Claire Duvallet

Claire Duvallet

STEM equity @ Science for America | formerly: data science @ Biobot Analytics, PhD @ MIT, Luce Scholar in Cambodia | public health data, microbiome, personalized medicine | gender and racial equity in STEM | she/hers

PhDChat - a computational PhD as an act of self-love

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A few weeks ago, I got to give a really fun talk to my lab and friends. A postdoc asked me to present at our lab summit (which is like a day-long group meeting), and I said I didn’t want to talk about my science because I was going to have just defended! Instead, I decided to use the time to get on my soapbox and talk about some of the things I learned and approaches I took during my computational PhD. tl’dr - love yourself, treat the PhD as an act of radical self-love and you will reap the benefits.

You can see the full talk at cduvallet.github.io/phdchat-philosophies/.

Beyond just getting to share my gospel, I also used this as an excuse to learn how to make fancy-looking presentations like I’d seen Christian (a new postdoc in my (former) favorite postdoc’s new lab) do. Turns out it’s super easy to use Reveal.js, and it lets you make presentations from a markdown file. Then, using github’s built-in pages hosting, you can automatically upload it to the internet.

Some things I learned in this process, which are also documented in my repo with the presentation:

  • To preview the presentation locally, run python -m SimpleHTTPServer from one directory above where you have your index.html (or from the same directory probably works too).

  • To host the presentation online, go to your repo’s settings and enable the repo as a page. Make sure that index.html is in a folder called docs/ (or just follow the implied instructions from the github pages options).

Ok actually that’s it – it really is quite simple! Hopefully this post can help lower the activation energy for someone else deciding whether to try this out or not!

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