On concurrent enrollment

Excuses for illness made, I would like to write today on my experience of concurrent enrollment with Phd.

My advice would generally be that is you are in the third year of your Phd, don't do it.

However, back when I did undergrad there was no talk of R. You used excel or Ostats, or far off in the distance there was this Matlab thing, that I thought was some sort of engineering software. Excel for mac no longer even has a statspak, and my work has suffered a random walk towards palaeoclimatology: a far cry from the 'sample size of one' I was so pleased with when I studied Pterosaurs. The result? This is a gap in my skills I will have to rectify, or change my Phd topic.

Two years in, I attended a half-day course run by the UQ School of Biology stats advisor. It wasn't bad, but grossly insufficient for my needs. I have been banging my head against R for a year now, with the patient assistance of an R expert in my lab. Three years in, I enrolled in some more R courses.

I am currently enrolled in "Computing for Data Analysis" run on coursera.org by John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. I am impressed with the energy Roger Peng, the course organiser, is putting into the course, but with tens of thousands of students enrolled, getting the help you need is definitely part of the skills you are learning.

With no programming background, a history of frustration with statistics, and possible dyscalcula, I am swinging between mysterious highs when I finally get something to work, and mostly wallowing in the lows of frustration, sometimes as low as pondering if this is the career for me, and maybe I would be better off applying for one of those brewing jobs I saw advertised in Melbourne.

It is now less the 2 weeks until I go to SVP in Raleigh to present some work I haven't finished yet, let along written up, and part 1 of assignment 1 just took me two and a half days to complete. If this wasn't so damn important, I would not still be enrolled.

So as I said, my advice is that is you are in the third year of your Phd, if it isn't make or break, don't do it.

My subject reading for this week has largely been R-help and The R Book. While I think R-Help is an invaluable resource, it contains many R-sholes. It is certainly off-putting for those starting out. While searching previous answers is very handy, I don't think I will be asking questions there any time soon.

Welcome!

Today is the first day of writing this blog. I attended a graduate student workshop this morning about what makes a Phd student successful. What I got out of it, which may not be what they thought I would get out of it,  is the following:

A. Figure out why you are doing a Phd.
B. What ever the answer to A, figure out how to get excited about your phd, and follow through on that
C. Write every day about/for your Phd.
D. Go surfing

Well, maybe D isn't exactly what I need, though now that I mention it,  would really love to learn how to surf and it is getting into summer...

A and B I am going to need some help with, (and D...) But C is something I can start today.

So let me introduce myself, academically.

After completing my undergraduate studies I commenced an honours research project on scarce pterosaur material form central-western Queensland. After an extended wrestling match with pterosaur phylogenetics and the paucity of description of non-cranial elements, my supervisor, Steve Salisbury, and I prevailed with a paper in the coveted Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology.

Fletcher, T. and Salisbury, S. W. 2010. New pterosaur fossils from the Early Cretaceous (Albian) of Queensland, Australia.  Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 30(6), 1747–1759.

You can find the link to the Pdf here is you are keen.

During the two years following my honours I traveled to Germany to present this work at the Munich Flugsaurier in honour of Peter Wellnhofer, completed a Graduate certificate in Communication, science communication, and another in Arts, philosophy of science, and spent about 20 hours a week volunteering as an acid preparator, undergraduate volunteer supervisor and unofficial lab manager.

During one of my trips out west on field work with the lab, I was struck by the large fossilised logs intertwining between the semi-articulated vertebrate we were unearthing.  It is uncommon for plant and vertebrate fossils to be preserved together and the possibilities of a project combing the two started circulating.  So the seed of my Phd was planted.

Over time the scope and title of my phd have changed and it is now something like: Biological proxies for palaeoclimate: A case study from the mid-Cretaceous Winton Formation (Aptian-Albian), central-Western Queensland.

In the following posts I expect I will give you a bit of background on each of the methods I am using, or have tried to use including: Leaf Margin Analysis, Climate Leaf Analysis Multivariate Program, Leaf Area Analysis, Bioclimatic Analysis, Wood Indices correlation, crocodile bone histology (modern and ancient) and dinosaur bone histology. I may expound on my adventures in concurrent enrollment as I embark on an online university course in computational statistics. I will probably give some reviews on the conference I recently attended and those coming up soon. And hopefully, I will get in the habit of writing.

Welcome to my blog.