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Microbial Advent Calendar – A review

By January 3, 2018Fun, Opinion

Now that I can move my neck properly again it’s time to have a look back on my Microbial Advent Calendar attempt. The exercise was to produce a small blog post a day, for 24 days, about a cool microbiology fact/paper related anywhere from close to pretty far from the Christmas topic.

With 17 out of 24 blog posts in December, I have a look back on how to improve this if I want to redo it next year.

The Good...

  • Read at least one paper a day
    • Important habit to get into for staying in touch with the science world
  • Small science-related writing every day
    • Never stop writing
  • One illustration every day
    • My way to partially stay sane in Academia
  • Improved knowledge
    • I got to discover a lot of cold-related microbiology
  • Having a small collection of premade bacteria drawings helped a lot
    • I will probably redo some stickers of them
  • Bacteria are an important process of cocoa production!
    • Seriously…
  • Kept the blog alive

... and the Improvable

Most of the improvement would be related on how to improve the length of writing a post a day:

  • Start preparing a list before the 1st of December
    • Days where I already had a paper lined out where considerably faster to produce than others
  • Don’t get sidetracked by awesome datasets
    • I didn’t really needed to have an animated map of the progression of the London Plague of 1664.
    • I refrained from making a similar analysis of the chocolate production worldwide since 1962
  • Find a middle point on how to discuss a paper
    • Don’t really have time to properly get into what bothered me in some of the papers I presented
  • Manage my back/neck better
    • Take care of yourself…

All in all, I really liked doing this, even if it can be a little bit overwhelming when not prepared correctly. I hope you liked this illustrated attempt as much as I did making it and I would like to thank you for passing by and reading my daily ramblings.

I will keep doing small posts about papers I find interresting, although the publishing frequency might be a little bit slower.

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