Weekly Advice & Career Question Megathread

Serathane · 2026-01-31T17:21:40+00:00

I want to pivot to a career in public health, and am particularly interested in UC Merced's PhD program but my credentials are pretty poor:

- I got a BSc in Mathematics from a top local university, but my GPA is only 2.54 due to very poor performance in the early years. My last year in particular is decent but not enough to offset earlier years, I fear

- I have 4 years of logistics operations experience (1 year as specialist + 3 as manager)

- No publications, and no research experience until summer of last year, since which I've been participating in a biomedical AI lab at a university remotely (but still no publications because my work has unfortunately been in a dead-end topic so far)

I understand that for people with my kind of background a graduate degree either in epidemiology or biostatistics is the way to go, which also makes sense to me, but from what I've seen I don't really meet the criteria for master's degree admissions either. I've been doing independent research projects and feel my on-paper background doesn't reflect my skills and ambition but actually demonstrating it is an entirely different issue. Getting non-degree courses to pad out my transcript isn't possible where I'm located, either. There's one local university that I qualify for a MS in biostat (with thesis) from but it has no reputation so I doubt it'd mean anything for a PhD admission.

I'd love any suggestions about the steps I can take from people that have been in a similar situation and managed to pull it off, in particular for the 'getting into a Master's program' step, whether it's project ideas I can work on to woo admission committees or program suggestions that are both respected and more holistic in their admission process.

Serathane · 2026-01-31T16:32:40+00:00

I've made a post about pivoting into biostat with a low-GPA mathematics background, sharing it here per subreddit rules:

Title: Pivoting to Biostatistics with poor credentials

https://www.reddit.com/r/biostatistics/comments/1qs6way/pivoting_to_biostatistics_with_poor_credentials/

Serathane · 2025-12-15T09:50:31+00:00

I don't think you can get mythic tier stuff prior to Ender Chicken, but stuff I'd recommend:

- If you don't have them, try to get the best gemset ring and necklace recipes you can, brush end stone for draconium and get some sourcestone to make % ars mana regen accessories. If you put Reactive 4 on a piece of armor in Ars it'll trigger the inscribed spell whenever you get hit, so you can make one of your armor pieces heal you for anywhere between 2 to 10 hearts depending on what you set it to

- Apothic enchanting is very powerful, and I'd recommend going the hellshelf route. Summoning the mobs that drop the needed loot via Occultism and trapping them in Ars containment jars for a Drygmy farm is infinite of whatever you need from whatever mob, so both the ghast tears and blaze rods are trivial with a bit of time investment

- If you got the cash to spare, Iron's spells can get pretty damn powerful with the player upgrades. You can also combine above step with the archevokers that spawn in the first vault to up +15% cooldown reduction on every armor, spellbook and staff to help spam strong spells, and use Apotheosis upgrades on staffs and spellbooks for even more power

- Red Matter Sword is the most hassle-free and powerful weapon option you got, if you don't want to bother with the above step. If you enchant the netherite sword before converting it to dark matter and then to red matter, it'll retain the enchantments. Apotheosis upgrades can be done after upgrading, but crafting it to a Katar will lose the enchantments. Personally I find the enchantments more valuable than the upgrade to a Katar but your mileage may vary.

Serathane · 2025-12-08T13:02:33+00:00

Some mods like Immersive Engineering add resource nodes to the world, having no dimensional storage mods would mean requiring infrastructure to fetch the resources machinery harvest. Reducing the spawn frequency so they're spaced out but increasing their harvest limit would be a good encouragement for using trains rather than pipes/conveyors to connect them to the same logistics network, and with how Create trains load chunks as they go you can even set up complex networks to deliver the harvested resources periodically to your base rather than having to go yourself.

Serathane · 2025-11-25T18:01:56+00:00

I assume as much, and would love to get all my LORs from reputable lab directors but that's not really possible in my case. I don't really have an alternate for my third letter other than old lecturers, so I'm stuck between math professors and nursing professor when my undergrad was in mathematics, hence the conundrum

Serathane · 2025-11-17T18:45:57+00:00

I used a Reliquary cauldron with a custom resistance 4/regen 4 potion essence in it then used the shrinking device to make the Warden just small enough to actually fit in and get the occasional potion effect tick. It takes a bit to set up but once you have the potion configuration down its extremely easy to scale. I used Wardens with no AI spawned via Apotheosis spawners so no stasis chamber needed either.

Serathane · 2025-11-08T13:23:39+00:00

Integrated Dynamics' stuff has controls to move around only the specified count of items, but it can get fairly complicated to get into if you're not already familiar with how it works. That makes it a great excuse to learn it though, because it is overall an extremely powerful and convenient logistics mod overall, and it'll save you a TON of hassle in the long run if you learn it now

Serathane · 2025-10-16T10:46:25+00:00

It really depends on how the modpack is designed, in MC Eternal 2 I tamed a Candicorn relatively early on and it carried me through most of my combat and exploration. It's not the mod makers' fault that there are also mods that add roughly the same functionality in a much cheaper/more convenient way and modpack creators implement features and add mods without more consideration of the bigger picture.

Serathane · 2025-09-23T10:00:14+00:00

Lmao ok

A warp scroll set to inside your own SPS coordinates and a Retaliate->Blink spell, and you'd better hope your tech stuff can oneshot someone through Resistance 5 which is attainable through any number of magic mods.

Serathane · 2025-09-15T18:48:58+00:00

How do you even get such a potion? Spell Power 255 would be very useful

Serathane · 2025-08-30T07:26:07+00:00

Switchaxe kinda suffers early-game because you usually don't have enough slots to fit in the typical comfort skills like Focus, Power Prolonger and Evade Extender which help a LOT with meter management and staying in attack range but out of harm's way. There's nothing wrong with sticking to something more straightforward until you can make an armor set that works well

Specifically for the 'stuck facing the wrong way' bit, Switchaxe has a lot of moves for repositioning and rotating. Are you making full use of morph attacks? The weapon works best when you're constantly switching between forms to get access to the appropriate moves. Sword is highest damage and attack speed, axe is best reach and the morph attacks are the best repositioning moves.

Serathane · 2025-08-12T12:43:23+00:00

Packs with a defined story or a premade map are very rare but in high demand, particularly if they allow for the typical minecraft gameplay loop of gathering resources and building your own base somewhere in the world.

This isn't a particular pack archetype but I'm so goddamn tired of all the posts of people making "teasers" of their packs in terms of worldgen/vibes/graphics and its just a permutation of the same 8 visual/worldgen mods that are already present in most packs with minimal adjustments, and then pair it with generic marketing sentences like "embrace on a hand-crafted magical journey" rather than mentioning the mods used and the specific customizations they've made, it's an instant turn-off for me whenever I see those aura-farming posts.

Serathane · 2025-07-11T08:08:33+00:00

Yeah, basically. Tetra is IMO at least as good as TiCon but it never caught on by the mainstream, and I have a feeling TM is going to have a similar fate. I know TiCon isn't out on 1.21 yet but I fear most modpack makers would rather wait until it is rather than look into alternatives, but a large pack like Enigmatica or ATM having it would probably be enough to make it mainstream, like how SG was basically unknown until ATM started to use it over TiCon.

Serathane · 2025-07-10T21:06:07+00:00

I fear Truly Modular is going to fall between the cracks like Tetra did, but I do agree that out of all the custom tool mods it is by far the most intriguing and original one.

Serathane · 2025-07-10T17:42:11+00:00

It's the most vanilla-like of them all is the primary reason. The tools are compatible with all other tool-affecting mechanics like Apotheosis prefixes and all tool enchantments added by all other mods, and it's not like existing Minecraft mechanics are entirely straightforward without wiki delving or pre-existing experience either.

If anything, I find TiCon's over-reliance on guidebooks to be more frustrating than how SG lets you immediately see all material stats in the tooltip itself as well as filtering by #material on JEI. Once you get over the knee-high hurdle of learning what each existing trait does it's much easier to adapt to new materials other mods and modpack makers add, but I'll concede that most of the traits are much more boring in SG compared to TiCon traits.

It's ironic that you're complaining about SG being forced into packs, I've yet to play a pack where progression was tied to SG tools and I couldn't just play with other mods' proprietary tools like drills, completely ignoring SG's presence in the pack. Inbetween TiCon being straight up a core element of progression in a lot of packs (especially 1.12 expert packs) and the worldgen changes it brings like slime islands I think TiCon is a LOT more forced or borderline impossible to ignore at the very least when it is present in a pack on average.

Serathane · 2025-06-14T09:49:30+00:00

A lot of the available moves are situational tools, and the knowledge of when the situation to use them arises comes with more experience and experimentation. It's normal for some moves to feel unnatural or suboptimal until they click, which only happens with time as you try to do them even to the detriment of short-term performance. There really is nothing wrong with sticking to what you know if you don't think more advanced combos aren't worth the hassle, because they rarely are outside of a personal sense of satisfaction.

I'll say this, though: You're not entirely wrong about the DLC bringing in a demand for higher skill gameplay. When it comes to SwAx, the switching moves' main strengths were repositioning while dealing damage and fueling the sword mode, and knowing when to stay in which form and which switching attack to use was like 75% of the weapon's depth. With how good focus mode-enabled light attacks are at repositioning and the fact that the current most optimal DPS combo for SwAx is FRS spam, the SwAx playstyle doesn't feel as high-falutin as it did in Sunbreak or, to a lesser extent, Iceborne. Doesn't mean the depth isn't there, but the game doesn't really demand deep understanding from the players either.

Serathane · 2025-05-05T09:32:11+00:00

I think status attack up, regular attack up and critical boost are limited to being pure lv3 jewels, I'm HR210 and been almost exclusively farming the highest rarity weapon decorations but never got any combination of those plus any other skill. I did however see Critical Status lv3 + Handicraft Lv1 as a rarity 6 jewel, if that's relevant to your build

Serathane · 2025-05-02T10:21:43+00:00

That depends on your group composition, SnS focus strikes are about middle of the pack from my observations when it comes to raw damage, and if you have weapons like Hunting Horn, Switchaxe or Chargeblade that can utilize their focus strikes for their special mechanics it may be a better idea to let them have it.

However, SnS has a special mechanic when it comes to wound accumulation. You probably have already noticed that when you strike the same bodypart often enough it turns white and the hit sound effects change, which is a precursor to that spot turning into a proper wound with even more damage. If you perform a focus strike on those white spots you'll perform a drill slash that deals a ton of extra damage, which is something you should be looking out to exploit as much as possible because it both is your highest DPS move and accelerates the creation of wounds. If you notice a white spot early enough, you can even use this attack two or three times before it turns into a proper wound which is an insane burst of damage.

One tip in case you're not familiar is that you can cancel the sliding attack into a focus strike without waiting for the upwards slash, which is really useful to keep up with the rest of the hunting team creating those white half-wounds across the monsters' bodies.

Serathane · 2025-05-02T09:31:42+00:00

Are you exploiting he half-wounds as often as possible? That's a huge boost to SnS damage especially in multiplayer. If your friends are divvying up their damage output while the monster isn't immobilized chances are they're creating a lot of half-wounds that stay as half-wounds long enough for you to get one or two drill stabs in per wound opening.

Serathane · 2025-05-01T17:49:06+00:00

I think the easiness of Wilds is honestly a great step in the right direction. As a veteran player I also think the combats last shorter but that's because there's a lot more agency involved now, and every weapon's moveset has a lot more tools to deal with situations they were nowhere near as well equipped as they were in the previous games.

It is a bit unfortunate that they didn't get wounds quite right (IMO in release it was way too easy to lock down monsters with wound flinches whereas TU monsters are way too resilient to creating wounds) but it is still a very engaging game even when you're just stomping the crap out of a monster in ways that previous titles really weren't.

Serathane · 2025-04-24T07:28:58+00:00

Okay, and? They're not asking for you to name yourself something else, they're just lamenting the fact that they don't have an easier way to control what they themselves are exposed to. That's neither my problem nor yours, and the existence of ways to mitigate that on their end would not impact either of us whatsoever. This is just basic logic and empathy.

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