With the fervour of someone with an n = 1 positive experience, I thought I’d write about what I learned from a recent writing retreat. My University organises one-day events to encourage writing. They’re on-campus, in the neutral territory of the Library, so perhaps calling them “writing retreats” is a little far-fetched. Nonetheless, the idea is to provide a time and space for people to achieve some writing.

PhD students sometimes get the same bad advice on writing their thesis. I call this advice the Rule of Three . Typically, they get told that their thesis: Will take 3 months to write Should have 3 results chapters Should be 300 pages These bits of advice have one thing in common: they are all wrong. If you have been organised (see below), it should not take 3 months to write a PhD thesis.

As part of the series on development of early career researchers in the lab, we spent a session (with homework) to learn how to write a document in LaTeX. Like the R session, we spent an hour or so in a room with laptops writing a document and then homework was set, to be completed for the following week. There’s a mix of TeX abilities in the lab.

As part of the series on development of early career researchers in the lab, we spent three sessions over three weeks learning the basics of R. In my book “The Digital Cell”, I advocate R as the main number-crunching software but the R literacy in my lab is actually quite mixed. In order to know how to pitch the training, I conducted a quick poll in our lab Slack workspace to find out what R skills people in the lab already had.

Part of a series on the development of Early Career Researchers in the lab. The idea for the CV clinic came from the lab themselves. We had previously had a session on creating a research profile and a large part of that session was spent looking at CVs. We scrutinised some anonymised CVs and suggested improvements to them. From this, the idea came to put everyone’s CVs through the same treatment!

Part of a series on the development of Early Career Researchers in the lab. We spent a session discussing how to create a research profile. This led to a second session on CVs. Here is an outline of what we covered. CVs We talked about different CV formats first of all. We focussed on academic CVs mainly, but we discussed the differences between academic and CVs for jobs outside academia.

How can we contribute to the development of early career researchers in a lab environment? I’m talking about how people in the lab acquire “soft skills” or “get better” in ways that are parallel to doing research. This sort of training can get overlooked in the chase for new results and the excitement of doing biomedical research. I’m testing out a strategy to develop the skills of people in the lab. It’s an experiment.

I was talking to a speaker visiting our department recently. While discussing his postdoc work from years ago, he told me about the identification of the sperm factor that causes calcium oscillations in the egg at fertilisation. It was an interesting tale because the group who eventually identified the factor – now widely accepted as PLCzeta – had earlier misidentified the factor, naming it oscillin.