Owen Yang
Skills are likely the key factor that gets a master graduate to the next job. Although different people have different learning styles, I am a fan of learning by doing. Perhaps identify one or two skills you would like to take away with this Master or Doctor degree.
Software practical skills
Depending on our assessment on own ability, it can be a practical skill such as doing a Cox regression or running a GWAS from the raw data. For practical skills, it will help if we aim to be able to teach other people or discuss with other people so that they could understand. Teaching is a deeper level of learning, and we tend to identify our knowledge blind spot when we try to teach or try to explain.
Other types of practical skills
The skills can also be a task like conducting interviews or design a questionnaire. Producing clinical trial documents. Grant or ethics applications. These tasks tend to be learnt only after we have done it, and the experience is undervalued.
Deeper understanding of a system
It can be understanding and managing a large complex dataset such as the UK Biobank. It can also be getting to know what cancer registries is. These examples look like a lot of numbers, but you might recognise this is in fact a ‘qualitative’ task where you get to know something that is big.
I guess what I would like to say is, it is interesting how research programmes are designed in a way, or advertised in a way that they are training future leaders, but in reality not many have their first jobs as a boss. Focus on a few skills and work towards it could be a nice strategy to adopt when we choose our dissertation topic so that we are earthed to the ground.
