What is this blog?
Hi, I’m Zorian! I also go by Zo and use he/him pronouns. As of writing this, I am just starting my third year as a PhD candidate in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. I’ll spare the details for a later blog post, but quickly, my research interests involve the intersections of deep learning, computational biology, molecular evolution and immunology. So, what’s this blog all about? Welp, to be honest I’ve wanted to have some platform to share my thoughts and experiences about things I’m interested in for a while now. I had a short stint of vlogging during my senior year at Virginia Tech, but quickly found myself uncomfortable recording myself in public. After a nice break from this hobby, I’ve decided to reboot in a more “Zo-friendly” alternative: blogging. A quick disclaimer – I don’t intend for these posts to be “formal” in a sense of being beautifully written. Rather, I want these blog posts to read in way similar to how I speak (minus the slang of course). I want this to be fun, and I will indefinitely write under the assumption that nobody will read this blog and it will serve as a personal journal of sorts. I had no idea what to write about first, so I figured I’d start with a quick self-introduction and overview :)
The 3 goals of this blog
Starting out at least, I have three personal goals I’d like to achieve with this blog:
- Practice self-reflection and gratitude
- Build effective technical and science communication skills
- Reenforce my own understanding of technical and scientific concepts :P
Upcoming content
While I don’t have a huge laundry list of ideas to write about right now, I do have a few general categories for future blog posts:
Journals
I’m hoping to achieve some of my self-reflection goals here. A lot of… stuff has happened since I graduated from college and moved across the country back in the summer of 2019. A lot of these things have shaped me as a person, scientist, friend and drastically shifted how I treat myself and by-extension, those around me. I struggle with putting my reflections down-on paper, so I’m hoping to make a habit of that here. I’ll reflect on research trials and tribulations, career development, and some personal development goals in these posts.
Informational/Tutorial posts
In these posts, I will give my best shot at describing concepts in machine learning, statistics, and biology in an easy-to-understand fashion. Think Medium tutorial posts here! The overall goal is to sharpen my scientific communication skills and explain concepts that may seem intimidating to people unfamiliar with them, and to make these concepts more approachable while motivating a lot of the beauty underlying these things!
Research review posts
One thing I feel like every PhD student must master during their time in graduate school is how to efficiently identify, read, and understand past and recent research articles. This has proven to be a huge part of my day-to-day and it seems to be a skill that translates well into industry. Here, I’m basically forcing myself to exercise this skill, but hopefully these posts are as helpful as the aforementioned tutorial posts – though with a lot more detailed focus.
MAYBE accompanying videos?
As I said before, I did give vlogging a go back in the day… While that wasn’t my thing, I did really enjoy the creative process of making and editing my videos (despite being really bad at it). I’d love to learn more about video production and making educational videos to accompany points 2 and 3 seems like a great start! This would be a huge time commitment though, and there is no way I’d be able to animate and edit every blog post, so I’ll have to come up with a system for this, at least until I’m better at video editing.
Until next time!
If you’ve made it to the end of this post, thanks so much for reading my word vomit! I’m hoping to get one or two blog posts up per-month to start, hoping somebody on the vast internet finds these future ramblings useful in some way!
Take care y’all,
Zo