As usual, there is a lot going on! I got a promotion, submitted some new work to conferences and things are moving forwards with the spin-out company.
For previous monthly updates see here: Beyond the PhD Series.
Academic work
Publications
It’s been an exceptionally busy few months publication wise!
Thankfully all of the major deadlines have now finished for this year (I hope!) so I’m looking forward to getting back to a more normal pace for the next few months.
Accepted
A paper from the Washington DC conference workshop I attended earlier in the year (AAAI) is now published in a book chapter. I’ve not had something published in a book chapter before so can’t claim to fully understand how it works. The main thing is it’s a peer reviewed bit of work now available.
Rejected
To demonstrate that things don’t always go to plan: a conference paper we submitted over the summer was recently rejected. I do understand the reviewer’s concerns. If we find a more suitable venue we may submit it, otherwise we’ll work to turn it into a full journal paper.
Revisions
A journal paper we submitted earlier this year came back with some reviewer comments. Thankfully there were only two reviewers and the comments seem quite minor. We’ve submitted the revisions, fingers crossed! P.S. Be sure to check out my guide to peer review and making paper revisions.
Submitted
Four conference submissions:
- We recently submitted a paper to an AI conference. You can read the pre-print here. The work was led by a fantastic visiting PhD student. I’m sad to see them go!
- And we submitted a different paper to another AI conference, and this is a paper I’ve been leading on with the support of the aforementioned fantastic PhD student. I came up with the idea for this paper in September last year and with the help of a few PhD students it has now come to life.
The submission involved way more people than expected but I think it’s a stronger paper because of it and I’m relatively happy with the final result.
The conference deadline was extended by two weeks which should have meant we had loads of time. However, we hit a few issues with some of the experiments in the week before the deadline, until having a breakthrough on the final night – which meant working until 3:30am on Saturday morning. This is the only time I’ve [ever] found myself in that position and don’t plan to repeat it! We’ll see what the reviewers think of it. Again, the pre-print is available here.
- Finally, right near the end of September we submitted two proposal papers to a workshop at a big AI conference. The proposals track isn’t common for most conferences and is basically for ideas of future work or preliminary results. Thankfully neither of these involved working until 3:30am the night before the deadline. If either get accepted the conference will have been and gone by the time of the next ‘Beyond the PhD’ post! The two proposals were:
- A reworked version of something which got rejected earlier in the year.
- An expanded version of a case study we included for one of the above paper submissions, led by another great visiting PhD student.
Postdoc job
Promotion
Last update I mentioned that I’d applied for a promotion from senior research associate to research fellow. I’m pleased to share that I was awarded the promotion, yay!
The application largely revolved around providing evidence that I was already meeting many of the requirements for the position. Therefore I’m not expecting too much to change with my day to day work.
Mainly it’s a new job title and a higher salary of around £6k more per year, though of course with taxes, student loans etc I personally only receive about half of that increase. Anyhow, I’m happy to have got the promotion!
Work
Last year at a mini conference I met a PhD student with similar research interests to mine. We had a few Teams calls and they’ve now ended up joining us in Bristol for a three month research visit.
There are lots of different projects on the go at the moment, as you can probably tell by the different papers mentioned above. I have a few other papers in the works at the moment.
In other news, I’m now officially part-time in this job because of the…
Spin-out Company
Things are going well in the spin out company. It’s been tough balancing my time between this and my full-time postdoc job so I’m now pleased to have a bit of dedicated time every week for the spin-out. I’ve dropped down to 4 days per week (0.8 FTE) in my postdoc job.
Recently we’ve been recruiting and I now line manage a machine learning engineer. They’ve been making fantastic progress.
The Savvy Scientist website
New posts
For once I have a good number of new posts to share with you since the last Beyond the PhD post!
- PhD Profiles: Hassal, PhD (and MD!) Graduate in Neuroscience, University of Cambridge – if you’re a PhD student or grad and are interested in being featured in my PhD Profiles series please do reach out!
- How to Use ChatGPT Effectively as a Researcher
- Gifts for a PhD Student
It has been very useful having my girlfriend helping behind the scenes! We’ve also now passed 100 posts on the website, woo.
Website traffic
I’m still getting used to the new Google Analytics platform. Here is a plot of the number of weekly users this year:
The number of users dipped over the summer, I suspect largely because I wasn’t posting so much. Things have been on the up since setting a regular posting schedule.
Time off
Camping
I’ve been to a few different adventure festival events over the summer, which are always very inspiring. I’m satisfied with the work I do but can’t deny that working at a computer all day long can be monotonous. Going on trips at the weekend can be a great way of breaking up the day to day.
My girlfriend and I are currently planning our next holiday, but unlike lots of recent ones (Morocco, Camino) this one will be intentionally chilled out and not an adventure!
I also recently took the opportunity to sell a tent I’d bought a few years ago but never used and I unexpectedly ended up turning a profit on it!
I don’t like having unnecessary items around and knew I wasn’t going to use the tent so it is gone. Along with a baby monitor which was a failed attempt for my girlfriend to be able to keep an eye on me for safety reasons while I’m doing wood working in our garage.
Garden
Wildlife
The pond I created in the last of these posts is now getting established. Look at the difference in the size of the plants!
We’ve also started to get new insects in the garden, from supporting a population of pond skaters through to regular visits from dragonflies.
Food growing
This summer doesn’t seem to have been as productive as last year. Maybe it’s because we were away on holiday for a few weeks in May/June? Thankfully there has still been lots to harvest – cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, courgettes, greens, garlic and many types of berries.
Earlier in the year I trimmed back our fig plant and decided to try growing the cuttings. I’m really happy to share how well they’ve done in such a short period of time.
DIY
A few years ago I saved some wooden pallets from going to landfill. Since then I’ve made a few things out of the wood, including a raised bed to grow vegetables in, but I still had lots left.
Perhaps inspired by the coastal board walks on my recent holiday, I decided to turn some of the spare wood into some paths in the garden. In the photo below I was trying out one potential location, hence why they look like they’ve just been dropped on top of the pebbles!
Yoga
In July my girlfriend and I decided to start doing daily yoga, and for now we’re keeping it up. We started off with Youtube’s Adriene but now regularly just do our own thing.
Not every day is a full 20-25 minutes. Some days is just a 5 min stretch but having given up on meditation a few years ago I’m enjoying having yoga as part of my routine.
Media I’ve consumed
Books
On reflection all the books I read over this period had their similarities…
Bringing Down Goliath: How Good Law Can Topple the Powerful – Jolyon Maugham. I’ve been a monthly donator to Good Law Project for the past few years but after reading this book I upped my donations. Good Law Project is one of the few things which gives me any slither of hope for the UK.
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley. I think I was probably forced to read this way back in school. This time I wasn’t forced and found it reasonably good but not amazing. I can only think it has its cult following (like 1984) because of the underlying message, not how well written and interesting the actual story is.
It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism – Bernie Sanders. Worth a read. Last update I read a book about life in Denmark and in this one there were lots more references to Scandinavian life.
Monthly finances
Income
Postdoc
Every month was different over this period: I got a pay rise in August from £2360.55 to £2645.75 then switched to part time in September which took my take-home monthly salary back down to £2216.51.
Savings
Over this three month period my savings went up £3126.85.
Summary & plans
In my last Beyond the PhD post I set myself a plan of three things:
- Reduce expectations on myself, realising that it isn’t possible to pursue every possible research project
- Drop down my hours in my postdoc role so that I’m not trying to run the spin-out on top of a full time job
- Take frequent short breaks
I failed miserably at the first. Perhaps in part because of having the opportunity to work with enthusiastic visiting PhD students who I knew were only with us temporarily. But also in part because I still struggle to slow down!
Thankfully I followed through with the second point and have in fact dropped my hours which should, in theory at least, mean less overall hours worked and therefore a better work life balance.
My progress towards taking frequent short breaks really depends on what time scale we’re talking over since I never really defined it. If we’re talking about taking regular breaks during the working day, I’m pretty good at that, in part because I’m not great at sitting still in one place for any length of time. If we mean taking days off work, I’m less good at that but it’s something I’m working on.
Let’s make that my goal for the next period: take a few random days off of work.
Until next time, happy researching!
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