INTERCROSSING ITN

Hello again! Apologies for the long break, hopefully you were having such a good summer holiday that you didn’t miss my blog posts anyway :)

Leading on from the last post, where I talked about some different ways of finding PhD projects, the next stage is to apply for the job, advertise yourself enough to be asked for an interview, and then ace that too!

So, PhD applications. Well even before you apply, it can be a good idea to send the supervisor an email asking a couple of questions, perhaps about the methods or scope of the project. Fabian and Alexandre both exchanged emails with their prospective supervisors and were both encouraged to apply. Hopefully, the answers you receive will reaffirm your interest in the project and can even give you more information on which to base your application. On the other hand, it could help you in deciding that the project is not quite right for you.

Unfortunately, most of us can’t remember what the Intercrossing application form was like (being a whole THREE YEARS ago now!). But, general application advice holds true here.

Give yourself plenty of time. Some applications can be quite lengthy and you don’t want to be rushing to finish in time. You won’t present yourself well, and will probably forget some important parts of your past experience. Keeping an up-to-date CV and cover letter helps a lot here in saving time. (Hmm, there’s another thing to add to my to-do list. I really should take my own advice).

Regurgitate the person specification. Make it obvious to the reader that you meet all of their criteria, but also GIVE EXAMPLES! Anybody can say they have ‘teamwork skills’ (and I’m pretty sure everyone does, although many probably shouldn’t), but giving examples shows proof that you are what you say you are. Examples don’t have to be from academic experience either; use some from your hobbies, voluntary work, side projects etc.

Update webpages. If you have any kind of online presence, (i.e. LinkedIn, Research Gate, Twitter) then update it, write some new posts, show you’re an active user!

Sell yourself! You’re awesome. Make sure the person reading knows that too.

Now I’m going to assume that your brilliant and well time-managed application got you an interview. What do you need to prepare now?

As all Intercrossing ESRs were in different countries to where we were applying, many of us had Skype interviews. General consensus is that they are weird, and we don’t like them. It’s very different talking to someone via computer than face-to-face, so be aware of that. Unless you’re on video of course (luckily I wasn’t, but sadly my strategic placing of a nice-looking plant and the bookshelf-of-intelligence was entirely wasted). There are some quite good magazine articles around the web with some tips on skype interviews, e.g. this one and many others you can probably find online.

Language was also something that several of the ESRs had some trouble with, where English was not their first language but is commonly used in international groups (lucky me). I guess there’s a limit on what can be improved in a short space of time, but perhaps reading some English articles, textbooks, or papers could help to familiarise yourself with the correct words and terms. Obviously you need to understand the questions you get asked and be able to answer them, that goes without saying. But more than that, you need to understand the whole topic so that you can also ask questions to the interviewers (this goes for native English speakers too!).

One last piece of advice I’m going to say is to be prepared for anything and everything. We all have nightmare-ish stories of that one completely strange question we never expected. So just prepare for any question you think could or couldn’t be asked, and to defend anything you wrote in your application. Habib, for example, was asked why he wanted to move from studying animals to plants, whereas others were asked to explain bioinformatic algorithms or to critically evaluate a paper. Don’t be afraid of thinking out loud as you work out a problem. But if worst comes to worst and you have no way of answering a difficult question, don’t panic and just say that you simply don’t know. Easy. Making up an answer can be tempting, but the interviewer is very likely to be an expert in the field and will certainly know if you invent some research or explain a method incorrectly. No wingin’ it here unfortunately.

Om and Alexandre also had to prepare a short presentation on themselves or their previous work. This could be a good exercise to do anyway, to practice some basic answers to questions about your experience or methods, on which you can elaborate in the interview.

I’m just going to leave you with some great advice from Fabian, because I couldn’t put it better myself:

“If you get papers to prepare for the interview, read them. Read them in detail. Also the supplementary files. Be aware of your weaknesses or things the interviewers might address (e.g. a bad grade, gaps in your CV, strange career path) and think about how to defend/ explain it.”

Yesterday, I joined the LMU-based ESRs Soumya and Vedran to host our popular phylogeny booth at the Open House Day of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Munich. It was great fun to discuss the evolutionary relationships between various species with the visitors. Our prominently placed logos raised questions about INTERCROSSING, funding by the EU and our research projects.

I was able to join a discussion about gene technology, organized by Thomas Ott (a former Marie-Curie fellow). Together with some master students he educated school classes about basic breeding techniques and gene technology. It was organized in turns where a multiple choice question was asked and the pupils used voting devices to answer them. Afterwards the replies where analyzed and discussed. I really liked the session, because it was very relaxed and fact driven, compared to the polarized debates that usually arise with this topic. The organizers explained the most important risks and potentials of gene technology within an hour and refuted many prejudices without “taking sides”. The kids are now equipped with the basic knowledge that is needed to participate in the gene technology debate that our society is facing and are less likely to believe the loudest voices. Instead, they are able to differentiate and build their own opinion, based on scientific facts.

Afterwards we participated in various scientific discussions with our colleagues at the subsequent faculty party. They were generously encouraged with free beer and a delicious BBQ.

Hello again! Welcome to the second post of the #LizzyWrites series! This one was going to be all about how we found, applied for, and ended up being accepted onto the Intercrossing program. However, I ended up having sooo much to say just about finding a PhD post that I’ve decided to split them up and save everyone from reading a complete essay of a blog post. So, this one is just about different ways of finding potential PhD projects, so that you can check out all the options and hopefully find the perfect project for you! A bit like online PhD dating... if you like.

As mentioned in the first post, I’m collecting some bits of experience and pieces of advice from the other ESRs, to try and help out anyone thinking of applying for a PhD. I received some great ideas for this post from a few of the ESRs on how they came by the Intercrossing job advertisement – so thanks Om, Fabian, Habib and Alexandre for your input! 

It turns out that there were various different routes taken by our ESRs by which we came to hear about Intercrossing. Alexandre and I were both told by word of mouth from our Masters’ supervisors. Mine forwarded an email from someone, who forwarded it from someone else and so on, and which presumably originated from our co-ordinator Richard Nichols announcing it to his network of contacts. (Ahh yes, that buzzword ‘networking’. Kinda works doesn’t it?)

My advice here would be: work really hard during your masters / bachelors thesis, or any projects where you work closely with one or two supervisors. It will help you considerably to impress your supervisors with your dedication and skills, who will then be kind enough to tell you about PhD opportunities (and believe you are capable of doing them!) or even recommend you themselves. Remember you also need their good opinion to give you a glowing reference when you apply too! Working on a large project will also help you get a feel for real research, and will probably form a large part of a PhD interview discussion.

Others found the Intercrossing posting in different ways. Om found it by searching on the job pages of the Nature website. It’s a great idea to have a look on this page or similar ones, not only to see: 1. What kind of posts are available, but also: 2. What kind of qualifications and experience they require, 3. To have a look at some application forms, and if nothing else, 4. To decide what kind of ‘name’ to give yourself. For example, although ‘Bioinformatician’ and ‘Computational Biologist’ both sound like an equal mix of computers and biology, I’ve found their requirements to be slightly different, with varying amounts of programming involved in the job. Likewise, there are many words that can come after ‘Research’ that require different levels of experience. You need to work out: “Am I a Research [Student / Technician / Officer / Assistant / Associate / Investigator / Leader]?” I could go on, but that list is mind-boggling enough. Learning what to ‘market’ yourself as is useful in filtering down job searches to the posts that you have the relevant skills and experience to apply for (and this goes for many types of jobs, not just PhDs).  

Here is a very incomplete but useful list of some websites that advertise PhDs:

Nature website, as mentioned. Useful for looking for PhD positions in different countries, but also has many other higher academic positions such as lecturers, so not wholly PhD-focused.

Academic job websites: Advertise PhDs and other academic jobs in UK (e.g. jobs.ac.uk), Europe (e.g. academicpositions.eu, academics.com) or globally (e.g. unijobs.com). Great if you’re thinking of doing a year in research before embarking on a PhD, as they also advertise many ‘research assistant’ positions. 

findaphd.com: Very focused on PhD positions in UK universities (and some in other countries); I think it probably lists every PhD available, so a great place to start finding interesting projects. Very likely to be equivalents in other countries, such as www.hochschulkompass.de/en/doctoral-studies.html in Germany. 

Scientific magazines such as ‘New Scientist’ often have job pages, but these tend to be more from industry and companies, rather than universities. Whether to go the academia or industry route? Well that’s a debate for another post!

Instead of trawling through job websites, Habib seemed to have a much easier time of PhD-searching:

“In my case, I googled a few key words, like ‘genetics’, ‘statistics’, ‘computer’ etc. and found the INTERCROSSING webpage. It was an awesome coincidence!”

Awesome indeed! Try it, go google crazy! You might just be as lucky as Habib. And if you fancy checking out our website at the same time: http://intercrossing.wikispaces.com/

Social media can also be a great help in finding PhD posts. Fabian saw a posting for Intercrossing on a University of Munich Facebook group, where a student of his supervisor-to-be had posted the advertisement. I’ve also seen many PhDs being advertised on Twitter by the academic supervising them, and then being retweeted and passed around by swathes of followers. The moral of this story: procrastination apparently pays off. Go and spend a bit more time on facebook instead of writing that essay. (Disclaimer: this is sarcasm, which can sometimes be difficult to detect. Please do your essay.)

Hi there! / Hallo! / Goddag! / Hola! / Bonjour! / G’day!

Welcome to the first in this series of ‘What does it take to be an ESR?’ blog posts, written by me (Lizzy), and dedicated to explaining a bit more about the process we ESRs have been through to get the stage we are now at. And that stage is... nearly at the end of our PhDs! (eek!). I’m going to write about stuff like; how we found the job posting and applied for it (and somehow managed to be successful), the enlightenment and sometimes logistical nightmare of moving to and living in a different country, and the standard PhD student-y things like attending conferences and writing the dreaded thesis.  

I guess by writing these posts, I’m aiming to try and encourage other young students to apply for these types of EU-funded, international programs. I’ll hopefully convince you all of what a rewarding experience it has been to be an Intercrossing ESR. Instead of doing a PhD in my home country, moving to Denmark has given me an understanding of a different culture and instilled some personal confidence by forcing me out of my British-bubble comfort zone. Also, to any students contemplating whether to do a PhD, I will try to advise from our own diverse experiences, exactly what a PhD studentship entails; the good, the bad, and the downright makes-you-question-your-whole-life-plan (convinced yet?). So you can decide whether it’s for you or not. I’ll be asking for some input from the other ESRs as well, otherwise it’ll be a bit overly one-sided and I’ll just end up persuading everyone to move to Denmark (really, it’s a great country).

So, this might be a good time to answer the question: what does ‘ESR’ actually mean? It stands for ‘Early Stage Researcher’, which makes us sound like we should be kept in a playpen under constant supervision while we randomly jab around with pipettes and make castles out of test tubes. Luckily, this is far from the truth, though I’ve always found pipetting races to be rather fun. What it actually means, is that we have an undergraduate degree, but haven’t spent at least five years working in our field and also haven’t completed a PhD. Either of these would make us far too experienced to be mere ESRs. Luckily, the latter of these is something we are all well on our way to now (two and a half years in fact!). Then finally, we will be let out of the playpen to become ‘ERs’, or ‘Experienced Researchers’, with a PhD under our belts. This is what all us Intercrossing ESRs are aiming for. The light at the end of the long (and sometimes dark) tunnel. This series of posts will describe some of the things we have experienced along that tunnel, and although we haven’t made it out quite yet, we can offer bits of advice for chugging through.

I’ll hopefully be writing every other week, so look out for the tag #LizzyWrites to see the whole series. The next post will be about how we found and applied for the job, and the wonders of skype interviews!

Stay tuned!

We are happy to announce our participation in the upcoming Open House Day of the Faculty of Biology of the University of Munich, on 9th of July 2015. After last year’s great success, we will host our interactive booth on phylogeny and evolution, again. We will ask the visitors to guess the evolutionary relationships between various species and surprise them with the results based on genetic similarity. Pupils, potential students, neighboring residents and all interested citizens are welcome to learn about our work and what the faculty has to offer. As last year, we will use the opportunity to be Marie-Curie ambassadors and promote INTERCROSSING.

Munich is one of the main locations of our network, hosting two ESRs. Two of us did their undergraduate studies at the LMU and were recruited there for the INTERCROSSING project. Our strategy workshop in 2013 partly took place in Munich, including the essential progress committee meetings with our PIs. Four ESRs have spent at least three month of their secondments at the LMU.

However, at Bayer, I attended a presentation on the production of new seed varieties, where they described the whole process in stages; from the observation of a particular problem that could delay or make more difficult the production of the crop, to the bioinformatic analysis of the DNA sequences, and then finally the implementations of the results (the new seed with superior traits such as disease resistance or cold tolerance) to the fields to examine the resulting plant phenotype. This got me thinking how plant research can have a direct impact on the whole society and agricultural economy. 

So just a general piece of advice: Don’t judge if you don’t know, and if you don’t know just ask around...

We are presenting our results currently at our self-organised achievement meeting. We are enlightened to name Will Spooner, Brian Charlesworth, and Nathaniel Street as external speakers. The supervisors are listening critically.

There is a student conference  coming up this autumn in Stirling: the European Meeting of PhD students in Evolutionary Biology. It is entirely organised by students and everyone who registers gets a talk.

Thus, first come first serve! Registration is now open.

Jeffrey Chang nicely describes the necessity for more attractive career paths for applied bioinformaticians and underpins them with his personal experiences. He requests bioinformatics training for biologist to fill the gap of people, which are required to analyze the huge amounts of data produced by modern biology projects. The key message is: It remains a challenge to encourage talented people for our field, as long as applied bioinformaticians are evaluated based on their first author publications, instead of their impact in interdisciplinary collaborations.

Luckily, our network’s initiators have foreseen these shortcomings and launched INTERCROSSING. Our ITN provides 13 ESR positions to address the absence of attractive career paths for young researchers. Our training in bioinformatics and related topics enables us to tackle tomorrow’s biological data challenges as described in the comment. INTERCROSSING’s network of ESRs and lead scientists is a strong and powerful foundation for future collaborations and career opportunities, where applied bioinformaticians will be valued as creative collaborators.

The printed copy of our review “Bioinformatic Tools for Polyploid Crops” finally arrived! It was requested by the Journal of Agricultural Science and Technology B, after a poster presentation at the NBIC2014.

Welcome to the Intercrossing blog and our very first entry. It is a pleasure that your path is crossing ours here.

We are 13 PhD students who were chosen about three years ago to dedicate heart and soul into a Marie Curie Initial Training Network called INTERCROSSING. Our initiators, first and foremost, Prof Richard Nichols from Queen Mary University of London, saw the need for “the cultivation of a new type of young researcher to deal with challenges of exploiting the latest Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies”.

We quickly realised that modern biologists need to know how to store, integrate, make sense, analyse, and visualise the mountains of available information in a simple way. The goal of this network is to bridge the gap between computer science and biology and send us off with a set of skills to confront the challenges of the demanding research arena of “big biological data”.

Recruited from a wide range of scientific backgrounds such as maths, computer science, bioinformatics, and biology, we were joined together to receive PhD training in population genetics, informatics, and statistics. Most of us now work on NGS data or develop new methods to analyse population structure or predict biological traits like crop phenotypes.

Training workshops were delivered by our network collaborators, including both universities and companies. A great opportunity is that all of us have either started their research at a university or a company and later on switched to a partner organisation for some time. So each of us got the taste of different work styles and we also receive feedback and widen our knowledge through the collaboration with one another.

Here comes some statistics and population genetics: Our group consists of seven males and six females, originating from nine different countries, which could be clustered into far West (US), far East (India, Pakistan, and Russia) and Europe (Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, and UK). As we have also learned that data visualisation is crucial for big data, we stretched our creativity here to help represent our locations. For more information visit our wiki.

We decided to start this blog after a great workshop at the Natural History Museum in London, which taught us well in science communication and public engagement. We want to write about our network activities, news and the experiences we have gained throughout the last years. Also, we plan to chat about our next one or two years where we will all progress to writing up our theses and move on to new positions. We hope you will enjoy our blurbs, which you can find under the following tags: #scilove #scientistsatwork #ESRlife and #bigNGSdata.