Hello!
Again, I will soon complete another year of my doctoral studies. It has been filled with significant successes, engaging challenges, valuable opportunities to grow personally and as a group in our lab, and valuable opportunities to attend international conferences and showcase our work. As my project is reaching an end, it has been gratifying and motivating to continue pushing towards the last steps of preparing manuscripts for submission and formally starting to draft my doctoral thesis. Therefore, as in previous years, I would like to look back and expand on some especially noteworthy topics over the last year.
1. Leveraging recent scientific advances
3. Embracing productivity and creativity spikes
4. AI is a valuable scientific assistant
Leveraging recent scientific advances
Our doctoral research begins with a proposal laying down our work’s core aims. It identifies a gap in the field and defines three aims that should produce advances in the selected topic. While it should be specific enough to highlight how the project will add scientific value to the field, it is still helpful to keep some flexibility to account for adjustments in case of unexpected challenges. Interestingly, this arrangement can also be beneficial in more fortunate circumstances: while I am still on track to complete my proposed research aims, recent methods that became available over the last year opened new opportunities to push my work further. Motivated by the emphasis on sharing open-source software and code by reputable journals when publishing articles, there is an incentive to publish cutting-edge analysis pipelines alongside the paper, and, indeed, some of this work can provide exciting new results when adapted to my topic of bone biomechanics.
As a result, it has been a learning experience to accommodate changes to my original research plan that can potentially bring more exciting results than initially planned. While it is a relative risk to pursue a relatively new avenue at a later stage in my doctoral studies, these decisions arise from scientific discussions that also involve my supervisor. By making sure he is aware and supportive of such endeavours, there is a sense of confidence and motivation to carry out such studies into unknown territory.
Going the extra mile
On a different topic, I have also been thinking about the compounding effects of showing up consistently and doing my best to produce quality work on all fronts of my research project. Every year, we are expected to submit conference abstracts, prepare posters and presentations (when such abstracts are accepted), give seminars in our institute colloquium and produce journal articles that will eventually make up our doctoral thesis. While it can feel challenging to keep up with these external, well-defined timelines while also making substantial progress in the research project, it has helped to develop very sharp organisational and prioritisation skills to coordinate these requests effectively.
Notably, learning lessons arise from experiencing these events first-hand and being open to learning from them. On this note, by consistently submitting abstracts and having the chance to prepare presentations and posters regularly, it has become easier to compartmentalise my research work into a submittable format, and I feel that I am developing an ability to share such stories in a clear figure panel and a few hundred words at a time. This exercise stimulates our ability to write and prepare dense yet insightful figure panels and shows a strong commitment and desire to contribute scientifically to the field. Besides, I believe this effort does not go unnoticed since scientific committees in conferences and reviewers from journals recognise the quality of such technical aspects when we submit our work.
Additionally, by challenging myself to meet these goals, collaborating with colleagues in their research projects, and supporting the lab (computational) infrastructure where needed, I can experience different aspects of academia, develop interpersonal skills and increase my value as an employee. While it is fair that some colleagues may prefer to focus (exclusively) on their research, I believe that putting extra effort into additional domains outside our main project can be truly valuable from a personal growth perspective.
“Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.” - Winston Churchill
Embracing productivity and creativity spikes
Previously, I have mentioned the importance of managing energy levels and developing a sustainable routine from a long-term perspective. Still, unexpectedly or not, there can be periods with many deadlines that require an extra level of dedication to complete all the requests. I have experienced such intense periods, and I am trying to learn how to prepare and recover efficiently from them when they occur. Nonetheless, one of the most surprising aspects I discovered in these moments was the ability to iterate creatively in search of solutions for a problem. While there was an apparent physiological stimulus with stress to work longer hours and be ready to continue the next day, I was amazed at the brainstorming ability to devise alternative approaches every time a given method failed. An essential aspect of this approach was to establish a dependency of objectives such that we could have an initial result to present and progressively add more complexity that would add more value to the work. In this case, I felt confident trying out new ideas, knowing that I could still discard them if they were unsuccessful and still have a finished product to deliver.
In any case, I am more interested in learning to detect possible periods of high stress and plan to decrease their intensity accordingly. While the rate of ideas and energy felt incredible during these episodes, the crash after the deadlines passed was not as pleasant and would require more attention to rest and recover.
AI is a valuable scientific assistant
Finally, I would like to briefly mention the impact of AI-based tools on our research work. Previously, I shared how these tools can be beneficial for specific tasks during our work, and I am excited to continue exploring new features as they are released. Still, I think these play a supporting role by alleviating the burden of demanding tasks. For instance, they can help summarise a long list of publications, but users must still write their findings when sharing and interpreting new results. Comparably, they can be handy to simplify coding tasks and prepare documentation pages, but the user still needs to develop the idea and structure for a complete codebase. Given the pace at which new tools are released, such tasks may soon be accessible for these models, but for now, we can be grateful to leverage them for less exciting assignments.
Conclusion
It has been a very productive and successful year, and I am looking forward to the final months of my doctoral journey. While some challenges remain, I believe they will continue to make me grow personally and professionally.
Please feel free to share your thoughts on your doctoral journey!
Have a great day!