually learn a language but it does get me spending 10 minutes a day learning Spanish, which is 10 more minutes than I’d be spending on it otherwise. If you use Duolingo too here is my profile.
Chin-ups
I recently said that I wanted to start doing weighted chin/pull ups with the aim of doing sets with +20kg by the end of the year. So I bought some weights and have started progressing towards this goal!
By the end of June I think the most weight I’d done was 5 sets of 5 with 10kg added, for both chins and pull ups. It would be great to reach this volume with 20kg by the end of the year.
Time off
Baking
We bought an airfryer to avoid switching our (gas) oven on for smaller things. The fact the airfryer also seems to cook food more quickly and doesn’t need pre-heating is great too.
We do eat healthily most of the time, but one of the first things we wanted to try making was vegan Krispy Kreme style doughnuts. They turned out great!
Media I’ve consumed
Books
April
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Pretty good, I enjoyed it more than other recent fiction books. I think I’d benefit from starting to read a synopsis ahead of diving into a book because sometimes I struggle to follow what is going on from the dialogue in books such as this.
- Artemis Fowl and the Last Guardian by Eoin Colfer. I’ve now finally reached the end of this series. They’ve been fun and easy to read, a nice way to switch off from work.
May
- The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab. I really enjoyed this. It was hands down my favourite fiction book I’ve read so far this year. I highly recommended it!
- The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work by John Gottman. No my marriage isn’t failing: I’m not even married! This book is well worth a read for us all, even if you’re not currently in a relationship. I found it very useful to start thinking about better ways to communicate with everybody in my life and spot signs of ineffective compromise.
June
- Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio García Martínez. I was recommended this by two people involved with startups since they knew I was starting a spin out. It was interesting to read someone’s start up journey but the writer didn’t come across as the type of person I’d like to find myself working with. Note to self: don’t become this person!
- Immune by Philipp Dettmer. I had already read this book all about our immune system back in January, and wanted to re-read it to help me to remember some of the details. A great book covering a fascinating and important topic. Well worth a read.
Articles
- The Top Idea in Your Mind by Paul Graham. Interesting short article about ideas, priorities and forgiveness. Well worth a read.
- 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known by Kevin Kelly. Not sure how much I retain the wisdom from lists such as this one but they’re fun to read.
Videos
Too many van life / tiny home videos!
Monthly finances
Income
Postdoc +£1456.96 and +£1265.73
Over this period I had temporarily inflated earnings due to doing three days per week at both unis and my Bristol job being at a slightly higher salary. Taxes with multiple jobs seem a bit confusing so I’m expecting that some of this will get taken back as tax, we’ll see.
Lloyds bank switching offer +£125
At the moment there are loads of really good offers where banks basically pay you to switch your current account to their one. Free money for not doing a lot! The process is super simple and all your direct debits and standing orders automatically get transferred. I generally switch once a year.
You can find the whole list of available offers here.
Savings
With inflation getting so high I’m trying to avoid having much money sat in my current account. Therefore I’ve been putting the money somewhere that it’ll get at least some amount of interest, even though it is losing value compared to inflation.
I invest automatically in the stock market (not just the UK markets thankfully!!) and for money I want to have readily available I’ve started buying premium bonds again which get around 1.4% interest at the time of writing. Again, not great but much better than getting closer to 0% as in a typical current account.
Summer Plan
Enjoy some time off and I encourage you to do the same. 🙂
Thank you for reading this quarterly update in the Beyond a PhD series. You can stay up to date with all of the latest posts on the blog by subscribing here:
