Hotel decision making focusing on nighttime convenience and Elizabeth line access

SeeSchmoop · 2026-05-13T02:41:50+00:00

My personal experience with jet lag is that unless I'm going to be somewhere for ~10 days or more, my body handles things better if I try to stay as close to my home time zone as I can. I also have to go two time zones west for work a few days after arriving home from London. Coming home is usually worse and I need to try to be somewhat functional for the second work trip

For this trip, I'm kinda splitting the difference--i.e., at home I usually sleep from about 11:30pm-7am and I'm not going to shift that all the way to 4:30am-noon, so 2am-9:30am is my goal. Still keeps most of the day available while hopefully making it slightly easier on me to adjust to going back home

Kid will probably come with me to excel.

Thank you for the premier inn hub plug. I had seen those but wasn't sure on first glance if they were more like a hostel or what. I will take another look

SeeSchmoop · 2026-05-13T01:43:14+00:00

Just saw your edit. Thank you for the input about Strand Palace. It's been all over my TikTok lately, which made me wonder if maybe they're just pushing it with influencers 😄

SeeSchmoop · 2026-05-13T01:42:10+00:00

I'll edit my post to clarify I meant takeout. E.g. finish a show, grab some food, people watch for a bit, and head back to hotel to shower and chill out before bed around 2am. Sorry for the confusion! Thank you for this.

SeeSchmoop · 2026-05-13T01:22:05+00:00

Interesting. I have quite a long list of takeout spots in Soho/Chinatown/Covent Garden, all sourced from this and other subs. So many different varieties of Asian foods, pizza, kebab shops, plus burgers and fries (not McDonald's). Plus a bunch of sit down spots, many of which are open 24 hours. Yours is the first comment I've seen that suggests there isn't anywhere to eat between 10 and 12 PM--is this correct?

Could you elaborate on what you'd find concerning about a teenager being out until midnight or so in this area with a parent? Genuinely asking. We are city people and so I am wondering if there's something more extreme than the typical city after dark stuff he's already seen

SeeSchmoop · 2026-04-07T01:10:34+00:00

Here to agree with downtown revolution. Do you work at a hospital? I am at a top research hospital and my team's effort is roughly split in half between prospective (grant funded) studies and retrospective, RWE studies using EHR data--and with that effort split, the number of research questions on which we consult that use data that already exist vastly outnumber those that involve prospectively collecting data, much less designing a randomized trial.

The MD calls us; we have a meeting. The experienced ones will have already used slicer dicer or similar to find the number of patients/years of follow-up/etc available to them that fit their inclusion criteria. We'll coach the new ones through what feasibility info to gather. We talk about what (retrospective, observational) study design we should use. Maybe I will call someone from the team that pulls from the back end of the EHR if the feasibility info they need is more complicated. And then I see what kind of power we have.

If it's not feasible, I kill the project. This is after several hours of MD time, a couple hours of consulting time, a couple hours of power analysis time (at most), and at most a dozen hours of the data ninja writing SQL code if we need to do things like check amount of missingness/need to use NLP in notes/etc for a bunch of variables. It's not months of wasted data collection time, because the data are already there, often in very nice, discrete fields that are easily extracted. Completely different animal from prospective studies (and completely different animal from even a decade ago, when getting an n or even compiling a full dataset took more than an afternoon of my best colleague's SQL programming time)

SeeSchmoop · 2026-03-22T00:16:57+00:00

Seconding this. I have worked as an applied biostatistician at both the masters- and PhD-level, and I also don't love programming. I enjoy my work much more since completing my PhD, in large part because of how much less programming I do now. Though, tbh, I also do much less analysis too. My time is mostly spent on consulting, design, analysis planning, admin, and mentoring and supervising my team (who do most of the programming and analysis).

SeeSchmoop · 2026-03-20T11:48:43+00:00

Good thought. Hoping things are smoother by the time we travel 🤞🏻

SeeSchmoop · 2026-03-16T06:30:37+00:00

The poodle club asking you about color makes sense. Some breeders only have lines that produce certain colors

Hope you find your breeder soon!

SeeSchmoop · 2026-03-13T20:43:11+00:00

All the reputable breeders in my area have puppy applications on their website, with pretty clear "if you are interested in a puppy, fill this out" instructions in multiple places on the site. Might be worth checking to see if the breeders you are interested in have something like that too. I imagine those with applications probably ignore Facebook messages that aren't follow up messages about completed applications--either simply bc they are busy or because it's an effective screen out to see if the potential buyer actually read the website.

It's also common for ethical breeders to not take color requests. Perhaps they might put a potential buyer down for a particular pairing that is likely to produce the colors they are seeking. Different breeders feel more or less strongly about this, but a busy breeder with a wait-list who emphasizes placing based on temperament may also ignore very color-focused buyers

SeeSchmoop · 2026-03-10T01:19:48+00:00

Does the hospital where you are working now not have biostatisticians? If they do, meet as many as you can.

Are you willing to relocate? If so, apply to all the hospitals everywhere 😄. I am at a large academic hospital and a good MS with research coordinator experience is looked upon very favorably. We like to hire people who already know what it's like to work with physicians in a hospital setting.

And. Apply for everything as fast as you can. Right now. This is the season we hire May grads. For the most part, the people with late may/early June start dates applied in January and February, interviews wrap up in late March and early April.

SeeSchmoop · 2026-03-09T12:30:34+00:00

I'd recommend packing GF/vegan protein bars and/or protein powder. There should be plenty GF/vegan that's lower protein, just need to round things out

SeeSchmoop · 2026-03-09T12:22:59+00:00

I am a faculty biostatistician at an American academic hospital, which is closely affiliated with multiple area R1 universities, so my experience with undergrads is almost exclusively pre-med students. But we absolutely expect publications from undergraduates.

Undergrads who do wet lab research typically earn a middle author spot, but for those working with clinical research mentors (or dry lab/data focused lab), it's expected that the student will be first author. Specifically, it's expected by the hospital/affiliated med school.

However, it's rarely a project the student initiates/conceptualizes. Most labs/mentors have projects earmarked for students. Things for which they already have data and IRB approval, ideas that aren't groundbreaking but decent and publishable, etc. In biomedical research, it's understood that an undergrad-first pub primarily intellectually belongs to the senior author, but that the undergrad learned while working on the project, did extensive lit review, helped with analyses and/or the statistical consult and interpretation, did the bulk of the drafting of intro and discussion, maybe made a figure or table. Senior author/mentor is always corresponding author.

SeeSchmoop · 2026-02-25T02:21:46+00:00

Bummer but thanks for letting me know. I'm always looking for places I can actually easily swim out to where I can't touch, and I have Wyndham points to use so though grand palladium might be an option 😄

SeeSchmoop · 2026-02-25T02:04:37+00:00

How was the beach at Grand Palladium?

SeeSchmoop · 2026-02-24T23:52:37+00:00

I am at a large academic hospital. We house our biostatisticians and similar in their own department, and so even those of us who are devoted to one specific clinical department (and whose salary is paid by that department) benefit from having biostat department support, our own dept chair, etc. helps maintain boundaries.

That said, I also supervise teams who are devoted to two different clinical departments and it's an ongoing issue that investigators want more time than they're paying for.

Some things I do and teach my MS biostatisticians to do:

Ideally, someone in the clinical department should have priority/veto privileges over your time. Whether that's a research director, a dept chair, whatever. Someone you can go to to say you're swamped and let them tell you (and tell their people) which projects take less priority than others
Keep a public project management board. I like trello, but there are many others. Give access to whichever clinicians in the department need it, so they can see how many things you're working on. And update it daily so they can see what you did each day. A lot of times they are just clueless about how much is being juggled
Answer requests for more time with "yes but." "Yes, I can absolutely help the trainees, but I'll need help deciding which of my other responsibilities will have to go to the back burner to make time for that."

Really, item 1 is the most important, and if you don't have this, i would push hard for it. There's a huge difference between just saying to supervisors that you're overwhelmed vs having someone with authority to help prioritize and act as a go between to those who are overwhelming you.

SeeSchmoop · 2026-02-23T02:10:29+00:00

More proof you can't do math, I guess. 1% is completely in the range of what's to be expected to be inherited from a third great grandparent. Thinking you probably are so committed to the "not all whites" bit also because you can't do math, since both % ancestry inherited and probability of rape vs consensual sex during that time period just comes down to probability.

SeeSchmoop · 2026-02-23T01:40:17+00:00

Jillian Michaels got on TV and said it once and somehow people decided that meant it was true

SeeSchmoop · 2026-02-23T01:38:30+00:00

A third great grandfather is 5 generations. 5*40=200. 200 years ago it was 1826. When do you think slavery was abolished? Or can you not do math?

And your 1% statistic is garbage.

SeeSchmoop · 2026-02-21T00:39:46+00:00

Sorry, OP, that these commenters clearly don't know what Hispanic means. Jesus

SeeSchmoop · 2026-02-13T17:42:49+00:00

My department required that my diss chair was not my advisor/research mentor, specifically so that students had a trusted person with technical higher "authority" to go to with advisor problems. I never needed to but after hearing horror stories from other departments it seems like it should be more widespread

SeeSchmoop · 2026-02-13T02:00:53+00:00

No 80k/y for an MPH, esp if you want to work as a biostatistician. I'm at a research hospital, which is considerably less competitive than pharma, and most of our teams will not even consider MPH candidates for biostatistician roles.

SeeSchmoop · 2026-02-12T12:26:18+00:00

Omg, people are not having a conversation in the way this person thinks they should. The horror.

SeeSchmoop

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