I get a lot of emails and texts from possible interns, job searchers, PhD candidates, industry to academia transitioners, and so on. What follows is a condensed version of my adventure. I am interested in the recommendations you provide for such a group, and I am more than willing to accommodate valid and valuable suggestions. Let’s get started.
I have no training in neuroscience, but I appreciate the work you perform. I’d like to change careers. What are my options, and what should I do?
The grass always seems to be greener on the other side. Before you abandon ship, you might want to do a litmus test. Spend at least three months as an intern learning the ropes of the academic research field. If you want to see every island in the Caribbean before choosing one to call home, a master’s degree may be in order. Look up the research facilities focusing on your preferred area of study (human cognitive research, for example). Do you know that until the project funds arrive, the vast majority of Indian research academics go without pay? Some laboratories are downright toxic. Do you consider yourself a self-learner? Find former lab members and have a chat with them. Make your choice.
When I found myself in a similar circumstance, I decided to pursue an MPhil in Neurosciences I had two SRF interviews lined up, but decided not to go that route. If I don’t feel like I’m making progress towards mastery of the material and interest drops below 25%, I decided to call it quits. In addition, I told myself not to beat up on myself over the choice, wallow in misery for two weeks, and then try to move on.
What to read, what to prepare
I used YouTube to watch every one of Robert Sapolsky’s lectures to feel a sense of understanding and start on a confident note. Neuroscience by Dale Purves is a good place to start. Take MCB80x; if you’re able to put in extra time and effort, consider Medical Neurosciences by Dr. Leonard White. I read Instant notes in neuroscience book which was very helpful to get familiar with terminologies.
What skillsets were valued in your lab and how can someone pickup some skills even before starting to work in the lab?
The ANTS book and videos by Mike Cohen are excellent tools. Signal processing, logic, coding, neurobiology, and interpretation are all brought together in a seamless fashion in this book. If you want to skip the stories and get right to the meat of the matter, Andy Field’s Discovering Statistics using R is a great place to begin. Read through all of the EEGLAB tutorials.
Cover Automate the boring stuff with Python and A Whirlwind Tour of Python
If you already have a programming background, get yourself familiarised with MNE Python, YASA and Neurokit2
Show me some useful skills/questions I can prepare
- How to plot a topogram for power spectral values
- Indexing, slicing and dicing. Pick up the third row, fifth to 128th column
- Data visualisation for time series, counts
- Plot and save in a loop
- Fetch specific files from a folder (say csv sheets) and access third row, fifth column and write that value to a new csv sheet
- Where is your github/lab/whatever page (just show me anything that demonstrates your competence) if you say you can code?
- Resume says knows R. Tell me 10 things about R.
- Tell me about your favorite research paper and why?
- Name three researchers in the domain of your interest.
- What do you want to study? How do we study that? If there is a
10crore funding, what will you do? - If you are interviewing for a
Meditation research study, understand the phenomenology, main papers in the field, papers published from the lab - Pick any concept in Neuroscience and explain it to me for 5 minutes in
ELI5format