Hidden Curriculum and My Favourite Resources

In this blogpost I plan to keep an updated list of resources I found most useful in my professional development. Mostly for myself, but would be happy if someone else will find them useful.

A lot of important things in academia (and elsewhere too, I can imagine) you kind of learn as you go. The so-called soft skills are rarely taught explicitly, and everyone is expected to find their own path. I recently started spending more time trying to fill some of the gaps in my training - which means going through piles of resources in different topics, from writing to project management. Some of these resources were more helpful than others, and here is what helped me:

Scientific Writing

• A free online course by Kristin Sainani from Stanford University. Covers all topics, including science communication and peer review. For me the most useful part was the hands-on exercises for writing clear sentences and structuring paragraphs. Demo videos of the course instructor editing texts are also extremely insightful. I’d say if you don’t know where to start, start here.

• Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded by Joshua Schimel describes how to apply elements of storytelling to academic writing. An amazing book, honestly. It is all about how to write about your science in the most clear and impactful way, from writing effective sentences to designing a story arc for the whole manuscript. Can’t recommend enough.

• An article by George Gopen & Judith Swan with a set of concrete recommendations on how to improve the flow by changing structure on the sentence and paragraph levels.

• The Scientist’s Guide to Writing by Stephen Heard. This book covers all aspects of writing a scientific article. For me, the most useful part was the advice on the writing process. The stuff on writing itself is nice too, though I do prefer the sources I put above.

Graphic Design and Data Visualization

• A free textbook “Fundamentals of Data Visualization” by Claus O. Wilke. Covers common types of graphs, and dos and don’ts in data visualization.

• Graph design for the eye and mind by Stephen Kosslyn. I like how this book brings some knowledge about human perception and how we tend to interpret visual information. I liked the book’s perspective and principles outlined there. At the same time, I found much of the concrete advice outdated and not relevant (like how the book calls box-and-whiskers plots a new type of graph and sort of advices against it just for this reason).

• A blog by Zen Faulkes on poster presentations. Zen also has written a book, but I haven’t read it yet.
• WANTED: a resource on how to make good conceptual figures

Data Management, Organizational Skills, and Reproducible Research

• An amazing series of tutorials by Pat Schloss covering project organization and principles of reproducible research for computational biology. Start at the very beginning (e.g., folder structure for a project and how to work at a server), covers principles of documentation, version control using git, scripting, and how to collaborate with others.

• A blogpost with a slightly different take on the same question. For my projects, I ended up using a combination of both approaches.

Project Management for Academia

A new frontier for me! After I realized that a big portion of my time and mindspace is now taken by planning my PhD project (I have ~1 year left, and I am working on four papers as the first author, one of which is a collaboration between four labs!), I decided to learn the tools and best practices for project management. Will add more soon, and for now:

• A series of blogposts in the New PI Blog called Project Management for Academia 101. Covers basic definitions, explains the difference between the two main PM approaches, and gives an example of how the PM techniques can be applied to a PhD project and to managing a lab.

• A blogpost with a nice analogy. Start with a cupcake!

Mentoring and Supervising

• A really nice and thought-provoking handbook from the New York City College on mentoring undergraduate students. Aimed at faculty, but was helpful for me too.

Career in Academia

• The Professor Is In book and blog by Karen Kelsky. I obviously don’t have enough expertise to judge, but I found this very interesting: a former department chair writes about the academic job market and how to prepare for it.

How to Science

After some digging into the art of scientific writing, I realized that my problem is deeper than I thought before: I’m actually a bit hazy on how to do science, and how to think in general. I definitely don’t expect to find a nice book covering everything I ever need to learn to make it in science. But here are some useful metaphors and other things that have been guiding my thinking.

• A TEDTalk by Uri Alon on being “stuck in the cloud”, research as a non-linear process, and the importance of the “yes and” approach.

• Two articles by Uri Alon, “How To Choose a Good Scientific Problem” and “How to Build a Motivated Research Group”

• A blogpost by Richard Gao on selling your research as a creative process, why it is good actually, and how to “manufacture a research gap”.