How to get free money
Or, why social media is an important part of your grad school game
Olga Botvinnik
Bioinformatics Bootcamp
Sept 26 th , 2014

• NDSEG Fellowship winner (top 6%)
• NSF Honorable Mention (top 10%)
• Hertz Foundation Fellowship Finalist (top
50/800 applicants)
• NumFOCUS John Hunter Technical
Fellowship winner (first awardee)
• Wrote prettyplotlib python package
• Attended 3 conferences for free

How did I get these fellowships?
I applied to 15 and won 2.
• 2012-2013, pre-PhD, applied for 6 fellowships and got zero money
• 2013-2014, 1 st year, applied for 6 fellowships and got NDSEG fellowship
• 2014-2015, 2 nd year, applied for 3 and got
NumFOCUS

Databases for fellowships aka NSF is not the only one!
• UCLA GRAPES
– Can search by award requirements, e.g. US
Citizen, female, year, whether it’s for travel abroad, etc.
• Stanford FISP
• Google “Fellowship database” and you’ll get a lot

How did I attend conferences for free?
PyData NYC 2013
This led to Travis Oliphant, the author of Numpy and CEO of
Continuum Analytics
(Anaconda Python distro) to contact me about Continuum’s diversity fellowships for
PyData
Strata Silicon Valley 2014
This led to the Strata outreach committee contacting me and arranging a free pass in exchange for live-tweeting
PyCon 2014: applied for fellowship directly

Why should you care about social media?
• Anytime someone meets you, they will google your name
– If that doesn’t work, they’ll do “your name
UCSD”
• Having at least SOME online presence is much better than none
• You will get jobs (and some fellowships) much easier if people can find out more about you than just your LinkedIn profile

How to have an online presence:
Bare minimum

• “Facebook for jobs”
• Recruiters will contact you, before you even finish graduate school!
– ….if you have the right things on your profile
• Besides your regular resume type things on your profile, there’s a few key points

Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile: why?

Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile: your title
• Don’t let “Student” be the first thing in your title
• If you are doing data science-like data analysis, put “Data Scientist”
• If you’re doing algorithm development, put
“algorithm developer” or something to that extent

Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile: your summary
Too long!
On the right track, could say more

Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile: your summary
Brief academic description of you so far.
Research interests: scientific buzzwords
Specialties: computer science buzzwords
Programming languages: best first
[Other, e.g. graphic design]

Crafting a fantastic LinkedIn profile: your connections
• Recruiters will try to contact you to be your
“connection” first because then they don’t have to pay LinkedIn’s fees
• Without going overboard, connect with other people (that you know) in your field
– Fellow graduate students at UCSD
– People you know from pre-PhD school (undergrad, jobs, etc)
– People you meet at networking events
• By seeing who you are connected to, recruiters will have a better sense of who you are

• “Social coding”
• Many open source projects are hosted here, including Python packages
• All public projects are free and private projects cost money
• You can get a free academic account with your
UCSD email and get 5 private repositories
• Software jobs often want code samples, so they will look at your code on Github!

Crafting a fantastic Github profile: your projects
• As much as you can, work on your research code in public repositories
• For excellent project templates, check out: github.com/audreyr/cookiecutter
• This gets you several benefits:
– Free use of Travis-CI, a “continuous integration” service which runs all your tests every time you push code to Github ( travis-ci.org
)
– Free use of CoverallsIO, which checks your test coverage ( coveralls.io
)
– Online documentation, very useful for both you and your collaborators (“github pages,” readthedocs.org
)

Crafting a fantastic Github profile: open source software
• If you find a way to make something better, bundle it into a package and release it!
• Making a Python package is super easy, especially if you’re using cookiecutter from the last slide
• Maintaining your code is important, you will get issues and pull requests on Github and it’s important to respond (I’m guilty of not being that responsive and I feel bad)

Crafting a fantastic Github profile: your contributions
Quote from a job posting: “If you’re making less than 4 commits a day, don’t bother applying”

How to have an online presence:
Bonus points

Extra points for online presence:
Twitter

Extra points for online presence:
Personal website
Use: flavors.me for design and buy a domain for $10/year

Extra points for online presence: blog
Use: github pages and pelican for posting

How to get free money
Or, why social media is an important part of your grad school game
Olga Botvinnik
Bioinformatics Bootcamp
Sept 26 th , 2014