Overview of Jamie_Wizard

pm133, didn't mean to offend. I've seen load of your posts where you offer good advice. I did, however, notice some bias in a few - to paraphrase your opinion "Oh yeah, I know loads of dumb people who've got into those top 'RG' universities, they were nothing special. The whole prestigious university thing is bullshit. Just my opinion of course!" In my view that's not particularly helpful. Just my view of course ;-)

2.1 should be fine, go for it!

The only way in which the classification is likely to affect you is in comparison to other applicants - the application process has to be fair in recognising academic grades when releasing funding for scholarships. So this will be more of an issue for very highly sought-after scholarships.

I was also approached for a post-doc with a famous Russian professor in the UK in a specialist field - Machine Learning. He and his colleagues made some pioneering contributions that transformed the field (they invented conformal prediction in ML). In my case, towards the end of my PhD, which was going really well, I wasn't very proactive in searching for the next position until the last moment, rather focusing on getting it all completed and finishing my publications. The downside to this was that I heard of others having organised their post-docs and jobs before they completed and I felt I'd left it a bit until the last minute.

Although I achieved 3 full papers and presented at 5 conferences before I finished, I wasn't as proactive and as enterprising in creating collaborations as Tudor Queen.

That said, the professor I mentioned ran a seminar for staff and post-graduate students where he invited his previous PhD students who ended up working in companies such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook . Our department was small and everyone had an idea of what area others were working on. I sometimes attended the seminars, and there were drinks afterwards where he got to ask me more about my work - in particular he was interested in my background in Chemistry and my PhD in distributed computing.

As I was submitting, I was approached by the professor who encouraged me to apply for his post-doc position in Machine Learning for Drug discovery. I interviewed for it and got the position.

I'm currently working in a consulting role in a medical research institute, but now I'm leaving there now to start a post-doc in Imperial college.

But achieving a Nobel prize means the science is good - it's outstanding and absolutely NOT secondary! I sense a whiff of the Fox and Sour grapes in what you're preaching pm133, and I've called it out before. [no offence intended]

For those that don't know it, story goes that the fox tries to eat grapes from a vine but cannot reach them. Rather than admit defeat, he states they are undesirable. The expression "sour grapes" originated from this fable.

The following list speaks for itself:

As for aiming for a prestigious institution (Russell group or others) for post-doc, you'll usually need to demonstrate that you're at the top of your game, and more importantly, have something significant to contribute to that research group. One doesn't necessarily need to go to such a prestigious institution to do good quality, impactful research. That said, it is usually the most impactful research that is carried out at these institutions.

All the best,
Jamie

Hi there,

It's good that you're ambitious but I think you need to align your attitude with your goals, because when you say "currently I don't have any first-authored papers, and my supervisor isn't planning on making me write one.", it appears as if you think it's your supervisors PhD and career, especially when you use the phrase "making me write one".

I read your later reply about your supervisor using parts of your data for other peoples papers. A good supervisor should be able to balance their own research goals with keeping plan to guide the PhD student to develop and have enough peer-reviewed material for their PhD and viva. When this doesn't happen, the PhD student/candidate should ensure the supervisor is reminded of this and is not jeopardising their PhD. I think your supervisor has let you down in this regard, but then I also think you have let yourself down for not challenging this and standing up for your PhD -- believe me, unless you have very easy-going examiners, you'll need to stand up for your PhD in the viva!

After the first year(s) up until the upgrade to PhD-proper (usually 1-2 years) and when one becomes a PhD candidate, really it doesn't make sense to not take full responsibility for your own development and publishing, even if that appears daunting. Ideally, PhD candidates would have gotten a feel and developed a bit of confidence in their first 1-2 years submitting to and presenting at conferences, and submitting papers (even if they are reject or have significant amendments) - it's part of the learning and development process.

By the sounds of it, you've been fortunate with your experiments and results - as you know, in the sciences experiments can go wrong - your supervisor is making use of those results to compliment others work. I think you need to be more proactive, especially now that you're approaching the end.

...I mean trees just dumped in the street do nothing to spruce up the area.

Haha, thanks Tudor. Yeah, I am totally with you on working in softer ambient light.

We may have missed the local councils Tree collection :-)

Hahaha the photo was from the other day, but I didn't get a chance to actually post the reply!! That said, I was always told it was the 6th to get rid of the tree, and feel a bit weird for still having the tree. Just been too busy to take it down (having to pack everything away), lol

So, to sum up. I absolutely love Linux (it's necessary for my research and computation work), but I hate it for Microsoft Office (it can be run using Wine) or LibreOffice. It's OK for Latex editing in Texmaker, but prefer Mac or Windows for that. It's alright for viewing PDFs, but again my mac/windows laptops are just nicer for this.

Eng, that's the funniest operating system analogy I've heard, it made me laugh out loud!

Tudor, you're most welcome.

Nead, VMs (virtual machines) are a useful tool, especially when running them to provide compatibility for software or servers (although this is being superseded by the containerisation tools such as Docker and Singularity). They are, however, often quite slow when it comes to graphical user interfaces, also requiring a lot of RAM and CPU resources.

This is my cluster, now in my living room. They each run Ubuntu 16.04-LTS, have 6 cores (12 hyperthreaded cores), and 32GB RAM each. But the badass part is I managed to get it working with Infiniband and I'm getting ~8 Gbit/sec (8x faster bandwidth than Gigabit ethernet)...Computation is done with Openlava (Opensource IBM LSF) and Apache Spark (Hadoop platform).

I usually use it via my MacBook Air, my desk (on the left), or sometimes via my windows laptop.

[url=https://ibb.co/L0CFbbt][/img]
[url=https://ibb.co/vLMjMFP][/img]

They should all work. When I ordered my Dell Worksation, I was able to choose to have it pre-installed with Ubuntu. Installation would never pose a problem for me (as I maintain Linux servers), but I was pleasantly surprised at this. So, perhaps you could order directly from Dell. Alternatively, you can download Ubuntu 18 - make sure you go for the LTS version (Long Term Support), which means it's supported for many years to come. That way you could pick up a cheaper laptop from Curry's/ PC World and then install it yourself, electing to wipe windows. In my experience, Dual boot, where Ubuntu offers to install alongside windows, is quite unreliable. If something goes wrong, you'll need a technical person to help fix it and may not be able to access your Windows installation even if it's present. So I'd avoid using that option, and install Ubuntu as the sole operating system.

Best wishes,
Jamie

I'm not familiar with CLAN or CHILDES, but on quick inspection of their website, it appears their "UNIX" version (actually Unix is pretty dead, and Linux has taken over - so I guess they are referring to Linux) only supports command-line (i.e. you run the program by typing in commands) and doesn't have a visual interface. This should be straightforward for you to pick up.



Linux will work on pretty much most machines and will do the best job of making use of resources optimally. However, a potential issue could be support for Graphics chipset (the graphics circuitry on the machine). Specifically, finding driver software to get the most out of some graphics cards could mean having to go to the effort of installing propriety drivers (instead of using existing ones). If the graphics chipset is common, then this is less likely to be an issue.

Hi Tudor,

Hope the following helps...



I use Linux at my workplace workstation, my workstations and servers at home (alongside Windows and Mac OSX). It's a must for Computer Science, Computational Biology/Chemistry. The only issue I had at work, where we use Skype for Business, was that the Business version wasn't available for Linux/Ubuntu.

I personally use two laptops. My personal laptop is a Windows 10 Professional laptop with Linux Ubuntu Subsytem for windows installed - it can be installed as an option at any time. This allows me to use Linux Commands on my Windows laptop which has been exceptionally helpful duing my PhD. Though typicallly I'd log in remotely to a powerful cluster of machines in my spare computer room (at my mum's house) or the universities cluster. My present work laptop is Mac OS X. The main thing is it's light to carry and OS X has a Linux core, allowing me to also use Linux commands.




I know of a few non-technical people who use Linux (Ubuntu) on their laptops without any problems and they seem quite happy with it. You're right, Libre Office is compatible, but in my experience I never enjoyed it as it corrupted my documents and formatting was often a bit off.

Thank you Tudor, you too! Yes, Prague was lovely.

Bring on 2020! :-)