Welcome to the final quarterly update of 2024 on my life as a postdoc and university spin-out company co-founder.
I hope everyone managed to have a break over the festive period and is now feeling re-charged ready to tackle the new year ahead.
I had a very busy few weeks off myself, but one highlight was visiting the Eden project down in Cornwall which I’ve always fancied seeing. It was certainly an unusual way to spend Boxing Day, walking around a tropical rainforest!
Read on for more details on academic and spin-out work, plus life outside of the office.
For previous monthly updates see here: Beyond the PhD Series.
Work
Research fellow (postdoc) job
Work is generally going pretty well. I’ll cover papers and grants separately in the subsections below.
I was invited to be an external examiner for a PhD student at Imperial who I met at a conference earlier in 2024. Knowing that the university probably had some rules about who could and couldn’t examine, I immediately clarified with their supervisors that I’d not been an external examiner before.
Frustratingly it turned out that, yes, it is not possible to be an external PhD examiner if you’ve not done it before – at least for Imperial. Don’t ask me how you can get that first bit of experience!
Papers
A paper we submitted last quarter was rejected from the conference workshop (CCAI NeurIPS 2024). We’ve since submitted an improved copy somewhere else – ESANN 2025.
This quarter I led submission of a paper to another conference (CHI 2025) and it was met with the same fate – rejection. The reviewer feedback is very reasonable, and they raised many of the same concerns that I and my co-authors had in our minds ahead of submission. We’ve been improving the paper and will submit it somewhere else early in 2025. The same conference it was rejected from has a ‘Late Breaking Work’ track so we may submit it there. Here is the preprint of the original version, soon to be updated.
There are a few other papers in the pipeline to be submitted next quarter – at least one to a journal and another to a conference.
Grants
Last quarter I mentioned submission of two grant proposals:
- Co-Investigator for a healthcare project through a new Digital Health Hub (initial estimate~£100k, finalised to £80k). Outcome: successful, yay!
- Co-Prinicipal Investigator for a twin fellowship through the same digital health hub (~£80k). Outcome: rejected. Boo. Their feedback was reasonable.
Between September and December I was involved with a few more grant applications:
- Internal university funding (£5k), with me as project lead / principal investigator (PI). This one carries on the explainable AI for healthcare work which I’ve been involved with over the past few years, including the second paper mentioned above. Outcome: Successful.
- Internal university funding “Impact Acceleration Award” (£50k), as co-investigator. To begin commercialisation of a clinical dashboard. Outcome: Successful.
- Internal university funding “Impact Acceleration Award” (£15k), as principal investigator (PI). To explore commercialisation of an AI for climate (methane emissions) project I’m involved with. Outcome: Successful.
A good few months for grant applications at the university!
Admittedly some of these are for very small amounts of money (i.e. £5k) and are internal awards at the university. These are therefore less prestigious than bringing external funding to the university. Still, it’s good to be successful with the applications and it means that my job contract can get extended which is always useful.
Finally, in December I supported the submission of a chunky £1.25M first stage grant application as a co-investigator. Admittedly I’ve not been involved too much yet since this was just the short initial outline. If we’re invited to the next stage I’ll be much more involved in full proposal submission early in 2025.
My first lectureship application
After mentioning last quarter that I was tempted to apply, I did decide to apply to a job advert for the role of lecturer in AI, here at Bristol. There were two positions available.
Applying for a lecturer role, here in the UK at least, seems to involve submitting an online application plus four key documents
- CV / resume
- Cover letter
- Research statement – your research interests and ambitions
- Teaching statement – your teaching experience and style
I’d not ever put together something before for the research and teaching statements, but was reasonably happy with what I submitted.
Outcome: Sadly I wasn’t invited to interview and haven’t received any feedback to indicate both what my weaknesses were and how far off the mark I was. I knew that the odds were low to get an interview (<5% of applicants were interviewed) but it is still disappointing. If more positions are advertised this year I’ll decide how to proceed closer to the time.
Spin-out company
Things are progressing well at the spin-out company. We submitted a few reasonably big grant applications (£400-700k) which we’ll hear the outcomes of early in 2025.
In December we filmed some content for a press release with the university at the hospital we work with. It’s pretty tricky coming up with answers to questions on the spot and I’m not sure I answered everything perfectly, but we’ll see how it turns out!
I’ve also started engaging more with external stakeholders to form partnerships etc. I’m looking forward to seeing what 2025 brings for the company.
The Savvy Scientist website
New posts
Since the last post in this Beyond the PhD series, I’ve posted two articles:
Website traffic
Traffic was up in 2024 compared to 2023. However, it was only a modest increase given the additional number of articles published.
In 2025 I have a few aims for the website, which include:
- Writing and publishing articles more consistently
- Starting the PhD Profiles series up again – if you’re interested in being featured, please let me know
Time off
DIY – kitchen makeover
My partner and I bought our first home nearly four years ago. Since then, one major area which has been long overdue an update was the kitchen. I’m pretty sure it hasn’t had much of anything doing to it since it was installed 30 years ago – I know the age because lots of the sink plumbing has stickers on it showing it was produced in 1994!
Structurally the kitchen is mostly fine, therefore we decided to give the room a makeover by painting the cabinet fronts, tiles, and at least one wall. We’re nearing the end of painting the cabinet fronts. I’m most unsure about the next bit – painting the tiles. So we’ll see how that goes.
Besides painting, I’ve also made-good the hole in the wall where I installed the new electrics for our dishwasher. We’ve been loving having the dishwasher, definitely the best upgrade we’ve made!
Media I’ve consumed
Books
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, James Clear. Decent book with lots of actionable insights to improve your life. I’d recommend it, especially for reading at the start of a new year.
The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, Allen Carr. No. I’ve never smoked and think it is an awful thing. However I’ve got a family member who does smoke and I was intrigued to see what the book contains given that it has such glowing reviews from lots of ex-smokers. All seems like sensible advice – if you smoke and want to quit it is worth a read.
Having read Deep Work last quarter, I reread some of it around Christmas by mistake – it doesn’t bode well that much of it seemed new to me! Anyhow, it is a good book so I was fine with getting reminded about its contents.
One year ago I said that in 2024 “I expect to read about one book per 4-6 weeks.” which would equate to 9-13 books over the year. In actual fact I’ve read 6 books in 2024.
I do enjoy reading but previously found myself becoming too absorbed by hitting a self-imposed quota of reading two books per month – in fact, it was a previous resolution to read less! In 2025 I’ll simply aim to read regularly, and not set any kind of goal around the number of books.
Duolingo
Although I no longer mention it here, I still use Duolingo every day and have now passed the 1500 day streak mark. Here is my recap for 2024:
I actually spent less time on Duolingo in 2024 than 2023 (1430 minutes). And 1088 minutes across the year only translates to about 3 minutes per day. I think I can do better in 2025!
If you want to connect here is my Duolingo profile.
Exercise
About a year ago I began cycling to work again. I started during my PhD and found it to be a great way to commute with the perk of added health benefits. You can find a whole post about it here: Learning to cycle in London: my first 1000 miles. I’ve now restarted in Bristol and again love it. The commute is fairly long so it is certainly getting me fit!
I recently bought some extra equipment for the home-gym (which sounds much more fancy than it is – really just a pull-up bar and dip station). I now have a weight belt so that I can add weights to my exercises, plus a cable attachment for my chin up bar.
Now I regularly do pull-ups with 5-10kg attached and can do accessory movements like face pulls which pretty much require a cable attachment to be possible. I’ve been happy with my pull-up and chin-up progression in 2024 and want to continue getting this into 2025 by adding more weight and more frequency to the exercises.
Personal finances
Income
Day jobs
My income has been lower than usual this past three months. I’m still paid for 50% of the week (“0.5FTE”) in my university job, but I’ve voluntarily dropped my pay at the spin-out company to enable the money to extend contracts for our staff. By December I had reduced my pay there to zero, meaning my total take-home pay in December was £1606.57…
From January onwards I’ve increased my hours at the university a bit. In part this is to enable me to lead the different grants we’ve recently been successful with – as outlined above.
PhD coaching
I have done a bit more PhD coaching than before. I don’t really push these paid-for sessions much, in large part because I’m busy enough without them on my plate. Over the past 90 days I’ve made £220 (pre taxes and fees).
Gambling and hoping to lose!
In the past I’ve done a lot of matched betting, making around £10,000 from it when I was a PhD student. Read the whole post here if you want.
I’ve not strayed back into matched betting since, but have instead adopted the strategy of hedging my bets, where possible, on societal events I’m concerned about.
Concretely, to make bets on the outcome I don’t want to see happen.
- If it loses, I’m happy
- If it wins, I’ve made some money (though would still prefer the other outcome)
I bet on Trump to win the election and made £250.
Note: I’d never encourage typical gambling and only ever bet money I’m happy to lose.
Savings
In 2024 my savings went up by £20,594 – an average of just over £1700 per month. Although this is a bit less than 2023, I’m very happy with this because:
- My income from my two jobs was inconsistent, and by the end of the year wasn’t far off the minimum PhD stipend in the UK – not the direction you typically want things going in!
- I substantially increased my charity donations compared to previous years.
I don’t fully know what 2025 what holds for me in terms of jobs and associated income. But I remain thankful having been able to build up savings to weather the storm and not have immediate concerns around a temporary drop in income.
Summary & plans
Annual recap
A year ago I set these goals for 2024:
| AIM | RESULT | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Post more consistently on this website. “In 2024 I want to be in the habit of working on the website regularly (every few days) to become more consistent with posting.” | 5/10 I didn’t end up writing every few days, and I posted the same amount of articles in 2024 as 2023: 15 each year. However, there were times where things were going really well with consistent posting and I’d like to build on that in 2025. I’ll blame the times it didn’t go so well on moving to the role of CEO in a company whilst working part time as a postdoc, plus spending a decent chunk of the year working abroad. Yeah, I’m fine with that! Nevertheless, I’m aiming for better in 2025. |
| 2 | Start a YouTube channel. “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.” | 1/10 I’ll admit that this goal was half-baked from the start. To no one’s surprise, I didn’t achieve this goal. I’ll cut myself some slack given how much I had going on in 2024. I still have a lot on my plate so won’t commit to it now either – though I do still sometimes film small snippets of content if/when I do decide to start. |
| 3 | Work abroad. “I’ll be disappointed if I haven’t spent at least a month working abroad by the end of 2024.” | 10/10 The best thing I did in 2024 was spend 6 weeks on a research visit to Norway over the summer. I’m so happy that I pushed to do this. Interested in doing a research visit? Read the post: How to Plan a Research Visit. Between this visit and two overseas conferences earlier in the year, I spent around 9 weeks of the year abroad for work. |
My goals for 2025
1. Better work-life balance
There were times in 2024 where I was working long hours, got pretty stressed, and my life outside of work suffered. In 2025 I want to aim for more balance, whilst also getting better at delegating and coming to terms with leaving things unfinished.
2. More deep work
Weirdly, despite being endlessly busy, I don’t feel like I have that many outputs to show for it. Papers aren’t everything, but in 2024 I published less than half the amount published in 2023.
Yes, I was working fewer hours in a research role but it didn’t feel like the admin overhead reduced proportionally. On the back of reading Deep Work, I want to ensure I’m carving out sufficient time in 2025 to work on the things which matter to me.
3. Go somewhere exciting for a holiday
I was fortunate to go abroad several times in 2024 but largely the exciting destinations were for conferences. I always ensure I take some leave on these trips to have an opportunity to actually see the place, but they’re still not typically ‘proper’ holidays.
Outside of these trips I was pretty drained (see the first bullet point) so went on holiday to somewhere I know well – which makes for an easy holiday. In 2025 I’d like to explore some new places.
4. Do more with this website
I would like to continue building up the website with regular content and more ways to engage. If there’s anything you’d love to see on the website let me know!
5. Spend more time outdoors
I don’t enjoy spending any more time than necessary at a computer – hence why I sometimes struggle with writing content for this site after a day of work! Fortunately, I’m lucky to have a garden at home and in 2025 I want to spend more time enjoying the garden plus going on some hikes.
I’m wishing everyone a great 2025.
Feel free to share your reflections on 2024 and plans for the year ahead. If you enjoyed this post be sure to take a look at previous updates in the Beyond the PhD Series.
Keen to be updated on new posts? Subscribe below!
