Key principles for success in the PhD: get money (fellowships), contribute to the world (open source), do science (manage yourself)

1. Dr. You or: How I learned how to
stop worrying and love the PhD
Olga Botvinnik
UCSD Bioinformatics Bootcamp
Sept 19th, 2015

2. Outline
• Get $$
• Contribute to the world
• Do science
Fellowships
Managing yourself
Open source

3. FELLOWSHIPS

4. Who am I?
• NDSEG Fellowship winner (top 6%)
• NSF Honorable Mention (top 10%)
• Hertz Foundation Fellowship Finalist (top
50/800 applicants)
• NumFOCUS John Hunter Technical
Fellowship winner (first awardee)
• Contributor to open-source (wrote
prettyplotlib python package,
contributor to seaborn)

5. How did I get these fellowships?
• 2012-2013, pre-PhD, applied for 6
fellowships and got zero money
• 2013-2014, 1st year, applied for 6
fellowships and got NDSEG fellowship
• 2014-2015, 2nd year, applied for 3 and got
NumFOCUS
I applied to 15 and won 2.

6. How can you get fellowships?
• UCLA GRAPES
– https://grad.ucla.edu/funding/
– Can search by award requirements, e.g. US
Citizen, female, year, whether it’s for travel
abroad, etc.
• Stanford FISP
– https://fisp.stanford.edu/
• Google “Fellowship database” and you’ll
get a lot
NSF is not the only one! Fellowship databases have 1000s of
opportunities.

7. How do you write fellowship
applications?
• Guiding principal: Make it as easy as
possible for the reader to say “heck YES
this person should get all the money!”
• Most have two components:
1. Research statement
• Common pitfall: Too broad or not testable
2. Personal essay
• Common pitfall: Not specific or doesn’t show why
you love science

8. How do you write fellowship
applications? (continued)
• Read examples
– From our program: http://bit.ly/bisb-fellowships
– Search “nsf fellowship example essays” and you’ll
get tonnes
• Read each others!
– Organize a fellowship peer review with students
from all years
– Learn about how awesome your peers are and
get feedback from people who have won
fellowships
• Deadlines start in Oct!

9. Shameless pitch: Graduate
Bioinformatics Council (GBIC)
Graduate Bioinfo
gbic-ucsd.github.io
Wanna be a first-year representative? Come talk to me!

10. OPEN SOURCE

11. • “Social coding”
• Many open source projects are hosted here,
including Python packages
• All public projects are free and private projects
cost $$
• You can get a free academic account with your
UCSD email and get 5 private repositories
• Software jobs often want code samples, so they
will look at your code on Github!
– “Github is your resume”

12. Your projects on GitHub
• As much as you can, work on your research code
in public repositories
• For excellent project templates, check out:
github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter
• This gets you several benefits:
– Pre-built Python package with the correct structure so
you can focus on the code and not the packaging
– Free use of Travis-CI, a “continuous integration”
service which runs all your tests every time you push
code to Github (travis-ci.org)
– Free use of CoverallsIO, which checks your test
coverage (coveralls.io)
– Online documentation, very useful for both you and
your collaborators (“github pages,” readthedocs.org)

13. Collaborating on GitHub
• You will find bugs in open source code
• Be a good citizen: if you fix the bug for
yourself, fix it for everyone. Or at least report
it to the project devs.
• Contributing to other projects exposes you to
other styles of coding and improves your own
code (true story)
• Use forks, branches and pull requests for
the commonly used GitHub flow model:
https://guides.github.com/introduction/flo
w

14. MANAGING YOURSELF

15. Grad school != undergrad
Undergrad Grad school
You
You
Your
advisor
School,
advisor,
classes

19. Your PhD is your PhD
and no-one else’s.
You
Your PhD

20. SUPPLEMENTARY

21. Grad school

22. How did I attend conferences for free?
PyData NYC 2013
Strata Silicon Valley 2014
This led to Travis Oliphant, the
author of Numpy and CEO of
Continuum Analytics
(Anaconda Python distro) to
contact me about Continuum’s
diversity fellowships for
PyData
This led to the Strata outreach
committee contacting me and
arranging a free pass in
exchange for live-tweeting
PyCon 2014: applied for fellowship directly

23. Why should you care about social
media?
• Anytime someone meets you, they will
google your name
– If that doesn’t work, they’ll do “your name
UCSD”
• Having at least SOME online presence is
much better than none
• You will get jobs (and some fellowships)
much easier if people can find out more
about you than just your LinkedIn profile

24. How to have an online presence:
Bare minimum

26. • “Facebook for jobs”
• Recruiters will contact you, before you
even finish graduate school!
– ….if you have the right things on your profile
• Besides your regular resume type things
on your profile, there’s a few key points

27. Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile:
why?

28. Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile:
your title
• Don’t let “Student” be the first thing in your
title
• If you are doing data science-like data
analysis, put “Data Scientist”
• If you’re doing algorithm development, put
“algorithm developer” or something to that
extent

29. Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile:
your summary
Too long!
On the right track, could say more

30. Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile:
your summary
Brief academic description of you so far.
Research interests: scientific buzzwords
Specialties: computer science buzzwords
Programming languages: best first
[Other, e.g. graphic design]

31. Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile:
your connections
• Recruiters will try to contact you to be your
“connection” first because then they don’t have to
pay LinkedIn’s fees
• Without going overboard, connect with other
people (that you know) in your field
– Fellow graduate students at UCSD
– People you know from pre-PhD school (undergrad,
jobs, etc)
– People you meet at networking events
• By seeing who you are connected to, recruiters
will have a better sense of who you are

32. How to have an online presence:
Bonus points

33. Extra points for online presence:
Twitter

34. Extra points for online presence:
Personal website
Use: flavors.me for design and buy a domain for $10/year

35. Extra points for online presence:
blog
Use: github pages and pelican for posting

36. How to get free money
Or, why social media is an important part
of your grad school game
Olga Botvinnik
Bioinformatics Bootcamp
Sept 26th, 2014