[PhD] January 2025 Updates

Overcoming the planning fallacy, insights from the Festival of Genomics, and re-learning how to write an academic paper.

Feb 03, 2025

January was a month focused on planning 2025 and learning new things from others in my field. I hope that February will be the time to implement them. A note of thanks to all that reached out following my Ideas I'd like to write about in 2025 post. It’s very rewarding to receive such a positive response. I am doing my best to reply. Please don’t hesitate to send a follow-up email.

Top Learnings

Learn from others' mistakes when possible. Especially from peers in your field.
Consider taking an “intro” course for a fresh perspective on familiar topics.
Schedule buffer time to absorb new intellectually intense material.
Take a screenshot of your weekly plan and your post-week reality to help you find pitfalls.
Attend an overview conference in your field every year or two to broaden your context.

A bit more about each of them

Learn from others' mistakes when possible. Especially from peers in your field.
- I interviewed eight current or recently graduated PhD bioinformatics/computational biology students about their workflow, paper writing coding and knowledge acquisition tips. I also asked them about how they got to where they are.
- I learned a lot from the interviews and I think it’s helped me reflect and refine things I do in my work. Keep an eye out for the post on this!
Consider taking an “intro” course for a fresh perspective on familiar topics.
- I took a course on “How to Write an Academic Paper” which is offered by Oxford University. Unfortunately, the materials are not publicly accessible. I am working on writing up my notes from the course. I found it useful to streamline my writing and co-authorship delegation process.
- The best test of this is putting into practice which will hopefully occur as I work towards the next few papers. Will keep you all updated.
Schedule buffer time to absorb new intellectually intense material.
- In January I identified topics I want to learn more about and grow in 2025. Most of them require intense mental capacity.
- Overcommitment and time underestimation are still a weakness of mine that I am working on. I am a fan of the Planning Fallacy concept and focused on applying it more to myself this month.
- For example for the “How to Write an Academic Paper” I scheduled four hours of prep time for the course, as we had required pre-reading and videos. I succeeded in my estimate — it took me exactly that amount. This made me a lot more prepared for the course itself and I was able to absorb the new material efficiently on the day itself. I plan to continue placing an estimate on various tasks and seeing how “off” I am to better calibrate myself.
  Source
- This goes in line with being better at making accurate predictions. Here is a free app you can use to train yourself.
Take a screenshot of your weekly plan and your post-week reality to help you find pitfalls.
- I have started doing this, in conjunction with the energy calendar practice by Sahil Bloom which I’ve been doing for around a year already.
- This is also helping me with better time calibration. The idea is simple, take a screenshot of your calendar on Monday and one on next Monday to see how you used your time. Think about where there were missed expectations etc.
- I’ve found that even taking the first screenshot is effective as it makes me reconsider my planning as soon as I mentally know it will go on record.
Attend an overview conference in your field every year or two to broaden your context.
- I attended the Festival of Genomics and Biodata (aptly shorthanded to FOG) in London on January 29th and 30th.
- Aside from the infectious atmosphere of the conference, I also found it extremely useful. I learned about the different types of omics:
- My favourite panel was “Building Upon the Strength of the UK’s Healthcare Data - Pushing Research Towards the Next Frontier” with speakers:
  - Ellen Thomas: Chief Medical Officer, Genomics England
  - Kate Evans: Executive Director of Researcher Data and Product, Our Future Health
  - Naomi Allen: Chief Scientist, UK Biobank
  - Nathalie Kingston: Director, NIHR BioResource
- They spoke about the future of how genomics data will be accessed, shared with researchers, and integrated into clinical care.
- They also outlined some of the current challenges: lack of standardisation between the different institutions, the legal burden of releasing medical records being on the GPs and the need for public dialogue to progress on to ensure more well-informed public participation.

They had mini domes at the conference where you could hear lightning shares.

101 Guides I might write

I have previously written Bioinformatics 101 and I also greatly admire the Codon Guide to Synthetic Biology and MIT’s How to Grow (almost) Anything course.
I am considering writing the following guides:
- Weekly Planning 101
- How to write an academic paper 101
- How to make a good visualisation 101
- Should you do a PhD 101?
- PhD Applications 101
- Omics’ 101 (a BRIEF overview of the different ones)
- Genomics 101
- Wet Lab Work 101
Let me know which ones you would want to write, or if there is one I have missed by replying to this email, leaving a comment, or sending me a DM on Substack.

Papers

Nature’s Index of Neglected Diseases (link)
UKHSA launches new metagenomic surveillance for health security (link)
Multi-Omics Playbook (link)
Toward a Radically Simple Multi-Modal Nasal Spray for Preventing Respiratory Infections (link)
- If you want the PDF DM me
The BIOME study: a randomized controlled trial in healthy adults (link)
- I signed up for updates from this pre-print