As I’ve been brainstorming more “advice” posts for this blog, I thought it might be useful for me to write down some thoughts I have about how to read advice. I try to acknowledge on this blog that my perspective is only a subjective, individual one based on my experiences, but I thought I would elaborate a bit more on why that’s important for you to remember as the reader.

I use a Fitbit to track some basic health statistics, but sometimes I wished that the plots on the app were displayed slightly differently. In this post, I will give a go at making plots that I think would be useful for me. To do this, I first need to download my data from Fitbit. One way is to export your data manually from Fitbit’s website. Alternatively, they also have an API.

Last week, I successfully defended my thesis! Just like I did with my preliminary oral exam, I will write about my experience here and give some insight into what happens behind-the-scenes. For those who may be unfamiliar, the thesis defense is the third and last major milestone in our PhD program. The first is the written comprehensive exam (taken after your first or second year), the second is the preliminary oral exam (typically taken in your third year), and the third is the thesis defense (typically taken in your fifth year).

Recently, I came across this great tutorial by Connor Rothschild, where he teaches you how to animate the Hugo Academic theme for a blogdown website. Inspired by this post, I wanted to apply similar animations to my personal website, which was built using the postcards R package.1 Below is what the resulting animated theme looked like: If you don’t care about how I implemented this and just want to apply an animated version of the jolla theme (screenshot above), you can install a forked copy of the postcards R package from my repo using the R command remotes::install_github("

Today, I thought I would share what a day in the life of a PhD student is like. Personally, I’ve always been interested in other people’s day-to-day experience at work. So I imagine that similarly, getting a glimpse into my day could be interesting and informative, particularly for students thinking about getting a PhD in biostatistics. I took two days from my third-year calendar (i.e. pre-pandemic) to give a sense of not only the typical activities I do, but also show how each day can be drastically different.