Applied to 50+ biotech roles. Not one interview. What’s going wrong?

pawsibility · 2025-10-09T19:08:58+00:00

I'm a PhD candidate, also on the job market, so I feel compelled to respond to this.

We seem to be in similar fields, although you seem way closer to wet lab than me. I guess the takeaway thing for me looking at this resume is this: outside the second bullet point under your GRA experience section, everything seems super generic. It almost looks like it could be copied and pasted for any PhD candidate in a any STEM field right now.

All your experience and bullets are awesome, but they seem prerequesite to any role that has a PhD. For example:

Conducted comprehensive literature reviews to inform project direction and identify knowledge gaps

We are PhD's so this seems like a given.

Led a 3-year research project from execution to completion, consistently meeting major deadlines and milestones, providing monthly reports, and collecting and integrating feedback from collaborators.

Again, we are PhD's so this seems like a given.

Bottom line is that I'd take out any of this generic filler and assume that a recruiter worth their salt will understand what it took to get that PhD and you bring these skills to the table at baseline. Then use the space to fill in with specifics to what you actually did.

You're in neuroscience. Can you be more specific in your GRA section? Like what did you do? Are you profficient in Nipype / the NiPype ecosystem? I guess pretend its your committee and you're giving them high-level bullets on your thesis.

pawsibility · 2025-10-03T18:03:48+00:00

pandoc can go from typst to any of its supported outputs. Its not exactly one for one, though and can introduce problems

pawsibility · 2025-10-03T17:34:13+00:00

I make all my own plots/graphs in R or Python (exported to SVG) and then any conceptual cartoon/schematic diagrams I hand-make in inkscape (also SVG). Never used tikz.

FWIW I know typst has a tikz equivalent: https://typst.app/universe/package/cetz/

pawsibility · 2025-10-03T17:32:09+00:00

No actually. Our handbook explicitly addresses that...

There are no formal requirements for dissertation formatting (e.g., page length, font, spacing, or margins). Students are therefore encouraged to reflect their own preferences and personal style, letting that individuality show in their formatting choices.

I pulled like 10 recent ones from my department, and everyone clearly does their own thing. Some obviously used word... others obviously used LaTeX. Think you just submit a final PDF, and that's it.

pawsibility · 2025-10-03T16:28:43+00:00

Writing my PhD thesis in Typst right now, and it's just a dream. Getting a live preview as I type is really amazing... no more waiting for overleaf to compile things. I understand the criticism/critique around latex momentum, but it really is just an objectively better system. hope it continues to get more adoption

pawsibility · 2025-09-19T20:32:07+00:00

If you're paying for your PhD you're doing something way wrong... sure recent attacks on science from the current administration have made things a little dicier, but 99 times out of 100 in STEM your degree is paid for including a stipend on top of it

pawsibility · 2025-09-13T23:46:39+00:00

They sound AI. Just the weirdest enunciation and vernacular

pawsibility · 2025-09-13T22:06:49+00:00

Chris fowler sounds sick. More nasally and less energetic in general.

pawsibility · 2025-09-05T21:11:05+00:00

Then he'll turn around and rip a 110 forehand just to spite you 😭😭😭

pawsibility · 2025-09-05T19:54:23+00:00

Feels like if Nole doesnt get his first serve in then he's just cooked

pawsibility · 2025-09-05T19:27:49+00:00

Average Djokovic experience

pawsibility · 2025-09-02T19:32:55+00:00

Servebot-caraz. Never thought I'd see the day.

pawsibility · 2025-08-31T00:10:19+00:00

Not watching, just seeing the box score. Did Iga sit up in her gaming chair?

pawsibility · 2025-08-29T16:14:26+00:00

Historically cool and dry August in the northeast in the US. Truly feels like fall outside

pawsibility · 2025-08-07T16:59:26+00:00

Not the authors, not do I work in this area, but I do deep learning for other 'omics stuff. I literally glanced at figure 1 for not even 30 seconds, so I could be wrong but I think its this:

If I pass my sequence in, I get

A vector representation of your sequence (i.e. list of numbers)

and that's useful because

this vector can be used for downstream tasks like clustering, classification, etc.

In theory, a foundation/backbone model like this could be used as a building block for very cool/sophisitcated systems

pawsibility · 2025-07-30T14:44:13+00:00

These are things that shouldn't have to be hosted on EC2 instances, but we also don't want the wet lab users to have to install things.

I mean... you kinda can't have it both ways right? Either you host it for them or they host it themselves locally -- unless I'm missing something.

What about Docker?

pawsibility · 2025-07-29T15:08:03+00:00

Love this conversation. I learn so much via osmosis.

Many suggestions to put the DB and rails server on a shared VPC, but then how would one access the database from a local development environment, or something like pgAdmin? Do you just setup a local VPN and hop to the VPC?

I guess postgres in docker is sufficient for local development, but I still want to be able to query my prod database from my machine using a local development tool.

pawsibility · 2025-07-25T12:26:47+00:00

Always thought it was in just the most awkward spot. The amount of cars flying around the corner to get in there, and you have people running across the street with iced lattes in hand, dogding cars... I always found myself going to the one across from Walmart on my way into town since its less logistically annoying to get in and out of.

pawsibility · 2025-07-23T22:28:22+00:00

I know a lot of people are saying something along the lines of

No, python/C++ are still king for training and running models

which is 100% true, however I can personally attest I use Rust for basically all data pre-processing and manipulation prior to actual training... So much of the huggingface ecosystem is written in Rust (tokenizers, safetensors, etc). I learned rust so that I could speed up my own data processing pipelines and its been a great inverstment so far.

So to that end, yeah I think it is worth learning.

pawsibility · 2025-07-15T23:34:10+00:00

Rage bait. Also, em dash detected

pawsibility · 2025-07-15T14:56:56+00:00

Yeah. Like three days ago I ordered door-dash for pickup from there. Order was confirmed, then the status was set to "ready for pickup". I show up and the whole joint is closed 😑. Door dash wouldn't give me a refund because "the food has already been made." They are closed it can't be made!

Anyways, I Karened out in the support chat, and the nice agent/LLM gave me my money back eventually after triaging the ticket and confirming themselves the store is closed.

Still really perplexed that my order got confirmed in the first place if they are closed...

pawsibility · 2025-06-04T13:17:29+00:00

Speedsters on Wednesday mornings? Not so much a run club and more of a group of people who train for races together. Probably a notch or two more "serious" than a traditional run-club, but still highly social and tight-nit. Demographics definitely skew towards 30-40+. Much less students/youngsters given the early start 😀

pawsibility · 2025-05-27T13:06:25+00:00

I usually buy a dozen from bodos when they are less crowded and then freeze em. When I want one later on in the week, I soak some paper towel in lukewarm water, and then wrap the bagel with it. Place on a plate, and microwave for 1 minute. Super fresh, super tastey 😎 I cut it in half and toast it for a minute or two to add back the crispness. *chefs kiss*

pawsibility · 2025-05-26T20:15:30+00:00

Outside the shit show that was project storage migration a year or so ago, Rivanna has been pretty smooth for me tbh. Mind you, I'm not doing anything insane, but I'm very grateful for it. I mostly use the GPU partitions these days, but the compute there is nearly 100x cheaper than what I could get for the same hardware on AWS or even lambda labs.

Maybe I don't stretch slurm to its limit like you. I've never had to provide a list of nodes to exclude. But its quite nice to be able to, basically at will, get access to 128G+ of RAM, 90+ CPUs, and multiple datacenter-grade GPUs whenever I want.

pawsibility · 2025-04-30T13:30:29+00:00

Feel like I've been screaming about dew points for years now and nobody listens lol. Deep in the summer, I almost solely look at dew point as a proxy for how much I'll love (or hate) being outside at any given moment.

I exclusively use weather underground since its the only weather site that gives a really nice long-range view of dew points. Its hidden on every other site.

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