Yossa Dwi Hartono

Yossa Dwi Hartono

Computational Biologist / Structural Bioinformatician

Notes from #whisperfest 2020

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I’ve been following Inger Mewburn’s blog The Thesis Whisperer since my PhD days. She and “The Whisper Collective” is organising a conference this year and I’ve signed up for a couple of sessions. I will post some stuff that I learn in this post.

On The Reg live: podcasting with Inger Mewburn and Jason Downs
Should I have a website? (Tseen Khoo)
Soundtrap
Why podcast your research? (Lauren Gawne)
How to start your own podcast
Omnifocus
Narelle Lemon’s podcast, Teachers Supporting Teachers

Voices from the outside: Careers beyond academia
Times are bleak but don’t despair – just do stuff and meet people
mexec careers
Some tips:

  • Subscribe to newsletters
  • CV/Resume:
    • 6 secs for recruiters to scan, and other things that we probably already know, but good to know why they do that
    • Soft keywords – can be overused e.g. team player
    • 3-4 pages
    • Don’t use underlines, brackets
    • footer with date
    • save cover and CV together with filename NameLastDec2020.pdf (or .doc depending on req)

Why academia shouldn’t be a competition
No idea how to summarise this. I feel encouraged, I guess? This touches on some soft aspects of being an academic that I’m not used to evaluate for myself. I think one takeaway is the perennial metric-ising everything problem. On one hand, translating human beings into numbers is a sort of reductionism, but on the other, how else one is supposed to do evaluations and comparisons? Stuff that comes to mind and some that was brought up: IQ, uni ranking, being a good mentor, not being toxic, being a good colleague.

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