We’re into February already! In case this is your first time reading a post from this series, every month I write about what I’ve been up to in the previous month and any plans I have for the coming month. I’m keen to make good use of my time, both to help ensure I’m heading towards my (pretty open-ended) longer term plans and to generally not let the year fly by! I’ve found writing these posts really useful to track how I’m spending my time and reflect on things that I’d like to do differently to improve my life.
For previous monthly updates see here: Beyond the PhD Series.
How I spent my time in January
The university I work at (Bath) opened back up after Christmas on 4th January. Having just enjoyed about two weeks off, it did take me a little time to get back into the rhythm of working!
I spent more time than ever on Duolingo learning Spanish, which I’m really enjoying, plus I started a new language in January too.
Academic work
Publications
PhD Paper
Last month I mentioned that we had a response for a paper I was working on (Paper A, from this list): minor revisions. It was only eight comments from two reviewers so actually I got off pretty lightly.
The editor requested the revisions in mid-December and I had in my head that we had about two months to get them done. Although I had planned to make the changes over the Christmas break, I couldn’t bring myself to. For the first few weekends in Janauary I made up excuses and procrastinated.
Before I knew it we were near the end of January, and although I had thought that the revisions were due around the 15th Febuary, there were in fact due on just the 4th February. Therefore I spent about a day (7 hours) near the end of January making all the necessary changes and replying to the reviewers.
It wasn’t fun, but it was much less intimidating than my brain had deceived me into thinking it would be. I think this is true of most things we put off doing!
For sure it is important to take a break from work and so in a way I’m pleased I didn’t actually work on it over Christmas. Even so, when I found myself procrastinating loads, and not actually being able to enjoy my time off because I knew I had the revisions hanging over me, it was probably high time that I actually got the work out the way.
I felt so much better once I had actually forced myself into doing the work. No reply yet, hopefully I’ll have a nice update next month.
Postdoc Paper
In my day job we’ve started laying the ground work for a paper relating to my postdoc work. The work is pretty different to my PhD so it’s cool to be hopefully helping push forward advances in a different field after a pretty short period of work.
In fact, it feels pretty crazy to be doing so since we started the project from scratch only in September and for ages I was working without a proper university computer! Nevertheless, we think we hopefully have something interesting and have found a suitable journal where similar research to what we’re working on has been published.
Postdoc
The main news from January relating to my postdoc is that we managed to get a small extension to my contract: one month extra to work on translating the work to increase impact. What does that mean? Well essentially I won’t be doing any research that month and instead will effectively be developing the code I’m working on (lots of Python scripts) into a more cohesive and user friendly tool. The target audience in this case are clinicians and we’re fortunate to already work closely with a group so they are providing suggestions and assistance.
My contract now runs until the end of April. The uncertainly working on a short term postdoc such as this certainly can be unnerving but I’m trying to channel that energy in two ways:
- Motivation to be productive in the time I have.
- Excitement about future endeavours. A year ago, when I hadn’t written a single line of Python code I’d not have dreamed I’d be doing what I’m doing now: who knows what I’ll be working on in a year?!
I’m still really enjoying learning machine learning, but working remotely does have it’s drawbacks. Like many others I go through bouts with little motivation and being isolated in my work means it can take a little while to sometimes get back into it. I consciously asked for weekly meetings with my line manager for exactly this reason, and being on a short project it would otherwise be easy for things to go awry.
In January we also submitted an abstract to an international conference taking place in July. Of course I won’t be with the group by that point so if it get’s accepted my boss will present it. He actually took the reigns in writing the abstract so I wouldn’t feel at all short-changed if he does present it!
The Savvy Scientist website
New posts
After falling behind in December, I’m pleased to have caught back up in January with a post every Thursday:
- Beyond the PhD: January 2021
- Do PhD Students Have a Social Life? Sharing My Experiences Making Friends and Avoiding PhD Loneliness
- How to Prepare for Your PhD Viva / Defence: Common Examiner Questions
- Academic CV Examples From Active Researchers
I’ve still been bad and not lined up a single PhD Profile for 2021 and I know that nothing will change unless I actually commit to changing that. I do have a list of potential guests but can get pretty put off doing anything which involves asking other people for things.
February goal: Speak to potential PhD Profile guests.
If you’re interested in being featured please get in touch!
Website traffic
In January the website received 5165 users (+47% compared to December) and 7115 page views (+42%), the biggest month in its history. Since I don’t do anything to promote the website I always get a little sceptical of anything excepy for search engine traffic. Nonetheless, many people seem to find the content useful which is the main purpose!
Learning new skills
Languages
Spanish
In January I spent far too long on Duolingo, all because I wanted this silly medal:
Looking at the pie chart at the top of this post, I spent 21 hours on Duolingo in January: about 40 minutes a day. Duolingo is really good at making learning a language addictive. Though I will say that gaining as many points as possible doesn’t perfectly align with actually improving your language skills. Therefore I’ve eased off a lot and instead have started learning a new language too…
Mandarin Chinese
I wanted to also try learning a completely different type of language: Mandarin! It has been a much more steep learning curve, not least because the characters completely foreign to me. Pinyin helps a bit. I’ve now been learning Mandarin with Duolingo for about a month and I’m picking up words but nothing like at the pace of Spanish. Nevertheless I’ll keep at it. I feel like if I can get at least slightly proficient at Mandarin then I’d be doing pretty well between English, Spanish and Mandarin.
Oh and in January, I also passed 100 days in a row of learning on Duolingo.
For me at least, if I don’t do something for a while I can forget about it and it slips down my list of priorities. Therefore doing a bit each day, even just 10 minutes, is really important in getting me to actually work on it.
If you also use Duolingo, my profile is here.
Human-Centred Design Course
In January I enrolled with my partner on this free course.
Why? Well mostly because my partner wanted to do it and needed someone to join her team!
But actually when I looked at the course I realised it aligned closely to some of my own goals. Also, despite the name of this website (!) I’m an engineer at heart and anything I can do to design better products which stand more of a chance at helping people sounds good to me.
The course runs frequently and is free so you can enroll today if you’re interested.
Chin-ups
You know how I was just saying that I find it really important to work towards a goal regularly otherwise I forget about it? Well case in point are chin-ups, where I’ve only gone four times since the new year. I kept at them pretty consistently since aiming to do 10 in a row last year but then stopped going due to being in another lockdown here in the UK.
The rules are that you can only go out for exercise once a day and I prefer going out for a walk after working, by which time it is dark and impossible to see the chinup bar in the local park. Well, that’s my excuse at least!
Now I’ve spoken through the problem, a solution would be to go and do the chinups at least a few times a week and forfeit my after-work walks on those days.
February goal: Do chin-ups twice a week.
Time off
It was my birthday near the start of January and I did a virtual escape room by Macmillan Cancer Support.
I’ve now not seen my family in over a year and I’m not sure when I’ll next get to see them so it was great to do a virtual escape room with them. It was pretty difficult and we had to use some of the clues!
My younger sister also sent me this adorable postcard of the family cat, hopefully I’ll be able to see them all in not too long?!
Talking of animals, we had a squirrel trying to well, squirrel, into our roof during January and spent many hours trying to shoo it away before it caused too much damage. I’m all for helping nature but also don’t want wildlife rooting inself in the roof!
Baking
Not really baking but for Christmas my partner and I got given a waffle-maker so for my birthday we enjoyed lots of vegan waffles!
Media I’ve consumed
Books
In 2021 I’m trying to get back to reading two fiction books a month. My two for January were:
Both were pretty good and I’m pleased I read them but neither would be a top choice.
Articles
- 100 Tips for a Better Life. I try to steer clear of click-baity articles but got recommended this and it is filled with some good advice. Therefore I’m now recommending that you read it too! Not all of them I agree with, chiefly number 94 about enjoying your job. Read my own post here for a bit of context.
Videos
- How a Master Potter Makes Giant Kimchi Pots Using the Traditional Method — Handmade. I love seeing masters of any craft, but especially ones who feel they have such a deep connection to it like in this video.
- Why your Carbon Footprint is a scam (ft. @Climate Town). Pretty decent science/environmental-commication video, though I do get a bit concerned that some people may take messages such as the one in this video the wrong way. We should all have still care about the environment!
- Synthetic Silviculture: Multi-scale Modeling of Plant Ecosystems. A few years old but still very cool.
- Everything by Two Minute Papers. I love this YouTube channel, Karoly does a fantastic job at explaining a topic and highlighting the advances made by each new paper.
Monthly finances
Income
- Postdoc +£1951.96
- Imperial +£335.17. This money was way overdue. I did a bit of work last summer and only just got the payment finalised!
- Prolific +£12.21. I spent less than an hour taking part in research studies with Prolific in January. To learn more about the platform see my separate post here: Prolific Review – Make money and help researchers in the process!
- Bank switching offer +£100. I switched a current account to Royal Bank of Scotland and they paid me £100 for doing so.
This page on the amazing Money Saving Expert website lists all the available offers at UK banks. For now there aren’t any cash offers, which is why it’s good to check back regularly (or subscribe to the newsletter) to jump on the offers when they’re around.
Savings
Between my earnings and some performance from investments, I ended January with £2279 more in my accounts than at the start of the month. I’m lucky at the moment to live reasonably cheaply with outgoings of not much more than £300 a month. I completely appreciate that this is abnormally low and that most people can’t get their expenses down this far. Even so, I recon most people can cut at least some costs and put themselves in a significantly stronger financial position. Also, find my list of top ways to make money as a student here.
I feel so strongly that building up savings is a good idea and now see it as a way of life, read my post here for more details.
Last month I hinted that I was trying to free up some money for something. Well a month on and nothing is guaranteed so I won’t talk about it at length just yet. In January I spent some more time moving money around and selling a decent chunk of all of my investments to turn them into cash.
One of the places I’ve moved most of this money to is Premium Bonds. For now I’m using them as a short term holding account and also won a £25 prize in January. Rather than getting a guaranteed interest rate, with premium bonds you stand a chance of winning tax-free prizes which equate to approximately a 1% interest rate.
Usually I’d not bother with them but interest rates elsewhere are shockingly poor and I need somewhere with quick easy access to my money. Long term I’d always suggest investing your money in funds on the stock market since the rate of return is hugely better in the long run. I really ought to write a post about investing since it is getting increasingly popular and I see a lot of content following poor strategies which I really don’t agree with!
January Summary
Everything is ticking along just fine at the moment and there isn’t much that I’d like to change. My work is going fine and hopefully soon I’ll have a positive update to share for a paper from my PhD.
Besides work related things, the lockdown isn’t much fun and living in close confines with my partner’s family isn’t doing wonders my mental health. I’m pleased to have kept up meditating and things like Duolingo which are nice distractions. I miss doing creative activities such as painting and baking so I’ll make an effort to incorporate more of that stuff back into my life.
February Plan
I soon need to start thinking about what I’ll do after my current post-doc position finishes. At the time of writing I still have three months of employment so I’ll leave it another month or so until I start properly looking. It is equally exciting and nerve-racking!
Besides the small goals I set myself throughout this post I’m not really interested in setting myself anything else to do in February. Overall I’m happy with how things are going at the moment!
Do you find these monthly posts interesting? Is there anything else you’d like to see covered? I enjoy getting feedback so feel free to let me know.
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