I can’t quite believe it, but it has officially been six years since the end of my own PhD, wow!
Lots has happened since, including pivoting to a different research area, buying my first home, and co-founding a tech company – along with a global pandemic of course, who could forget that?!
In this post I thought it would be fun to reflect upon how things have gone over the past six years, comparing it against the plans I outlined just after finishing the PhD in Beyond the PhD: my current and future plans.
Looking for some content reflecting upon my actual PhD? Here are the two most relevant posts:
- The Five Most Powerful Lessons I Learned During My PhD
- My top PhD regrets: 10 lessons learned by a PhD grad
My Original Plans Post-PhD
My viva was on 25th March 2020 and my PhD was awarded exactly six years ago on 1st April 2020.
Originally I had planned to go travelling abroad straight away, so I said to my PhD supervisor that I wasn’t interested in staying on as a postdoc and found new tenants for my London house share.
Unfortunately the swift arrival of COVID put a stop to my travel plans, so I had to stay put in the UK for the time being. About a month after finishing my PhD I wrote the first post in what became the “Beyond the PhD” series which focusses on post-PhD life.
In that first post, I laid out some ideas for short and long-term goals for how I wanted to spend my time. You can read the post for full details but in a nutshell I wanted to take a break, learn some new skills, then work on meaningful things I’m passionate about. Additionally I was also keen to maintain a financial safety net – to continue to build freedom to ensure I don’t ever need to stay in unfulfilling jobs.
The post outlined potential things I’d like to consider working on, which were:
Potential fields of work from my original post
- Coral reef restoration
- Economic sustainability / Green banking
- Urban food growing
- Fighting human exploitation
- Reforestation
- Lab grown meat production
- Fighting exploitation of natural resources
- All things “levelling the playing field” such as fighting racial or sexual discrimination
- Personal finance empowerment
- Or simply carrying on in the field of my PhD: regenerative medicine
I wasn’t sure at the time how I might want to work on topics such as these. I was interested in possibly starting a postdoc role but did say that “I’m not sure whether academia is right for me long term“.
Socially-conscious businesses and enterprises were another option I was considering. I also commented on the idea of starting my own company not being particularly appealing!
Let’s move on to what I’ve actually been up to so far…
What I’ve Been Up To Since My PhD
Soon after the PhD
Let’s start by covering the short-term plans I outlined six years ago:
- Take a break
- Improve my skills
- Develop this website further
- Finish off a few papers (at my own pace)
- Consider new ideas, projects or opportunities
Take a break
Taking a break didn’t really happen, at least not in the way I had hoped.
I started work on my thesis corrections immediately after the viva (well, the day afterwards!), then pivoted to finishing off and submitting a few papers from my PhD.
After that I got straight into learning new skills and plowed a lot of time into writing content for this website – more on both of these in a moment.
All of this was driven by the fact that I had moved in with my girlfriend’s parents at the start of COVID and didn’t feel comfortable (nor was it particularly feasible) to be sitting around relaxing, and of course couldn’t really go anywhere. Any time I wasn’t obviously busy I got given chores to do!
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t sat at a desk all day long but I was certainly a lot more productively busy than I would have liked. I’m skipping ahead but I got a job about six months after my viva and have been busy with work continuously since then. That break should hopefully come in not too long…
Improve my skills
This one I thoroughly achieved.
In the original post I said I was interested in skills such as
- Creating visual content: painting, animation (Blender) and videos
- Meditation
- Coding: Python, making apps and getting an introduction to machine learning
- Baking bread
- Statistics for large datasets
I’m happy to say that I did all of these things except for whatever my ambitions were for “statistics for large datasets”.
I can remember getting up to a fairly long streak with a meditation app, which certainly helped given the living situation!
The most interesting of these skills to bring up is coding. I’d not ever really done any before, besides tiny bits of MATLAB scripts during my undergrad and PhD.
In the months following my viva I did several free online courses to learn Python and the fundamentals of AI. I think I first brought it up here in June 2020. This has proven to be life changing, enabling me to pivot to new research and opening up job opportunities.
Develop this website further
“I didn’t post here as frequently during my PhD as I would have liked, and I’d like to change this going forwards.” Is what I said in my original post.
I did a great job with this goal in the first six months or so after the PhD, before starting as a postdoc. I was posting a new article every week or so, and it was the most productive time I’ve had for this website. In 2020 I posted 41 new articles, having posted 10 and 8 in 2018 and 2019 respectively.
Since being in full time work I’ve been averaging about 15 posts per year. As I say in almost every quarterly update, ideally this would be higher!
“I’m playing with the idea of making videos to compliment the written content. Video content is becoming more and more popular so could help reach a larger audience plus video production is one of the skills I’d like to learn anyway.”
I wish I could say that I made progress towards this. My living situation certainly wasn’t conducive to prancing about making YouTube videos, nor was my nearly 10 year old laptop up to the task of video editing.
Since then I have recorded clips here or there with the potential to turn them into videos but as of yet this is still on the back burner.
Finish off a few papers (at my own pace)
I think I achieved this pretty well.
After finishing the PhD I submitted another three papers to journals which are thankfully by now all published.
There is a final possible paper from my PhD I’ve been toying with writing up for a long time, but there are always more immediate things to work on – not least other possible papers from the work I currently do. That one may have to wait until my next possible career break!
Consider new ideas, projects or opportunities
I’m not really sure what I had in mind here if I’m honest. Looking back through early articles in this series I did try some volunteering and got involved with opportunities as they presented themselves, such as presenting my research.
I suppose I’d potentially hoped to create some new projects myself, which did eventually happen as we’ll come onto.
Longer term
All of the above happened in the first six months or so after my PhD. Here are some of the major things since then.
Jobs and research
Bath postdoc: my first job in AI
After a few months of online coding courses my girlfriend saw a postdoc role advertised at a nearby university. I really wasn’t set on wanting a job but decided to enquire and subsequently apply despite not feeling particularly well qualified for it.
It was a six month long post to try and build an initial prototype of an AI system to help with rare disease detection. I suspect competition for the role wasn’t particularly high since it was a short post and at a time where there was lots of uncertainty. I can remember thinking that I’d be happy if I got it and equally fine with continuing my upskilling.
Anyhow, I went to the online interview, got offered it, and started it remotely in September 2020. Things went really well and within a few months I had the prototype working well. The hospital, who had funded the original six months, funded me for another six months and we managed to apply for a few small grants to extend this. After just over a year I explored the commercial potential by going through a really great scheme we have in the UK called ICURe.
I went on the ICURe Explore programme for three months starting in November 2021. At the end of it I pitched to a group of industry experts who agreed that we should start a spin-out company, which is exactly what we did. More on that shortly.
In the meantime we applied for a sizeable grant which would have originally funded me as a postdoc for about three years. The decision was delayed and delayed to the point that I got a different job, at the University of Bristol, which I’m still in now. We did finally find out that we got the grant, but not until March 2023! Here is a BBC article about it.
IngeniumAI: starting a company
At the end of ICURe we were invited to the next round of support, to help steer the formation of a company and apply for a grant from Innovate UK – the UK funding body for research commercialisation. It was interesting learning what is involved with setting up a company, including lots of the common pitfalls. We applied for a £300k grant from Innovate UK in 2021 and got rejected, but applied again at the next opportunity and got it! Without this we’d not have gone through with starting the company.
We officially spun out in March 2023 and began expanding the team and developing the technology. Originally I was the CTO then I became the CEO. It has certainly been a rollercoaster! I’ll leave writing more for another post.
Bristol research fellow role: leading my own projects
We were close to running out of grant funding several times during my time as a postdoc at Bath, and as we emerged from COVID I thought that I might end up having my overdue career break.
I think at the time I wasn’t particularly interested in another job but I remember applying for two in 2021: one was a research assistant role (ie designed for someone without a PhD) at Bath, in a very mathsy/computer science team. Hasten to say that I wasn’t a good fit for it. I think they said I was overqualified but I remember feeling distinctly under qualified!
In around November 2021, I applied for a quite wacky sounding postdoc role at Bristol. Honestly I didn’t have much of an idea what I was applying for. Anyhow I reached out to the person who advertised it who encouraged me to apply and I was offered it. I started in a very part-time capacity at one day per week in December 2021. It has been amazing, in terms of support, flexibility, and opportunities: largely because my boss had a very nice fellowship until the end of 2025.
They have been incredibly supportive with me splitting my time as needed at the spin-out company and I’ve been lucky to go on many trips.
The main thing I’ve enjoyed though has been the opportunity to get involved with a wide variety of projects and lead my own research projects with undergraduates. Recently this has finally involved working on coral research, which featured in the list of topics I wanted to explore near the top of this post. You can see a preview of this recent work here: 3D Semantic Splatting. I have a longstanding interest in coral and I’ve separately written about how I ended up on a funded trip to help a coral reef project back in 2011.
During my time at Bristol I’ve considered applying for lots of lectureships, but besides applying for one (which I wasn’t offered) I’ve held off for two reasons:
- I can’t imagine trying to balance the spin-out work with starting as a lecturer
- I know I’d never get the career break to go travelling etc since I’d not want to abandon a research group and PhD students
It’s still on the cards, but not yet.
Life
Besides going on several nice holidays post-COVID the main news has been buying my first home. After many years of house sharing it has been great to have some of my own space.
One of my favourite things this has brought is the opportunity to grow fruit plants in the garden. Along with typical apples, pears, and berry bushes I’ve been growing more unusual plants too. Some of these have begun fruiting such as Chilean guava and juneberries. For others, such as ice cream beans, custard apples, and persimmons (okay not unusual if you live in places like Japan!) I’ll have quite a while to wait before they’ll start bearing fruit. It has been a real highlight to spend time in the garden and grow these plants.
I didn’t want to turn this into a mammoth post so for more granular details on what I’ve been up to in these past six years you can of course read about it all in the earlier articles in this series.
Let’s get on to an overview of the main highs and lows.
Highlights From the Past Six Years
Some of my best bits from the past six years have been:
- Going on a six week research visit last summer to Norway. This was by far the longest that I’d spent abroad in any one place and I loved the experience – the research group were great too. If you’re interested in doing one yourself, I’ve written a post about organising research visits.
- This website! Although I haven’t committed as much time to it as I would have liked, since finishing my PhD I’ve published approximately 100 articles, and continue to receive nice messages and an increasing number of invitations to talk at events. I even met a subscriber while on holiday recently in Japan! It’s rewarding to know that people continue to find the website useful.
- Buying a house and now
- 1) Not having to live with housemates (!)
- 2) Having a garden and an opportunity to grow lots of different fruits and vegetables, I love it.
- Supervising students on projects I’ve proposed. It has been fulfilling and many of the students have done such good work that they were able to get the work published. Sadly I’ve not yet supervised any PhD students, which I can see being a much more rewarding relationship.
- Amazing holidays such as walking nearly 300km on the Camino, exploring Morocco and going on a three week trip to Japan. I would really like to do more trips like these. The Camino route I did was about the limit of what could be done as a holiday from a normal job, longer trips would require a different working structure.
- My job at Bristol. I’ve been so fortunate getting involved in a wide variety of different and fulfilling research projects. Compared to my first postdoc role which of course focussed on one particular topic, it has been a great experience to have more freedom, learning a wide variety of skills, and leading research projects. On top of that, I’ve been really lucky to go on lots of international trips to new places.
- Co-founding a tech spin-out company aiming to save people’s lives. Running it day to day isn’t always fun, but I feel fortunate to have the opportunity and it’s a great cause.
Things That Haven’t Gone to Plan
- COVID – Which doesn’t need much of an explanation! Beyond the chaos and suffering it caused, more personally it screwed up my original travel plans. Having said that, I feel fortunate that it helped to justify spending time developing my skills and brought added justification to reassess career plans.
- Working more than I’d have liked. And related to this: pressures and stress from balancing time between a postdoc role, running a company, trying to progress this website, and have a life. When I only had the first postdoc role at Bath it was fine: just like my PhD I treated it as a 9-5 job. However I’ve found it increasingly difficult to contain work in that way whilst splitting my time between different roles.
- Moving to a new place and not actively making friends. I moved to Bristol at the start of COVID (you can read about that here) and largely haven’t done a great job of making friends outside of work. This is still a work in progress – it is very much related to the previous point!
- Still working as a postdoc. Yes I’ve largely been working part-time because of the spin-out company but I’ve still been a postdoc by now for over five years. I also worked for three years as a research assistant before my PhD. I’ve only applied for one lecturer position so it is to be expected that I’m still a postdoc but even so it feels like a long time to effectively be doing research for someone else. I hope that changes over the next six years.
- Not developing this website as much as I could. For much of the past six years this website hasn’t been close to the top of my list of priorities. As such, it hasn’t developed as much as it could, nor have I progressed the other ideas I’ve been considering such as a YouTube channel, Discord community, courses, etc.
My (tentative!) Plans for the Next Six Years
Over the next six years I hope to:
- Spend time abroad. Travelling and possibly working.
- Apply for academic positions. So far I have only applied for one lecturer position here at Bristol. I enjoy academia and would ideally like to stay within it (after some travelling).
- Develop a better work/life balance. Financially I don’t need to be working as many hours as I am (not least because some of them are currently unpaid!). I’d like to potentially work part-time and do other fulfilling things with my time alongside it.
- Start another venture, possibly not high-tech, and potentially not for profit. Here are some current ideas. As you’ll see, I still have very varied interests!
- Coral farming. In the past six years there has been a huge growth in knowledge around induced sexual reproduction of coral. Research papers such as this kicked things off but now there is a heap of research and commercial activity. It still feels like there is a load to explore and potential to develop the science.
- Mushroom growing, and the related idea of using it for packaging.
- Matching medics interested in research with academic projects.
- Growing unusual fruits.
- Something to do with helping people with personal finance goals.
- Many others!
- Continue to develop this website!
If you’ve found this reflections-type post interesting, please let me know.
I’m always keen to get feedback on which content is the most insightful and what to produce more of. You can subscribe below to stay up to date with all future posts (and get access to the free content library!):
