Hi Tudor, Hope you're well.

How about writing it and putting it up on BioArxiv s soon as the first draft is complete?

What a lame excuse.

Nice, Chemical engineering is a really cool field to be in, and interesting too.

Sorry to hear this. Unfortunately, people do get sick. I can appreciate how frustrating this is, but I agree with Tudor Queen, you can use this time well, and could see it as a gift, because imagine all the pressure and stress you've been through, you can now release some of that by relaxation, exercise, and have additional time to go over your thesis. If you want, you could even look for typos and send a list to examiners before-hand or have it with you in the viva, that looks good to them.

Hi again,

Glad to hear from you both! Sorry for my slow reply!

Yes Tudor, I did have the impression that it might work by invitation. Publishing such methodology as papers is something that I've done to explain the more specific techniques I've used in detail. However, such papers are quite limited in terms of pages and are usually for a specific application. It could be possible in another such journal, but then I'd have to apply it to something new and then use the relevant sections.

Thanks Rewt, sorry to hear someone wasted your time with an abstract, did they give you a valid reason for rejection? I think you're right, I guess I'll have to email someone. I've had it in my mind to pursue this idea, but have just been so busy with my two main projects. I think adapting the material I have shouldn't take so long. What was your specific field Rewt, is it engineering?

I appreciate the support. You guys are fantastic! Thanks again :-)

Hi all,

I hope everyone is in good health and staying safe during these challenging times.

I have a bit of an unusual question - how does one go about writing a book chapter from a publishing perspective? I have very detailed theoretical and applied knowledge of a particular area of my field that has come from my research. This will be useful for others and has a lot of applications. The thing is I could write a whole book, but this would be time-consuming and book-chapters would be more suitable.

Any suggestions to go about this would be greatly appreciated, such as how does one contact the relevant publisher? With journal articles, there's usually a page on the publisher's site with submission details and application form. Does one simply find a publisher in the field and contact them directly?

Thanks,
Jamie

Congratulations Sciencegirl!

I don't see why it shouldn't be a problem given the computational nature of your PhD. Also, given you're approaching the end of your PhD and the write-up stage, now would be the time to wind up and do less teaching so as to focus on finishing. My PhD supervisor actually loved to Skype, though we normally tried to meet in person once a week. In your case Skype and meeting in person once or twice a month sounds perfectly reasonable.

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 :-)