Olugbenga Alakija
Data Analytics | Business Intelligence | Data Science
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Live-tweeting conferences and making tweetable talks
I’ve gotten into the habit of live-tweeting conferences that I attend, and I really like it in part because I find it to be the best way to take notes, really helpful in lowering barriers to meeting in person, and a great way to raise your profile even if you are a lowly PhD student. Coming fresh off a conference and now that I’ve gotten pretty good at live-tweeting conferences, I wanted to share a few thoughts on tweeting scientific talks. ... Read more
Co-first-author non-academic PhD work
While the focus of my PhD was my scientific research, I also grew significantly as a leader and person through the extracurriculars I did. And even though none of those things will show up in my google scholar, I’ve been proud to contribute as “co-first-author” to many initiatives. I want to share them here, both as a reminder to myself and so that they can survive somewhere on the internet even if things in my department change. ... Read more
Graduation criteria
In general, I’ve come to believe that writing down standards and expectations is an absolute necessary first step to making any improvements. It’s a basic tenet of conflict management: “what would it look like for you to succeed?” In my last year or so as a BE Ref, I really ramped down the amount of effort and labor I put in to improving the BE student experience. It became so apparent to me that our department’s lack of consensus of what it means to be a successful BE graduate student meant that anything we tried to do could just so easily lead to us running around in circles: how on earth do you expect a student group to improve the graduation process for students, if no one knows or is willing to describe what is even required for graduation? ... Read more
PhDChat - a computational PhD as an act of self-love
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. ... Read more