In preparing for the start of second year, I (Kali) spent part of my time in completing various MOOCs - free, online courses. This was both to increase knowledge and to get back into the habit of studying regularly before the semester actually starts. Below are my notes from the Coursera online course How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper , designed by Phd students from the French University, École Polytechnique . The course is presented in English and is split over four weeks, with approximately 2 hours work expected for each week. You can access the entire thing at any time, so you could do it in a day if you wanted to. There is a paid option, if you want to get a certificate of completion, but that's definitely not necessary. While MOOCs are useful for building up skills, they can vary so much in what it takes to earn a grade and the general quality that they don't indicate anything very useful when you put them on a CV . It's much more useful to learn a
Or, how I accidentally became a member of a research group. Back in Spring, I signed up for the Manchester Gold Mentoring which is there for students to improve their CVs. I was assigned Samuel Purkiss as a mentor who is a MPhil student in Reinmar Hager's lab and he offered me and the other mentee (Marco) the opportunity to gain some lab experience by helping him with the work that he was doing with Mhd.Shadi Khudr (the lab's postdoc who designed the experiments) on aphids and daphnia. Initially, I was a bit reluctant to be in the building long or to do work on the group's computers but after some time I got used to it but throughout the summer I grew more comfortable and by July, I started coming in every day, as early as possible. I also have my own little desk space now. It has a folder where I collect data and papers, a book about Epigenetics that I bought but wanted to leave available to everyone. some blank paper and other stationary and most importantly the c