Tag Archives: #BeginScights

Beginnings – Top 10 Tips to Succeed in Your PhD

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Thursday 26th July saw the launch of SciLogs.com, a new English language science blog network. SciLogs.com, the brand-new home for Nature Network bloggers, forms part of the SciLogs international collection of blogs which already exist in German, Spanish and Dutch. To celebrate this addition to the NPG science blogging family, some of the NPG blogs are publishing posts focusing on “Beginnings”.

Participating in this cross-network blogging festival is nature.com’s Soapbox Science blog, Scitable’s Student Voices blog and bloggers from SciLogs.com, SciLogs.de, Scitable and Scientific American’s Blog Network. Join us as we explore the diverse interpretations of beginnings – from scientific examples such as stem cells to first time experiences such as publishing your first paper. You can also follow and contribute to the conversations on social media by using the #BeginScights hashtag.   

Marialuisa Aliotta is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Edinburgh and carries out research in experimental Nuclear Astrophysics. She is also the curator of the Nuclear Astrophysics Magazine and of Scientific Academic Writing. Her blog, Academic Life, is aimed at providing resources for aspiring and established academics. To find our more, visit: www.marialuisaaliotta.com

“The only way to find out how to do a PhD is to do one.

Therefore all advice is useless…”

                                                                                                                                               Richard Butterworth

 So, you have just graduated and are about to start a PhD. Well done and congratulations! This is certainly an important milestone in your education and you deserve to celebrate both an end and a new beginning. No doubt you are expecting exciting times ahead and plenty of new experiences and opportunities. For the luckiest of you, your PhD might turn out to be an easy ride. For most, however, it will not be all rosy as you first thought. Continue reading →

Beginnings – How to write your first grant proposal

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Thursday 26th July saw the launch of SciLogs.com, a new English language science blog network. SciLogs.com, the brand-new home for Nature Network bloggers, forms part of the SciLogs international collection of blogs which already exist in German, Spanish and Dutch. To celebrate this addition to the NPG science blogging family, some of the NPG blogs are publishing posts focusing on “Beginnings”.

Participating in this cross-network blogging festival is nature.com’s Soapbox Science blog, Scitable’s Student Voices blog and bloggers from SciLogs.com, SciLogs.de, Scitable and Scientific American’s Blog Network. Join us as we explore the diverse interpretations of beginnings – from scientific examples such as stem cells to first time experiences such as publishing your first paper. You can also follow and contribute to the conversations on social media by using the #BeginScights hashtag.   

Faye is a civil engineering professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, who studies river ice processes and dynamics.  She has served on, and chaired, grant selection committees for Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Discovery Grants program and for Canada’s International Polar Year research program.  Faye has a few blogs you might want to check out: “Help for New Professors” provides (often humorous) advice to early career academics and “The Art of Scientific Writing” provides much needed advice on technical writing to graduate students in science and engineering.  Check out Faye’s “River Ice Photo Blog” for beautiful pictures featuring the weird and wonderful world of river ice.

Many thanks to Nature for inviting me to write a guest post for the “Beginnings” series.  I’ve been asked to offer advice to young academics who are facing the daunting task of writing their first grant proposal.  This is a broad topic and, to a great extent, the specific approach is highly dependent upon the agency you’re targeting with your application.  In that context, it’s critical to read the instructions they provide.  Apparently, ~80% of people don’t do that. Amazing! However, beyond that, there are some general tips that apply universally and that’s what I’ll be focusing on today. Continue reading →

Beginnings – 6 Ps for putting on a performance

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Thursday 26th July saw the launch of SciLogs.com, a new English language science blog network. SciLogs.com, the brand-new home for Nature Network bloggers, forms part of the SciLogs international collection of blogs which already exist in German, Spanish and Dutch. To celebrate this addition to the NPG science blogging family, some of the NPG blogs are publishing posts focusing on “Beginnings”.

Participating in this cross-network blogging festival is nature.com’s Soapbox Science blog, Scitable’s Student Voices blog and bloggers from SciLogs.com, SciLogs.de, Scitable and Scientific American’s Blog Network. Join us as we explore the diverse interpretations of beginnings – from scientific examples such as stem cells to first time experiences such as publishing your first paper. You can also follow and contribute to the conversations on social media by using the #BeginScights hashtag.   

Jonathan Lawson is a first year Wellcome PhD student at the University of Cambridge, working on cytoskeletal organisation in the Carazo Salas lab. He is also an enthusiastic science communicator working with the Cambridge science magazine, BlueSci, getting involved in volunteer outreach programmes and sporadically writing on his own blog. Over the last year he has organised academic events for the other graduate students of Jesus College, Cambridge with the goal of encouraging others to talk about their academic interests. Find Jonathan on twitter as @clearsci.

In the beginning there was the word. But the word is no good unless you can talk about it, and so we invented conferences. Conferences lead to debate and research, which lead to more conferences. And this is good.

But, conferences don’t just happen, they must be carefully organised, speakers need to be invited and schedules laid out, you need programmes and resources, funding and advertising. This is one of the exciting tasks I chose to take on during the first year of my PhD at Cambridge:  organising my first conference. Continue reading →

Beginnings – Dos and Don’ts for first time Networkers

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Thursday 26th July saw the launch of SciLogs.com, a new English language science blog network. SciLogs.com, the brand-new home for Nature Network bloggers, forms part of the SciLogs international collection of blogs which already exist in German, Spanish and Dutch. To celebrate this addition to the NPG science blogging family, some of the NPG blogs are publishing posts focusing on “Beginnings”.

Participating in this cross-network blogging festival is nature.com’s Soapbox Science blog, Scitable’s Student Voices blog and bloggers from SciLogs.com, SciLogs.de, Scitable and Scientific American’s Blog Network. Join us as we explore the diverse interpretations of beginnings – from scientific examples such as stem cells to first time experiences such as publishing your first paper. You can also follow and contribute to the conversations on social media by using the #BeginScights hashtag.   

Pursuing an academic career in Palaeontology, Jon began university life as a geologist, following this with a course in biodiversity and taxonomy. While preparing for a PhD in vertebrate macroevolution at Imperial College, he is currently working on policy at the Geological Society. He blogs at https://fossilsandshit.wordpress.com/, tweets as Protohedgehog and co-runs an impending podcast series called Palaeocast.

It’s that time. You’ve been holding it off for as long as possible, but now the inevitable is upon you. You have to attend your first conference. You have to meet and be scrutinised by your peers, while convincing them that you are someone of value to the research community. Your first conference can break you as an academic, or you can leave so richly fulfilled that all you want to do from now on is attend them. The key is picking the right one. Larger international conferences can be a bit overwhelming. You want something a bit more chilled out, a bit more intimate, and a bit cheaper if possible. Break yourself in nice and easy. Continue reading →

Beginnings – Writing your first science paper

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Thursday 26th July saw the launch of SciLogs.com, a new English language science blog network. SciLogs.com, the brand-new home for Nature Network bloggers, forms part of the SciLogs international collection of blogs which already exist in German, Spanish and Dutch. To celebrate this addition to the NPG science blogging family, some of the NPG blogs are publishing posts focusing on “Beginnings”.

Participating in this cross-network blogging festival is nature.com’s Soapbox Science blog, Scitable’s Student Voices blog and bloggers from SciLogs.com, SciLogs.de, Scitable and Scientific American’s Blog Network. Join us as we explore the diverse interpretations of beginnings – from scientific examples such as stem cells to first time experiences such as publishing your first paper. You can also follow and contribute to the conversations on social media by using the #BeginScights hashtag.   

 

Michelle Wynn is a PhD candidate in Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan, working under the supervision of Sofia Merajver and Santiago Schnell .  Her thesis work involves the use of systems biology methods to understand the dysregulated signaling and metabolic networks associated with breast cancer development.  Her long-term goal is to direct a multidisciplinary research group that operates at the interface of theoretical and experimental cancer biology.  She hopes to defend soon.

In graduate school first-author publications are especially important because they represent a key milestone in the transition from trainee to independent researcher – something we all work very hard to achieve.   In October of last year I published my very first first-author research paper.  It was a lot of work and took far longer to write than I anticipated.  I know first-hand that preparing a manuscript can be very difficult and stressful – especially the first time.  I learned a great many things throughout the writing and submission process.   Below, I have listed three of the most important things I learned in the hope that they may be useful to others.

Continue reading →

Beginnings – Bunch of Fives – Why Blogging is Great, and Tips for Starting

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Thursday 26th July saw the launch of SciLogs.com, a new English language science blog network. SciLogs.com, the brand-new home for Nature Network bloggers, forms part of the SciLogs international collection of blogs which already exist in German, Spanish and Dutch. To celebrate this addition to the NPG science blogging family, some of the NPG blogs are publishing posts focusing on “Beginnings”.

Participating in this cross-network blogging festival is nature.com’s Soapbox Science blog, Scitable’s Student Voices blog and bloggers from SciLogs.com, SciLogs.de, Scitable and Scientific American’s Blog Network. Join us as we explore the diverse interpretations of beginnings – from scientific examples such as stem cells to first time experiences such as publishing your first paper. You can also follow and contribute to the conversations on social media by using the #BeginScights hashtag.   

 

Suzi Gage is a PhD student based at the University of Bristol. She’s researching cannabis and tobacco use, and their relationship with psychosis and depression, using Children of the 90s, a birth cohort based in Bristol. In her spare time she blogs, sings, knits, tweets and reads. Her blog, Sifting the Evidence, can be found here. 

I’ve always enjoyed journalism and writing; at school I edited the school mag one year, and I was a music journalist for Pi, UCL’s magazine while studying there, despite being a scientist at heart. Once I left Uni though, the opportunities for writing somewhat disappeared. I started working as a Research Assistant in Bristol, and the thought of journalism left me somewhat. But when I started my PhD, I realised I wanted science communication to be a big part of my studies. My topic of research (cannabis and mental health outcomes) is likely to generate some media interest, so I wanted to be as good as possible at explaining my science. But it was taking part in I’m a Scientist Get Me Out of Here that really showed me the value of science outreach. The scheme involved a lot of science writing, as all questions are answered in text form, but I was speaking to teenagers, so a completely different scientific language was required. Continue reading →