I can’t quite believe we’re now in 2024, happy New Year everyone!
Thankfully the final quarter of 2023 was pretty fruitful, with the conclusion of lots of work from throughout the year as well as a few nice breaks. Below are some updates on what I’ve been up to, along with some reflections on the year as a whole.
For previous monthly updates see here: Beyond the PhD Series.
Work
For anyone new here I have two distinct jobs: one as a postdoc, another as a co-founder and CTO of a spin-out company.
Postdoc job
Publications
This has been a good three months!
In the last Beyond the PhD post I mentioned four pieces of work getting submitted to conferences:
Paper 1 (second author)
Got through the first round of reviews, we submitted the rebuttal: the response to reviewer comments with the aim of addressing them all and getting it accepted. In December the result came back and it was rejected, which is fine but reading the final set of reviews it seems like they didn’t actually read the rebuttal document since we’d addressed lots of the questions they raised in it. A bit frustrating. We’re deciding what to do about the work: we may resubmit elsewhere. The preprint is still available online.
Outcome: Rejection.
Paper 2 (first author)
The second paper I mentioned last time went through peer review, including a rebuttal from us and has been accepted for oral presentation at this conference. The final copy is available here. I’m really excited to be going to the Arctic circle in a few days time and hopefully will stand a good chance of seeing the Northern Lights! As usual I’ll be taking a bit of annual leave after the conference to explore.
Outcome: Accepted.
Papers 3 and 4 (first / second author)
Two pieces of work to a workshop at a big AI conference:
- Reworked proposal of something rejected earlier in the year, thankfully accepted and online here. Ironically despite getting accepted by a respectable venue, when I went to put a copy of the work on arXiv it got rejected, which I didn’t even know was a possibility! I’ve instead put it on ResearchGate. Outcome: Accepted by the workshop, rejected by arXiv!
- Piece of work led by a great visiting PhD student also accepted and available online.
Outcome: Accepted.
Both were accepted just as posters, but that seemed to be the norm for the workshop so I’m not disappointed. I had the opportunity to go to the conference (in New Orleans) but decided not to go, but we were still well represented at the conference with co-authors from both papers there in person.
Paper 5 (bonus, third author)
On top of these, since the last post I was part of a team which submitted something to a workshop at another major AI conference. The work was accepted and I’ll be going to Vancouver, Canada to present it next month. This is the next iteration of the conference I went to earlier in the year in Washington D.C.
One thing I will say is that I don’t like the turnaround time for some of the camera-ready versions expected by conference organisers. We found out that it had been accepted the week before Christmas and the final version (with revisions expected) should be sent by 12th Jan.
Outcome: Accepted.
Separately to these a journal paper (equal contributions with first author) which got accepted earlier in the year is now available online.
Work and grants
Beyond the publications over this period I…
- Started co-supervising three undergraduates on different final year projects.
- Applied for a grant (£15K, internal university funding) which we found out just before Christmas we were successful with. I feel fortunate working not just in a hot field (AI) but on topics that are of high societal demand and impact: healthcare and climate change. The grant will pay for some of my time for six months and will start in March.
- Officially reduced my working hours down to 4 days per week since I’m now starting to get paid through the spin-out company.
- Am now cycling to the office. Having started back during my PhD in London, I’m now using the same bike I got for free then for commuting. It’s a pretty long journey so I’m thankful that the office has on-site showers! I love activities like this that: save me time, money and are good exercise.
Tenure-track (lecturer / assistant professor) applications?
In August I got a promotion from senior post doc up to research fellow. I don’t have my career fully mapped out but I’m certainly open to staying on in a university. The hiccup is that I’ve still not got going abroad out of my system since my girlfriend and I never got to go on our travels at the end of my PhD due to COVID.
My current boss has been very supportive, so in the short term I’ll be planning some trips to hopefully do research visits abroad, but he has also been very encouraging of me applying for lectureships.
Since I joined the university, around two years ago, there have been some different positions which have become available, including one which sounded interesting back in October. I met with the line manager for the position and they seemed great (and keen for me to apply) but I decided against it for a few reasons:
- It was in a completely different School (part of the university) to where I am now and I although I know my current School is very supportive, I knew basically nothing about that one.
- There were some very specific teaching duties which I didn’t really fancy getting involved with.
- It felt a bit premature since I’d only just started getting some AI publications under my belt – this is now pretty much resolved.
- I wasn’t sure about wanting to complicate my life – being involved with a spin-out as well as managing research in a university can be quite intense, without adding more admin and teaching responsibilities etc.
- Still having not yet spent any sizeable amount of time abroad!
For these reasons I decided against it.
However, I now know that there will plenty on the way (in my current School) this coming year, including a few closing this month. I don’t expect to apply to those since I’ve got some other short term deadlines but I’m certainly tempted to apply for the ones later in the year.
Spin-out
Things are progressing:
- We finalised recruitment of another full time member of staff and they started in November. I led recruitment for this one and LinkedIn made it pretty easy. Besides getting in any other grants or fund raising, we’ve now got the whole team assembled.
- We applied for a grant and will find out in February if we’ve been successful or not.
Other than that, things are progressing well.
The Savvy Scientist website
New posts
Since the last Beyond the PhD post I’ve published three articles:
- How to Master LinkedIn for Academics & PhD Students
- What is a PhD Viva Like? Sharing Graduates’ Experiences
- Graduate Teaching Assistants: Why You Should Consider Becoming One!
One article per month isn’t quite the frequency I was hoping for (one every 2 -3 weeks) but it is much better than earlier on in the year.
My girlfriend has started taking more of an active role with preparing the posts which has helped a lot. As had simply the pressure of someone else expecting me to actually work on the website!
Website traffic
Weekly users:
Traffic was pretty inconsistent in 2023, likely in part because of my equally inconsistent schedule for posting. It’s not too unsurprising that traffic slowed down in the run up to Christmas, the drop right at the end is only because of the way it was calculated. Traffic generally increased since I increased my posting consistency in the summer.
In 2024 I’ll try to keep up the regular schedule and we’ll see where we get to.
Time off
Holiday
In October my girlfriend and I had booked a week off work to go on a quiet holiday to Portugal. However, we looked at the weather forecast and despite usually being consistently sunny, it looked like this:
To make matters worse, here was the local weather forecast for Bristol:
Therefore we decided to postpone the trip by a few weeks. I then ended up splitting my time for the week off at home: a mix of relaxing and getting on with some work since we had deadlines for some of the above papers. We went on some nice walks, played mini-golf etc so it certainly wasn’t a wasted week.
The postponed week off that we had in Portugal was lovely and relaxing.
DIY
Lots of progress:
- After over a year of having a mirror resting against a wall in our living room I finally hung it on the wall.
- Not strictly DIY but we got two of these light tubes installed in dark areas of our house and they have already made a big difference.
- After over a year we finally finished off sanding and revarnishing our stairs. This was so much more work than I first anticipated, yes, even with an electric sander and the coarsest sand paper I could buy. I think there must have been six or more layers of varnish on there before.
- Bought two more water butts, replacing old and worn out small ones. One which no longer holds water has now been filled with compost (homemade!) and I’ve planted some garlic in it. The other I’ll turn into a second barrel pond since we’ve enjoyed having our first one so much.
- I decided in 2022 that I wanted to make something out of our Christmas trees each year. For 2022 I created a reindeer, and this year I decided to chop the tree up and create some Christmas ornaments which we attached to people’s presents. These were a lot of work to make! Pro tip: Don’t bother doing nice designs on both sides. It would have been better to do one side on twice as many pieces.
Duolingo
I don’t post about Duolingo much these days but I’m still keeping it up, and passed a 1000 day streak:
I still enjoy Duolingo but stick by what I’ve said before about it not being the most productive way to learn a language. It is however in my opinion a more productive use of time than other time wasting activities!
If you use Duolingo and want to connect, here is my profile.
Media I’ve consumed
Books
- Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back – Guy Shrubsole. Enlightening plus lots of ideas for a more sustainable, prosperous, and just society in general. If you’re based in the UK I’d say it is worth a read.
- Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain – Grace Lindsay. Interesting for anyone interested in brain, decision making, psychology, AI.
In 2023 I decided to try and read less books, and have certainly done so. Now that I’ve started commuting via bike rather than a bus this trend will continue into 2024 too. I expect to read about one book per 4-6 weeks.
Films
- The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Inspiring resourcefulness based on a true story. Here is the TED talk.
Personal finances
Income
- Postdoc – my take-home pay dropped to around £2216/month since I’m now part time. My full time equivalent salary for this role is around £48k (Bristol pay scales are available here), and I work 80% hours.
- Spin-out – after a bit of a delay getting on the payroll I’m now getting paid around £1000/month (£1500 pre tax) for this role. The reason that you’ll see I saved a load of money over this period is because my pay for this role got backdated for ~8 months so I received quite a large lump sum.
- £200 banking offer – for switching to a different current account with Nationwide. These sound too good to be true but they’re such easy free money! MoneySavingExpert track all the different offers available. If you’re eligible I’d suggest checking them out.
Savings
Near the end of the year I made a few changes:
- Updated charity direct debits to increase the amount I’m giving, now something like £150/month in regular donations. As someone who is too frugal to have an expensive phone contract, buy new clothes, pay for Spotify Premium etc this sounds weird but I’ve started to realise that it’s not so much that I’m cheap, it’s that I’d rather my money went to good causes.
- Big one-off charity donation for a topical cause I care deeply about.
- A five year cash ISA I opened way back in 2018 finally matured and I moved it from getting around 2.1% interest up to 5.25%. Besides making use of banking offers with linked savings accounts, which can get up to around 8% interest per year, now that I have a decent pot of savings I’m now investing more into the stock market (ethically I’d like to think!) through my stocks and shares ISA.
Over the past three months I’ve saved a slightly crazy £9404.58. This was in large part because of the lump sum I received for overdue salary from earlier in the year in the spin-out company.
In total for 2023 I saved £20418.35. I’m slightly concerned that I’ll get a big tax bill from HMRC so this total excludes £4000 I’ve set aside in case they come knocking later this year. In either case, I saved way more than I expected to this past year, and I feel incredibly fortunate to be in this position: please see this post on financial freedom for my motivation.
Summary & plans
What I’ve been happy with in 2023
- Publishing quite a few papers and establishing myself as an AI researcher. In my previous postdoc role (also in AI) we didn’t publish anything because of IP concerns since we were forming the aforementioned spin-out company.
- Getting the spin-out… spun out and making good progress. Being involved with running a business is completely new to me and it has been fun to learn
- Taking on more responsibility at work (university). In 2023 for the first time I was leading groups of researchers and managing grants on several projects at once. I got a promotion too.
- Making nice memories, especially on breaks from work such as when hiking nearly 300km on the Camino.
Reflecting on my goals for 2023
Last year I shared these aims for 2023:
| AIM | RESULT | |
| 1 | Set boundaries and learn to say no. It is important to have a work-life balance. | Partially achieved 5/10. I’ve been relatively good with taking annual leave, and think I must have taken around six weeks leave in 2023, however I’m still not great at saying no and do end up with getting involved with lots more than I probably should do. It is self inflicted! |
| 2 | Put less pressure on myself to read so many books. Reading can be fun, but not when I’m relentlessly pushing myself to read two books per month. It also means I make less time for other things, like this website. | Achieved, 10/10. It’s funny to have a goal of reading less, so this was quite an easy one to tick off. |
| 3 | Be more active with this website and related content. I want to work on regaining some of the traction I lost when I switched hosts. | Partially achieved, 5/10. 2023 was better than 2022 in this regard but still not ideal. |
| 4 | Make the most of the opportunities from my Bristol postdoc, I’m very lucky to have so much academic freedom and want to capitalise on it. | Partially achieved, 6/10. I’m happy to have led on a variety of different projects beyond healthcare (my background), started collaborations and generally started to find my niche. More on why I’m not 100% happy with my progress in a moment. |
What I’m not so happy about in 2023 and plans for 2024
- Not publishing as much on this website as planned. A few years ago I was in a really good habit of posting every week or so, but in 2023 I regularly went several months without posting. In 2024 I want to be in the habit of working on the website regularly (every few days) to become more consistent with posting.
- Not starting a YouTube channel. For a few years I’ve considered starting a YouTube channel around PhD topics just like this website. In January 2023 I even started filming some stuff but got frustrated with myself for how I came across on camera so gave up before even giving it a good go. I’m still not 100% sure it’s a good idea for me to start it since I’m not even great at regularly maintaining this website, which is comparatively much less effort, so we’ll see. It’s still something I’m interested in.
- Not pushing to work abroad for a bit. I’m very fortunate to have opportunities to go abroad, and want to, but haven’t capitalised on it yet. My excuse is that day to day work and short term deadlines took priority. I need to remember to step back and make time for longer term goals, I’ll be disappointed if I haven’t spent at least a month working abroad by the end of 2024.
I hope you have a great 2024. If you’ve found this recap of 2023 interesting, make sure to check out previous posts in the Beyond the PhD Series and you can subscribe below to be notified of new content:
I always enjoy reading your posts! Thank you for sharing, and I wish you all the best for 2024, my Duolingo Quest partner!
Thank you Rohunsingh both for this message and support on Duolingo. Best wishes to you also for 2024. Thanks, Jeff.