So, I want to say what I said before again.

The most important good habits include:

1. Manage your time: I learned this from a pre-med student and a colleague that you should always prepare what you need to do for tomorrow and make a list of them before sleep. If there is anything that won’t be finished that day, don’t worry, just move it to the next day.

2. Keep health: both mentally and physically; don’t be gaslit by superiors or peers. Also, don’t sit in front of a screen for a long time; keep walking a little bit.

3. Manage your emotions and energy: don’t waste time on something that you couldn’t change; if it really hurts you, make a reflection on how you should do next time when met the same situation. Don’t overthinking.

To begin, I should say this post is not about how to make a correct decision at the very beginning of your postdoc life (someone can, but I can’t due to subjective and objective reasons).

This is a journey to learn from mistakes, avoid making them again, and seriously share the experience so others might avoid the same situation.

I accepted a postdoc position two years ago, but looking back, if I faced the same option, I should ask for more details about the purpose of the training and what I would be expected to do during this training.

I may have stepped onto a path that was not quite suited to my strengths, and over time it became harder to find my footing. Although J tried to help keep things on course, I still feel very bad recently. Perhaps it is only the view from where I am standing, but recently I have felt a little like a stranger in a room I once hoped to belong to.

So lessons:

Before accepting the offer:

1. Ask what the training goal is, what and how many publications are expected, and what collaborative work you will need to do. Does all collaborative work have an outcome when you finish the contract?

During the training:

1. Don’t complain even if you feel something shouldn’t be like that; it only makes your supervisor feel that you can’t do that.
2. Be professional, don’t interpret, and maintain good manners.
3. Protect your own rights.
4. I am too serious to do everything, but it really doesn’t need to be so responsible. Don’t spend time doing something that won’t have an outcome.
5. Don’t be led by consulting questions, and reply slowly to avoid disrupting your current work.

I read a lot of Matt Might’s blog articles, and I really like them and still recommend that students who are in undergraduate or graduate school read his blog. He gives a lot of systematic suggestions on how to deal with specific tasks for undergraduate/graduate students.

This year, I am starting to supervise students, and I would like to open a new category to repeat something that we all learned in our past university studies, but new students might not have grasped at their stage.

Today, I am starting with how to write an email, as I received a lot of supervision inquiries from undergraduate and postgraduate students this year. I guess mainly because I updated my university personal page.

Every email should have a subject line, greeting, context, closing, and signature.

1.Subject line: can be short, but it needs to be clear so the receiver won’t mix it with advertisement email.

2.Greeting: It is totally fine if you don’t know how to address a person properly, but at least start with Hi,.

For PhD position inquiry emails, please address the supervisor by name, but don’t just write Hi Professor,. We all know you send multiple faculty member emails, but we also don’t want to reply to you if you are too lazy to add our name when you send these emails.

3.Context: Please introduce yourself if this is an inquiry email for a project or PhD position opportunity, and please also write it in paragraphs, not just a long one-line sentence. If you don’t provide any of your information, we won’t be able to evaluate whether you are suitable for the project or position, we will just assume you are not suitable.

With the use of AI, more and more international students will draft their emails using AI tools. It is ok, but please don’t write it too long, as our research shows that current reasoning AI models can potentially provide longer conversations than old non-reasoning AI models. In which, if you ask AI to help you draft an email, it could be longer than a usual email. Think about the words and information in each sentence and write it yourself (include only essential details), and use AI to help correct grammar errors and inaccurate words is the way I recommend.

For a PhD position inquiry email, please don’t just copy the supervisor’s personal page research topic when you express the interesting, I more want to see why your background aligns with my research.

It is also better to make one main ask, not five different problems at once. If you need to ask multiple questions, you could number them, so I won’t miss any questions.

4.Closing and Signature: Always thanks for their time and look forward to their reply. I do receive emails without the student’s signature (name). It is fine if their email address shows their name, and it is not fine to me if it doesn’t, I don’t know who I need to reply to.

If I don’t write it down, I never seem to find time to do it. Craig Venter passed away in April 29, it makes me feel my world become old and faraway with these excited people.

For me, it marks the end of an era.

Venter is someone I first learned about from textbooks when I studied genomics. My mentor in the US also worked at the J. Craig Venter Institute before, and he told me that he could focus on a project and not talk to anyone for a week (which I doubt).

What people say to you may not reveal their true character, watch how they treat others.

I finished my PhD in the last two years, but I haven’t updated my blog since 2023. It is not just too busy with research, but also about seeing how people treat others, and for me, how to manage up (apparently, I am not good at it).

Academic life is all about how to manage your time, your thoughts, your health, and your emotions. Thanks to the good environment, peers, and more experienced supervisors, I graduated.

I will keep writing, my views are my own.