August was unexpectedly really busy, and didn’t go as planned. Last month I said I wanted to take a break, and well, it didn’t really happen. I also said I wanted to create my first YouTube video and yeah that didn’t happen either.
Between a job interview, delivering a seminar presentation and unexpectedly having a LOAD of paper revisions to work on, my hopes of taking the month easy while casually trying to progress towards the goals I set for myself in last month’s report simply didn’t pan out as I hoped.
But that doesn’t mean that things went badly, in fact by all measures it was a very successful month!
You can read all my previous monthly reports here.
How I spent my time in August
In August I spent considerably longer working on academic things than planned. In fact if we break down that “Academic work” section you’ll see where all my time really went:
47 hours spent (unexpectedly) working on paper revisions in August: yeah that’ll explain why the month didn’t go as planned!
Academic work
Publications
Right at the end of July I submitted two papers to a themed special issue: Paper “B” which had been rejected elsewhere, and Paper “D” which I had as a chapter from my thesis but needed work in July to get it up to scratch for a journal.
Editor responses
About a week into August I received a message from an editor requesting we make major revisions for Paper B. When this happened for me previously I was given 60 days so you can imagine my shock when I read that we were given 10 days!!
It seems like this isn’t at all typical, though internal deadlines with it being a special issue are a likely explanation.
Thankfully the changes didn’t involve any further experiments, otherwise the deadline would have been entirely impossible to meet: not least because I’ve left the research group! The changes weren’t too major and nonetheless there were 44 (!) of them and some of them were pretty in depth.
I saw this meme the other day and it is pretty fitting:
With only 10 days I had basically no breathing room: remember you ought to give time to circulate the drafted response to your co-authors which itself takes several days.
It certainly wasn’t well timed that during these 10 days my girlfriend had booked several days off and I had an interview scheduled. That’s why it pays to be savvy with how you spend your time, get your part done and sent across to co-authors quickly.
Why didn’t I ask for an extension?
The length of time you get granted for resubmission gives an indication of how much work they’re expecting from you. When you get given a short timeframe, only limited changes can be expected.
If we’d asked for an extension it could have been reasonable to expect to see a lot more data: which we couldn’t really provide no matter how long we had available. It was better to just get on with it and return our response quickly.
Resubmission
After several very long days (one being 13 hours long) I got the changes to Paper B submitted.
Then guess what, less than 36 hours later I received an email now saying that major revisions were requested for the other study, Paper D! This time there were three reviewers, totalling only 10 comments. Even so, coming straight off of a very hectic 10 days I really struggled to motivate myself to get it done straight away so procrastinated for several days.
Finally I realised that I’d rather get something rough and ready circulated among the co-authors than run down the clock by which point it would be too late to make any further changes.
Therefore I decided that I’d get it finished by the end of that day, and wouldn’t sleep until it was ready. This wouldn’t have been healthy if there were more comments, but I knew they were all do-able. Circulating the draft to co-authors is so useful, there were a few points I was stuck on and within a few hours I’d had some help to get them addressed.
While I was still addressing these changes, Paper B which I had resubmitted, came back and this time wanted minor revisions within 5 days and it became a bit stressful. Note to self: Try to avoid sending off two papers at the same time!
Anyhow, I got the two papers resubmitted right at the end of August.
In case it’s useful to anyone here is a timeline of everything:
| Date | Paper B | Paper D |
|---|---|---|
| 9th August | [Under review since end of July] | [Under review since end of July] |
| 10th August | Editor: Major revisions. Deadline: 10 days | |
| 11th | ||
| 12th | ||
| 13th | Draft response circulated to co-authors | |
| 14th | ||
| 15th | ||
| 16th | ||
| 17th | ||
| 18th | ||
| 19th | ||
| 20th | Resubmitted within 3 hours of the deadline! | |
| 21st | Editor: Major revisions. Deadline: 10 days | |
| 22nd | ||
| 23rd | ||
| 24th | ||
| 25th | Editor: Minor revisions. Deadline: 5 days. Draft response sent to co-authors | Draft response sent to co-authors |
| 26th | ||
| 27th | Resubmitted | |
| 28th | ||
| 29th | ||
| 30th | ||
| 31st | Resubmitted |
So at the end of the month I was waiting on decisions for both papers.
Spoiler alert for the next update: Since I already shared it on Twitter, on 1st September both papers were accepted! What a relief and a result like that certainly makes all the hard work in August seem worth it.
I filmed some footage as I was going through the process so once everything is finalised I’ll put that video together.
There is still another paper (“C”) which I’ve got to put some time into, but need a break from papers for a bit!
Applying for my first postdoc
Despite previously saying that I wouldn’t try to get a conventional job, last month I decided to apply for a postdoc at the nearby University of Bath. You can read why I decided to apply in the last update.
Anyhow, in August I was offered an interview and was asked to prepare a 10 minute presentation on why I think I would be suitable for the position. From experience I know that interview panels typically use a scoring system so it’s always a good idea to go point by point through the job spec to make sure you cover everything.
The Interview
The one hour long interview went okay, there were a panel of three interviewers and they gave me a decent grilling. There were a few answers I gave which in hindsight I wasn’t completely happy with but that’s pretty much inevitable.
As outlined last month they were ideally after someone with a good amount of coding experience, something which I’ve been working on but certainly wouldn’t say I’m an expert in just yet. I thought that I’d perhaps been a little too truthful that I fell short in this regard.
The Outcome
A few days after the interview I got an email saying… they were still deliberating over the decision: at least it wasn’t a rejection.
The day after that I had an email saying that I was their first choice and that they’d love to offer me the job!
I was pretty shocked to get offered the only position I’ve applied for, and one which I felt I wasn’t fully qualified for. This highlights two things for me:
- Don’t be put off thinking it’s not worth applying
- Make use of online courses to expand your skillset and add credentials where you’d otherwise be lacking
Two things which I think massively helped me were:
- The aforementioned courses I’ve gone out of my way to pursue
- A side-project from my PhD (in fact Paper C) which has some relevance to this postdoc role
What is the job?
Now the interview and everything is out of the way I can share more details: later in September I’ll be starting as a postdoc at Bath, working to automate image processing of clinical CT scans to diagnose cardiovascular diseases. The project uses some of the skills I developed during my PhD but also has large elements of coding in it, with potential to utilise machine learning algorithms.
Coding and machine learning? Yes, exactly what I’ve been taking courses in since finishing the PhD. I am sure I would not have got the position without this extra boost in credentials these courses have provided.
The position is only six months long so there isn’t much breathing space for making mistakes. I’m pretty nervous because it’ll be pretty different to what I’ve done before, and starting a new job during C19 isn’t ideal. I’m sure it’ll involve some headaches but I applied for this job precisely to push myself and develop my skills.
I recorded footage of the whole process for applying for this job too so expect a video of that to come too!
How much will I earn?
The salary for this position is £33,797. This is over £3000 less than what I was earning as a research assistant (as a non-PhD holder) towards the end of my time at Imperial!!
Bath is an expensive city so financially it wouldn’t be a great situation long term, and clearly I could earn more elsewhere. But money wasn’t my motivation and the position is only for six months. I’m looking to potentially use this experience to transition to image processing and ML for other applications so the opportunity to gain these extra skills and credentials will more than make up for any drop in salary.
Also: remember that over the last six months I’ve been trying to learn exactly these skills completely unfunded so the prospect of getting support to develop these skills for a very worthwhile purpose while getting paid is pretty perfect!
Other academic-related things
I gave my first proper presentation in ages:
If you missed it and are interested to actually know what I worked on during my PhD, I’ll let you know once they’ve put it online.
I still get really nervous giving presentations, and this was the longest proper presentation I’ve ever given (20 minutes). I think it went okay but frustratingly there were some issues with my internet connection, we’ll see how bad it was once the presentation is available online!
Mentoring
August task: Get back in touch with my mentee.
I have got back in touch with my Prince’s Trust mentee but it’s still slow moving and I want to ensure I’m providing them with enough support. If we can’t get into a regular routine I might need to change things up.
The Savvy Scientist website
As usual four posts went live in August:
- Beyond the PhD: August 2020
- PhD FAQs – A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Doctoral Study
- PhD Profiles: Anurag, 2nd Year in Molecular Medicine at University of Turin, Italy
- Eat well on a student budget: my guide to creating cheap, quick, healthy & tasty meals
In August I decided to focus on the website for the first week of the month which turned out to be ideal. The intention was to take the rest of the month easy but of course after the first week there was a huge amount of work for the papers. If I’d not have worked on the website at the start of the month it would have been a lot more stressful to try and keep up with this at the same time as all the other academic work!
Now that I have a few weeks before starting the new job, I’m aiming to get some more content scheduled for the next few months because of course I’ll be a lot more busy on weekdays going forwards for the next six months.
What tends to happen is that I start writing a post then it becomes a monster essay of many thousands of words so it becomes split up into several [relatively] small posts. This is exactly what happened with the food series. Don’t think that I split them up to add suspense, I just can’t imagine many people wanting to read a ~6000+ word article! I need to make a conscience effort to add some shorter posts, I’m sure some of them must be too longwinded.
As ever please let me know what content you’d like to see more of!
PhD Chats
In August I also offered a small number of one-on-one sessions with readers to help answer PhD questions. There were a great mix of questions from applicants across a huge range of fields spread all around the world. To everyone who took part: it was really nice to chat and hopefully give some useful advice!
When I put the offer out there it was before August became hectic with papers and the job interview. The sessions were rewarding but also a bit of hassle to organise so I’m undecided on whether or not to carry it on. If I do carry it on it’ll be emailed out to subscribers so if you’re interested I suggest signing up for updates: it is free!
Website Stats
In August there were 4757 unique views, 3530 users and 3145 came organically (from search engines). These numbers are slightly down compared to July but the trend is certainly upwards.
The stats are still pretty paltry compared to what other people may achieve but I’m starting to get emails semi-regularly from people saying that the website has helped them which makes it all worth while!
Quora
August action: actually answer one Quora question a week in my weekly slot.
Yeah I still didn’t answer any Quora questions in August, but will cut myself some slack. Let’s drop this monthly goal for now.
Learning new skills
Computing
August task: complete weeks 7-10 of the Machine Learning course.
Done!
I was motivated to see this one through because it of course relates to the postdoc position I was interviewing for and am since going to be starting soon.
It’s been really fun and I’m looking forward to hopefully applying some of what I’ve learned to a real world problem in my new job!
We’re all so fortunate to have courses such as this available for free. I really urge others to make the most of them, especially if you’re looking to transition to a new path. There are lots of platforms, and I’ve been using Coursera.
September task: Finish the Machine Learning course.
Meditation
I meditated every day in August, for a total of just over five hours. Almost all of this meditation was unguided where I simply set a timer. I like the simplicity of doing it this way, though without guidance do sometimes get caught up in thoughts. I’ll drop this part of the monthly series now that it’s so established in my routine.
Laptop Maintenance
Last month I mentioned that my 2011 laptop was still trundling along just fine, but it has pretty much always run really warm, with the fans ramping up really quickly and sounding like a tornado.
I was doing a bit of reading suggesting that the thermal paste applied to the CPU can dry out after a year or two. Well I’ve not touched it since buying the laptop over eight years ago! I decided to fully disassemble the laptop to apply new thermal paste. It also gave an opportunity to clean out all the dust, yuck!
I really should have carried out a more scientific test under heavy load and comparing processing power but anyhow, here is a before and after of the minimum idle temperatures I’ve managed to record.
Changing the thermal paste certainly seems to have helped breath new life into what is otherwise pretty old technology!
Video production & editing
August task: Get one video finished and online. That last bit scares me!
I’m ashamed to say that this is the main thing I didn’t achieve in August. It’s now right at the top of my list for September. Although I didn’t get a video edited and online in August, I did create content to be used in a few videos.
It’s early days but if there is any content you’d particularly like to see, just let me know.
September task: Get a video finished and online.
Time off
Media I’ve consumed
Books
- The Other Half of Augusta Hope – More interesting than I expected it to be, though a bit cliche. It turned out to be a very topical read, with a resurgence in [unjustified] hatred against refugees crossing the English Channel just the week after I read this.
- The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 – A lot of people would be bored by the economics but I enjoyed it. Again this was pretty topical with the current C19 stuff going on, both in terms of the effects on human behaviour and economics.
- The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – I do like short stories and this classic was worth reading. I get old books like this through Project Gutenberg.
Podcasts
- Patagonia episode of How I Built This – It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Patagonia, and the more I hear the more I like it.
Other interesting things
My new favourite thing is this livestream of a coral reef in Florida:
- This work about imaging depth estimation
- The most insane production quality educational video about colour
- AI + Photoshop recreating Roman emperors
- This pretty trippy work by researchers at Google, particularly changing the lighting:
TV/Films
- Floor is Lava on Netflix. Pretty silly but fun!
- The Last Dance, again on Netflix. Despite having little interest in basketball, the story is compelling. Also I had no idea that Michael Jordan went off to play baseball during his career!
Monthly finances
Income
No income to speak of this month: no matched betting, Prolific or anything else. The Kolabtree project meeting I had last month hasn’t materialised into anything. I’ll be starting at Bath midway through September so would much rather focus on non-financial activities.
Savings
Investments
Things continue to go stratospheric. In fact, although I wouldn’t classify it as income, a few of my investments have gone so crazy this past month my assets have gone up almost as much as if I’d had a job and that’s without an enormous amount of investments.
Although fictional, reading The Mandibles this past month certainly has some eery parallels and has made me extra cautious. Perhaps some of the goliath companies can keep it up but I think trouble lies ahead. I’ll be looking to rebalance a few investments in September so that they don’t come too far out of proportion compared to everything else. I still need to work on my investing post!
Premium Bonds
Premium Bonds now represent a pretty good buy, with an estimated value better than most bank accounts.
I spent some time in August moving any money from bank accounts earning less than 1.4% (most of them!) into Premium Bonds. Who knows, I might win big, not that it would really change how I’m choosing to spend my time!
August Summary
I spent my time in August very differently to how I had initially planned.
When you submit a paper there is always a chance you’ll have to put in a lot of work to make major changes but even so you don’t expect to have to work to such tight deadlines, nor balance doing so on two papers concurrently.
Although not everything went to plan, including having a break, I’m of course very pleased and thankful to have got a job and effectively published two papers in a month. Now I really do need a bit of time off while I can!
September Plan
I start my new job on the 21st of September, which gives me a few weeks to get a few tasks done but ultimately I want a break!
September goals:
- Create a YouTube video
- Finish the ML course
- Chill out before starting the new job
Although I’ll soon be starting a full-time job, I’ll keep this series going and will hopefully have some insights into the life of a postdoc to share.
If you’ve followed this series for a while hopefully it has inspired you to consider starting something new. Adding some variety to your life, especially with things as they are, can be priceless. Plus you never know where it may lead!
Hi
Congrats on your new job . I have a question I’ve been researching on graduate programmes from different companies ( EY , Grant Thornton etc ) and I noticed their salary is between 24 k to 27 k . But you mentioned for your research assistantship you earned 33k . I just always thought that industry Jobs pay higher than academia .
My question is , is this always the case ?
Thanks for your messages Esther.
I agree that generally industry pays higher than academia, though as you’ve noted it isn’t always the case. There are of course a load of variables and it can be a little difficult to find suitable like-for-like positions to compare between.
For example grad schemes such as those you mention, may well provide a lower starting salary with the idea that they’ll be providing more in-job training than you’d get outside of such a programme and crucially that at the conclusion of your training your earnings can jump up. Many grad schemes also award pay increases during the scheme.
I’d be surprised if within 5 years the average grad at such a firm wasn’t earning a lot more than the amounts you’ve quoted. When I was working in industry (albeit briefly, as an engineering graduate not as part of any kind of training scheme) my salary was north of £30k.
In regards to earnings in academia, perhaps I didn’t phrase it too well but my salary as a research assistant at Imperial was in fact more like £37k, though it’s important to note that Imperial pays pretty much the highest academic wages in the UK. When I was working at the same level in Cambridge and Cardiff my earnings were more like £25k. The ceiling for earnings, and availability of positions, in academia is generally no competition for industry. Maybe you’ve already seen it but certainly read this post if you’ve not:
https://www.thesavvyscientist.com/how-much-does-a-phd-student-earn/
Best wishes,
Jeff.
I understand now . Thanks for the detailed explanation!
No worries, I hope it helps!