With no more funding secured, my postdoc position was scheduled to finish at the end of April. Eek! Of course with that comes some uncertainty, plus in April I had an interview for another job but also an opportunity to rethink what I’d like to be doing with my time. Read on for some details of how it went, what I got up to in April and some plans for May.
For previous monthly updates see here: Beyond the PhD Series.
How I spent my time in April
With a full-time postdoc job in April my time was of course primarily spent on that. Even so, I always like to ensure I’m making an effort to spend my time on other projects and things which I find interesting:
Academic work
Publications
I have two papers currently in different stages of processing:
- A paper from my PhD which was submitted to a journal last year, returned for minor revisions and was resubmitted at the start of February. Still no word on it. I think we did a good job addressing the reviewers’ concerns so am relatively confident it’ll get accepted. But that doesn’t mean much until we get a reply from the editor!
- A paper I’ve been drafting from my postdoc. One of my tasks in April was to get the draft completed so that our coauthors could give feedback. Frustratingly I was waiting a very long time for some patient data to get properly anonymised so that I could analyse it and include in the paper: and all this only got finished near the end of the month. Thankfully we got it done in time so by the time my contract had finished I could hand off the draft to our clinical colleagues to critique. I expect we’ll be submitting it to the journal in June.
Postdoc work
April was primarily spent turning the research I’d spent the last six months working on, into something more user friendly. This took two forms: simplifying use of the code, which now can be run from just one script, and automatically generating reports for each patient so that results can be easily interpreted.
I started the month by collecting opinions from my clinical colleagues for what features to include and came up with a list of things to work on. Some of them being essential and others as nice-to-haves incase I had time.
I found the work really interesting. As usual there was loads of having to search online for answers to problems (using Ecosia, not Google!) but eventually I got the main parts of the system all working, plus some of the nice-to-have features. This meant that I left the project feeling pretty happy with what we’d achieved and that it could actually start to become useful.
Postdoc funding
As mentioned, funding for my day job as a postdoc was due to finish at the end of March. We put in an application to extend this for another six months and had an interview with the funders for this towards the end of the month. Of course, not having much notice as to whether it would be extended or not wasn’t ideal. This was made even worse by the meeting being delayed by a week and then a delay in telling us the result which didn’t actually happen until my penultimate day of work!
When we eventually heard back we didn’t actually get a definitive answer. They said that they had concerns about some of what we’d proposed and wanted another meeting to discuss the extension. This additional meeting was scheduled to take place after my current contract finished.
Applying for other jobs
This put me in a bit of an awkward situation: ideally I want to carry on with the project but also knew that I should apply for other jobs. I’m in the fortunate position of having savings (please considering starting to save, here is why) so didn’t need a job straight away but also knew that organisations sometimes frown upon career breaks and it is generally easier to get another job whilst you’re already in one.
Having recently bought a house, I was keen to avoid applying for jobs too far away from this geographical area for the time being and eventually applied for just one other position, which was in a different department at the same university (Bath). I had the interview but got rejected and haven’t received any feedback from the panel.
I’ve kept an eye out for other positions with deadlines early in May but decided to take a short break from work whilst we waited for the funding meeting which was scheduled for only a few days into the month. I’ll save discussing all of this until next month!
The Savvy Scientist website
New posts
Last month I said that I’d fallen behind with this website and that continued in April while I was preoccupied with my job coming to an end. Three posts went live:
- My Complete Guide to Academic Peer Review: Examples, How to Reply to Feedback & Productively Make Paper Revisions
- Beyond the PhD: April 2021
- When Should You Apply For A PhD?
My goal in May is to get back to publishing a new post every Thursday in the month, and hopefully get some content scheduled for the summer too.
Website traffic
In April there were 4799 unique users (-8% compared to March), and 6958 page views (-9%).
Now that I have a bit of time off in May I’ll be looking to get back on top of producing regular content. As usual, if you have ideas for useful content please let me know.
Potential business venture
In the last update I briefly mentioned a potential business idea. Despite my best intentions, between everything going on for my job this had to take a backseat in April and I should have more of a proper update next month.
Learning new skills
Languages
I’m still really enjoying learning both Spanish and Mandarin on Duolingo. It is surprisingly good for my productivity to take a 10 minute break from every so often from work to improve my skills in these languages. Give it a go! Duolingo offers loads of languages so I’m sure you’ll find one which interests you.
Chin-ups & Pull-ups
Last month I mentioned that I was keen to sort out being able to regularly do chin ups because it wasn’t ideal going to an outdoor gym with all the bad weather we’ve been having. Now that I have some space I can call my own, I managed to set up some equipment in our garage. Being able to go and exercise in the dry whenever I want is great: a luxury I feel very fortunate to have!
In April I just started to get back into chin ups, pull ups and dips and am now training back up with the aim of hitting sets of 10 chin ups and pull ups. At the end of last year I managed 10 x chin ups, but having had some time off and pull ups generally being a bit more difficult, it may take a while to achieve this goal!
Courses & Kaggle
In April I started using Kaggle. If you’re not familiar with Kaggle, it’s an online community for people interested in both developing their skills in using AI and applying it to solve problems. There are free courses, many of which I went through in April, but the main part of Kaggle are the challenges:
These challenges allow you to pit your skills against other AI practitioners from around the world, competing to do as well as possible on a huge variety of challenges. Many of the challenges are posed by real world organisations and companies, with very real cash incentives for the top performers.
I’m starting to dabble in the challenges with the aim of improving my skills in areas of machine learning I currently have no experience.
As well as the challenges, the courses are good too, so if you’re just starting to get interested in AI and machine learning I’d suggest giving some of them a go:
In April I whizzed through lots of the free courses to get up to speed on certain topics and in May I now want to apply some of these new skills. If you’re interested in AI I think Kaggle is a great place to learn.
Other stuff
Media I’ve consumed
Books
I finished reading two books in April:
- Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World – Cade Metz. I learned about this book during an interview of Cade by one of my favourite AI companies. As someone who now works in the field, I found the book really interesting and recon it is worth a read for someone interested in both the technologies of AI and machine learning and their creators.
- The Eternity Code – Eoin Colfer. This is the third book in the Artemis Fowl series, and I read the first two books in March. Some people may shun these as children books, and they’re certainly not the most sophisticated. Even so, I’ve been enjoying them: they’re fun, easy to read and great for switching off from work. Read my posts here and here for why I think reading fiction is good.
House: Green Living Changes
In April we:
- Addressed some draughty window frames to cut energy losses. Adding some foam tape has hugely reduced draughts in certain rooms as well as having the benefit of cutting out all road noise.
- Started experimenting with saving seeds from our food. We’ve started with some sowing some bell pepper seeds.
- Saved some wood from landfill. I’m keen to start some small woodworking projects and had previously found the amazing sounding Bristol Wood Recycling Project, but I don’t have a car and at the time they weren’t open. So instead, every time I’ve seen people doing building work in the area I’ve now starting to post a note through the letter box asking if they’d be happy to give me the wood which looks to be getting thrown away. So far all three people have said yes. My biggest result so far including a builder even offering to drive a huge amount of wood over for me. Not only has this meant I can now try building things for free without risking ruining expensive wood, it also means I’m saving the supplies from getting thrown away: a win win.
Yes, all of that wood was going to end up in a skip! Next month I’ll be able to share some of the things I’ve started to build.
Monthly finances
Income
Postdoc +£2002.31 Potentially my final paycheque for a while! In May I’d like to start trying to diversify my income so that in the future I don’t need to rely on having a day job.
Savings
I ended April with £1095 more in my accounts than at the start of the month. Not bad considering I spent lots of money on random stuff for the house. My outgoings: mortgage, bills and food all come to around £750 a month, which means that every month in work I’m able to save enough to pay my expenses for another month or two.
Investments
In April I started investing again. This took a few different forms:
- Just before the new tax year on 6th April I added money to my old Charles Stanley Stocks and Shares ISA. I’ve set up monthly investment instructions so that this cash will gradually get used to buy ethical investments.
- Setting up a monthly £200 transfer to my tickr account. I’m still not 100% sure that tickr is the optimum place for everyone to invest since it has a fixed monthly charge which may erode performance unless you have thousands invested. But: I plan to have thousands invested, and I like it to further diversify my portfolio beyond my investments through Charles Stanley etc.
I also made a one-off investment of £250 in these EV chargers in Manchester through Abundance: a green investing platform. Abundance doesn’t offer projects that frequently but I think it’s a great platform. Please only invest a small amount of your savings in any single opportunity, for most of them you can start with just £50.
April Summary
April was a funny month, and I certainly didn’t expect for it to end without a conclusive answer as to whether or not my current contract was getting extended. Nevertheless I’m happy with the progress I’ve made with the project and of course am thankful to be in a position where I don’t need to worry too much about lining up a job to start straight away. Hopefully we get our funding extension and I won’t need to find another job anyway!
May Plan
Until the meeting with our funders, I don’t really know where I stand. I’ll certainly be having at least a few weeks off work and potentially a lot longer if I end up trying to find another job. Until then I’ll be catching up with other projects and enjoy having a bit of time off!
I hope you find these monthly posts interesting. If there are other details you’d like to see included please let me know. You can subscribe to stay up to date with content here:
