How to get free money Or, why social media is an important part of your grad school game

Dr. You or: How I learned how to stop worrying and love the PhDOlga BotvinnikUCSD Bioinformatics BootcampSept 19th, 2015

OutlineGet $$Contribute to the worldDo scienceFellowshipsManaging yourselfOpen source

fellowships

Who am I?NDSEG Fellowship winner (top 6%)NSF Honorable Mention (top 10%)Hertz Foundation Fellowship Finalist (top 50/800 applicants)NumFOCUS John Hunter Technical Fellowship winner (first awardee)Contributor to open-source (wrote prettyplotlib python package, contributor to seaborn)

NDSEG = National Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (from US Department of Defense)NSF = National Science Foundation4

How did I get these fellowships?2012-2013, pre-PhD, applied for 6 fellowships and got zero money2013-2014, 1st year, applied for 6 fellowships and got NDSEG fellowship2014-2015, 2nd year, applied for 3 and got NumFOCUSI applied to 15 and won 2.

cast your net wide

Honestly, I dont think I would have gotten the NumFOCUS fellowship if it wasnt for my open source track record5

How can you get fellowships?UCLA GRAPEShttps://grad.ucla.edu/funding/ Can search by award requirements, e.g. US Citizen, female, year, whether its for travel abroad, etc.Stanford FISPhttps://fisp.stanford.edu/ Google Fellowship database and youll get a lotNSF is not the only one! Fellowship databases have 1000s of opportunities.

All of these names are google-able6

How do you write fellowship applications?Guiding principal: Make it as easy as possible for the reader to say heck YES this person should get all the money!Most have two components:Research statementCommon pitfall: Too broad or not testablePersonal essayCommon pitfall: Not specific or doesnt show why you love science

How do you write fellowship applications? (continued)Read examplesFrom our program: http://bit.ly/bisb-fellowships Search nsf fellowship example essays and youll get tonnesRead each others!Organize a fellowship peer review with students from all yearsLearn about how awesome your peers are and get feedback from people who have won fellowshipsDeadlines start in Oct!

Shameless pitch: Graduate Bioinformatics Council (GBIC)Graduate Bioinfo

gbic-ucsd.github.ioWanna be a first-year representative? Come talk to me!

Open source

Social codingMany open source projects are hosted here, including Python packagesAll public projects are free and private projects cost $$You can get a free academic account with your UCSD email and get 5 private repositoriesSoftware jobs often want code samples, so they will look at your code on Github!Github is your resume

Your projects on GitHubAs much as you can, work on your research code in public repositoriesFor excellent project templates, check out: github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter This gets you several benefits:Pre-built Python package with the correct structure so you can focus on the code and not the packagingFree use of Travis-CI, a continuous integration service which runs all your tests every time you push code to Github (travis-ci.org)Free use of CoverallsIO, which checks your test coverage (coveralls.io)Online documentation, very useful for both you and your collaborators (github pages, readthedocs.org)

Collaborating on GitHubYou will find bugs in open source codeBe a good citizen: if you fix the bug for yourself, fix it for everyone. Or at least report it to the project devs.Contributing to other projects exposes you to other styles of coding and improves your own code (true story)Use forks, branches and pull requests for the commonly used GitHub flow model: https://guides.github.com/introduction/flow

managing yourself

Grad school != undergrad

UndergradGrad school

YouYouYour advisorSchool, advisor, classes

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Things that took me a long time to understand .All my projects before grad school were following instructions set by someone elseAfter classes, no-one will give you an A for anythingWriting papers is really hardCuriosity >> completeness

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http://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/creativity.jpg21

Your PhD is your PhD and no-one elses.YouYour PhD

Supplementary

Grad school

How did I attend conferences for free?

PyData NYC 2013Strata Silicon Valley 2014This led to Travis Oliphant, the author of Numpy and CEO of Continuum Analytics (Anaconda Python distro) to contact me about Continuums diversity fellowships for PyDataThis led to the Strata outreach committee contacting me and arranging a free pass in exchange for live-tweetingPyCon 2014: applied for fellowship directly

Why should you care about social media?Anytime someone meets you, they will google your nameIf that doesnt work, theyll do your name UCSDHaving at least SOME online presence is much better than noneYou will get jobs (and some fellowships) much easier if people can find out more about you than just your LinkedIn profile

How to have an online presence: Bare minimum

Facebook for jobsRecruiters will contact you, before you even finish graduate school!.if you have the right things on your profileBesides your regular resume type things on your profile, theres a few key points

Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile: why?

Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile: your titleDont let Student be the first thing in your titleIf you are doing data science-like data analysis, put Data ScientistIf youre doing algorithm development, put algorithm developer or something to that extent

Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile: your summary

Too long!On the right track, could say more

Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile: your summaryBrief academic description of you so far.

Research interests: scientific buzzwords

Specialties: computer science buzzwordsProgramming languages: best first[Other, e.g. graphic design]

The buzzwords are cheesy but they make your profile easy to scan. Dont go overboard though and say like genomics genetics gene engineering just to keyword stuff33

Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile: your connectionsRecruiters will try to contact you to be your connection first because then they dont have to pay LinkedIns feesWithout going overboard, connect with other people (that you know) in your fieldFellow graduate students at UCSDPeople you know from pre-PhD school (undergrad, jobs, etc)People you meet at networking eventsBy seeing who you are connected to, recruiters will have a better sense of who you are

How to have an online presence: Bonus points

Extra points for online presence:Twitter

Extra points for online presence:Personal websiteUse: flavors.me for design and buy a domain for $10/year

Extra points for online presence:blogUse: github pages and pelican for posting

I just38

How to get free moneyOr, why social media is an important part of your grad school gameOlga BotvinnikBioinformatics BootcampSept 26th, 2014