Sarah Winnicki, PhD

kim @kimmymonte.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 20:59 UTC

my dog when I tell him the Fourth of July is in a few days

9 replies 52 reposts 430 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 17:31 UTC

That is a bummer! My old school was a too-small Brutalist building, the replacement looks lovely

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 17:10 UTC

Yeah my best times in middle/high school were in a birding club. And being in a birding club as a 12 year old in the 00s guaranteed the rest of school wasn’t great

1 replies 0 reposts 4 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 16:49 UTC

my dad is still best friends with his pals from elementary school, they all went on to successful adult stuff but to this day hang out and routinely talk about their joyful memories of a lifetime of shenanigans not my experience

0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 16:40 UTC

just hoping midnight rolls around before I get any bad news haha

1 replies 0 reposts 3 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 16:38 UTC

feels good y'all

1 replies 0 reposts 11 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 16:37 UTC

In the span of 10 minutes I got three emails informing me that: -my dissertation deposit was accepted by the graduate college without revisions -a tentative hearing date is set for the end of my divorce proceedings after months of waiting -my routine bloodwork shows my health is on the mend

9 replies 0 reposts 34 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 16:34 UTC

I had some incredible mentors in middle and high school who helped my little queer neurodivergent ass make it through, but it was not pretty

0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 16:19 UTC

My childhood school district has replaced their old middle and high schools with lovely new buildings. Former classmates are sharing the photos of the demolition with nostalgic "remember all the good times?" captions That was, um, not my experience haha. I would've helped the demolition for free

4 replies 0 reposts 16 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 04:24 UTC

For having as many PhDs as he does Bruce Banner seems unemployed in some of those movies. Is that what it takes to make it in academia, >7 PhDs???

0 replies 0 reposts 2 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 02, 2024 at 04:04 UTC

I need to update my LinkedIn profile just so they stop sending me suggestions to apply for PhD student positions I just got this PhD, I do not need another one thanks

1 replies 0 reposts 16 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 18:43 UTC

My mother at least looks for research or academic positions, and she lives in a part of Ohio where there are quite a few small colleges and universities nearby, but that definitely doesn’t guarantee they’re hiring

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 17:07 UTC

I’ve been keeping my parents updated as I apply for jobs My father ranks them all by salary and still thinks that academics make much more than they do My mother ranks them all by how quickly it would take to drive there from her house and would like it under an hour Healthy expectations lol

1 replies 0 reposts 14 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 16:15 UTC

I thought about it, but then my professional reference would be my ex as we go through a divorce

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 15:35 UTC

Getting better luckily!

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 06:17 UTC

Well that makes me feel better! Haha

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 06:01 UTC

Tbf I don’t know if that should be comforting, given for some reason I read “pileated woodpecker” as a kid and pronounced it “pie-lated” as if the “e” doesn’t exist at all and I still don’t say it right to this day, and unfortunately occasionally infect ornithology students with my mispronunciation

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 05:46 UTC

That’s absolutely how I’d sight-read Pilates too!

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 05:05 UTC

I may be biased because I spent the first 18 years of my life there, but I do feel like Cleveland’s accent is particularly and noticeably weird even relative to the rest of the Great Lakes

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 04:54 UTC

It amazes me how much subtle variation there is, even just in the Midwest (I’ve lived in NE Ohio, central Ohio, NE Kansas, and now central Illinois), whenever I return home my siblings make fun of me because my vowels are a mix of all those places

1 replies 0 reposts 5 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 04:43 UTC

We’re Inland Northern American English twins! My peers gave me a rough time for it when I got to college, telling me it made me sound uneducated, it took me a long time to realize pronouncing things as you were taught them is just how language learning works haha

2 replies 0 reposts 3 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 04:37 UTC

My Cleveland accent makes French vowel pronunciations a disaster, he seemed to get a kick out of my attempts

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 04:33 UTC

I don’t want to speak for him, but I think we were both excited to learn that someone else had heard of some of the obscure saints I researched, and I was excited to finally learn how to pronounce all their names correctly!

1 replies 0 reposts 3 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 04:22 UTC

a French colleague moved into the shared graduate student office recently and made the mistake of mentioning something about early medieval France, not realizing that I wrote a 150 page undergraduate history thesis on Merovingian and Carolingian saints

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 04:20 UTC

my R scripts are where surplus computers go to die apparently

0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 04:19 UTC

Although I do a bit of genotyping and sequencing work myself, I'm grateful that my best microbiology contact is my sister (infectious disease PhD candidate), she can't divorce me away haha

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 02:11 UTC

that sounds much better than "when my ex-wife got so frustrated with code errors I helped troubleshoot before she lost it"

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 02:09 UTC

I am lucky that ours are relatively close (we did meet while working on a research crew together) so there's a enough formal collaboration that we appear on each other's CVs a few times, but not nearly enough to capture the true extent of it. We're not "research questions stay at work" kind of folks

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 02:07 UTC

I've been dipping my toe into life history and evolution theory lately, my poor ex-wife had to listen to so many late-night ramblings about it she should probably have an honorary degree at this point

0 replies 0 reposts 4 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 02:03 UTC

Luckily I do have a bunch of relevant coursework and side collaborations to highlight in these applications, but I do think that those alone don't capture how qualified I actually am to do this kind of work, wish I could convey that reality!

1 replies 0 reposts 5 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 02:01 UTC

We did formally collaborate on a few projects, but the most relevant one to this current job application is still unpublished and I can't even be too grumpy about it because trying to save our marriage and navigating our divorce has eaten up a lot of both of our writing evenings

2 replies 0 reposts 5 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 02:00 UTC

My ex-wife and I met studying sparrows together, but we focused on research at different scales (I studied individual-level physiology, she did big data distribution modeling). We're certainly not experts in each other's work, but not complete novices either!

1 replies 0 reposts 7 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 01, 2024 at 02:00 UTC

Having been married to an academic researcher is strange because I picked up knowledge of her sub-field but can't really put that in job applications I wish there was a professional way to say "I helped troubleshoot code for these kind of projects in my living room"

6 replies 0 reposts 32 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 21:40 UTC

We would all fit but my tiniest cat insists on stretching alllll the way out and my sweet gentle pushover dog will not crowd her Of course that means the 50 pound dog must lay on me

0 replies 0 reposts 4 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 21:29 UTC

I have two couches in my house One for me to sit on while I work And the other to sit totally empty because my dog and both of my cats insist on being on whichever couch I am occupying

2 replies 0 reposts 24 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 20:07 UTC

UIUC is so large I don’t even think I know all the biology sub-divisions here and I’m an official affiliate of at least four of them

0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 18:38 UTC

Dropped in the union today as I waited for my bus, pretty sure I was last here for mandatory covid testing years ago The England-Slovakia game is on and the crowd watching here is so boisterous, what fun!

0 replies 0 reposts 5 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 18:37 UTC

Graduate school is so weird, spent 5 years at this giant university and I’m pretty sure I’ve only been in 8 buildings total I knew every building at my tiny undergrad college so well (although I did work in Archives, spent years with the history of the college at my fingertips)

3 replies 0 reposts 13 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 17:57 UTC

It is very cool that the university gives us access to old machines that professors don’t want anymore, but they are pretty elderly by computer standards (this is a 2012) so they don’t last too long (this is my 3rd in 5 years)

1 replies 0 reposts 4 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 17:46 UTC

Luckily I was already noticing it was struggling so I habitually back up my saved files, knew it was only a matter of time

1 replies 0 reposts 7 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 17:44 UTC

I’ve been working remotely, connecting to my office desktop. It disconnected so I bussed over to the office to turn it back on, turns out the poor old desktop is not simply off but is no longer turning on Rest in peace, office desktop, thanks for running all my code scripts

1 replies 0 reposts 8 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 04:37 UTC

But I also got sick enough last year that “this dissertation is killing me” got too real for comfort, so I felt like my only competition was between me and the dissertation I finished it, I won, most of my organs are still working, that’s more than I dreamed for last year

1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes

Sarah Winnicki, PhD @skwinnicki.bsky.social [ View ] Jun 30, 2024 at 04:32 UTC

I didn’t like my MSc thesis, but I’m pretty damn proud of this PhD dissertation, but less because I think it’s particularly awesome (although I am fond of it) but more because I know what it took me to get there and I’m still pretty impressed I pulled it off at all lol

2 replies 0 reposts 1 likes