What do you guys do to upgrade yourself after entering the workforce

[ywhtptgtfo]

Did you just crap on me?

No, I am just saying that's the culture in academia, which is more competitive in many other places. The difference between reading an important paper one week later than others can potentially lead to missed opportunities.

I remember these was once an occasion when I was at a table with others and they were all talking about a paper that was 2 days old which they all independently found and read. Suffice to say, all I could do was to listen and not take part since I hadn't read it.

 

[El_Machinae]

Tough. That explains why you are spending so much time learning at leisure since that's a survival requirement.

It selects for that type of person, yes. Now, an incredible amount of my time is spent actually working, and in 'working', I'd include papers within or related to my field. With two hours of commuting, I shoot to be reading for those two hours (or editing documents). On this front, I'm little different from other high-pressure jobs. I often see people working on the bus, even when it's not pure academia.

That's where my podcasts come in. I independently learn non-work stuff during my leisure time, mainly through podcasts. I enjoy those other fields, even though I'll never get certification in them.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I would say that the first step is to figure out the career path you want. Once you know that, you can seek out the requirements and work on those. If you don't know where you are going, you'll never get there.

 

[downtown]

I think the best thing you can do is ask a lot of questions, and be very proactive. It's becoming more rare that a firm will take a really proactive role in your development. Make sure you know what the other people in your company and industry do, how they got there, what skills they have, etc. If you volunteer for things, even to sit in, you'll learn a lot.

The other thing is to read, and not just your industry specific literature. Reading more helps you become more versatile, which I think is a critical skill in any competitive environment.

I'm currently learning more about audio production, even though it isn't part of my day to day job. Many of my peers are learning Javascript, or photography. You can't sit still.

 

[Harv]

Without being specific, I work in an EE field.

There was a time about five years ago I sat down and learned how an inductance calculation was derived. It meant going through a textbook I had not studied in fifteen years and grinding through the derivation from start to finish. The knowledge has served me ever since.

Nowadays, it just seems we plug numbers into programs and spreadsheets and run with the results. Formulas would have been taken from papers and plugged into spreadsheets like Excel when they became popular about twenty years ago or so. The papers were written about 50 or 60 years ago. The people who wrote those papers are probably dead by now, so how am I to know what assumptions were made when they made their equations?

Learning how to make calculations away from the computer means I can do my work away from my computer, at a much more convenient place than at the office.

I prefer not to be my boss, TYVM. Administrative roles are a chore and I am a rule bender instead of a rule follower.

I sure identify with this statement! A rule bender might be an understatement. General disregard for company rules might be more accurate.

Upgrade your wardrobe.

Check. We will see if this fixes the social life.

 

[ywhtptgtfo]

Without being specific, I work in an EE field.

There was a time about five years ago I sat down and learned how an inductance calculation was derived. It meant going through a textbook I had not studied in fifteen years and grinding through the derivation from start to finish. The knowledge has served me ever since.

I didn't do anything that deep. One of the things I did a few months ago was to go through my 2nd year stats textbook in attempt to nail down most of the important aspects of statistics. I went through the derivation of the Poisson distribution from the binomial distribution (given infinite trials), the derivation of the Chebechev's rule, and stuff relating to the Central Limit Theorem.

I sure identify with this statement! A rule bender might be an understatement. General disregard for company rules might be more accurate.

I usually do it for efficiency and benefit of the project since a lot of the rules I have over here are result of political powerplay and egos.

Check. We will see if this fixes the social life.

Yeah, I will get to it.

 

[El_Machinae]

Oh! I've never regretted re-learning stats. In biosci, stats are something people are 'forced' to do, so they know how to do them without a strong intuition about how they work. BUT, having that intuition has allowed me to instantly recognise and critique people's works. I daresay, the papers that I review or the paper that come out from my colleagues (and myself) are vastly stronger and will much more likely stand the test of time. Plus, it's vastly easier to sniff out incomplete stats in the papers that I read. Currently, my field rewards the application of dodgy stats. It frustrating, for sure.

 

[illram]

A wardrobe upgrade might seem like a silly or flippant suggestion for upgrading your professional life, but I find that when I have new clothes to wear to work (can be anything: new shoes, a new jacket, a new suit, a new shirt, new pants, new sunglasses... even a nice new haircut) it's invigorating and can inspire additional self-confidence and make others perceive you in a more positive light. It's really a simple but powerful thing. They don't have to be fancy or expensive, just something that makes you feel good and is of course appropriate for wherever you work.

 

[downtown]

A wardrobe upgrade might seem like a silly or flippant suggestion for upgrading your professional life, but I find that when I have new clothes to wear to work (can be anything: new shoes, a new jacket, a new suit, a new shirt, new pants, new sunglasses... even a nice new haircut) it's invigorating and can inspire additional self-confidence and make others perceive you in a more positive light. It's really a simple but powerful thing. They don't have to be fancy or expensive, just something that makes you feel good and is of course appropriate for wherever you work.

I totally agree, and I've noticed that at my work...and with a 7 month exception, I've work jeans to work every day since I graduated college.

Investing in your appearance, generally, I think is helpful. Get a grown up hair cut, etc.

 

[civvver]

Hm well maybe I do it kind of backwards, but I do software development but it's all custom applications so we propose something, customer buys it, we develop it. So generally we will propose some solution and we'll have an idea of the technology required and then we'll have to research what to do. Learning is already built into the job.

For example, 6 years ago I primarily wrote c++ code only. One of our customers required a java application for portability and some IT requirements (it was a pretty arbitrary decision really but whatever). So we wrote a java version of our product and I learned java basically by looking at examples online, reading documentation etc. We did our UI in swing and now we are upgrading it to java fx. So again, lots of looking online, just figuring stuff out.

We used to have one guy compile and distribute all our software into a final build, he was the build guy. Now we have automatic software processes that do it for us, stuff like jenkins and mercurial databases and ant scripts. What we did before was super inefficient and cumbersome and costly cus we had to have a person do it. A couple years ago I had no idea what those software products were either but you figure them out and learn.

Basically I just google everything lol. And I ask tons of questions. I ask my smarter co-workers. I don't know the most but I'm one of the fastest learners. Don't be afraid to ask people for help.

And another thing you should do is every couple years evaluate your position in regards to the rest of the industry. Like are you getting paid industry average, could you easily switch jobs, etc.

 

[ywhtptgtfo]

Oh! I've never regretted re-learning stats. In biosci, stats are something people are 'forced' to do, so they know how to do them without a strong intuition about how they work. BUT, having that intuition has allowed me to instantly recognise and critique people's works. I daresay, the papers that I review or the paper that come out from my colleagues (and myself) are vastly stronger and will much more likely stand the test of time. Plus, it's vastly easier to sniff out incomplete stats in the papers that I read. Currently, my field rewards the application of dodgy stats. It frustrating, for sure.

Yes, that's the power I see in stats. It instantly makes you a much more powerful reviewer. Is this statistically significant? Why this posterior/prior/likelihood distribution? How does this compare to the background?

And yes, dodgy stats are fun to catch. Whenever I read papers about post-translation modification predictions that have some exaggerated accuracy rates, that paper is almost always from some obscure Chinese university and published in some low-tier journals.

For instance, there's this one paper that bragged about being able to predict glycosylation sites at 99% accuracy (not precision, but that useless accuracy attribute). Turns out the guy ran the test on every single amino acid in the protein test set - heck you can achieve that accuracy value by using one of those classical regular expressions published in some old literature duh!

When I conditioned on regular expression-based prediction, his precision plummeted to some 50-60%, which is laughably low compared to competitiors.