The Effortless Academic
This newsletter is about great tools, ideas and methods, to become effortless in managing the most important aspect of academia: Knowledge.
Who am I and why am I here?
Hi, I am Ilya Shabanov and I am working towards a PhD in Computational Conservation Ecology.
My PhD journey has been unusual. After my MSc in Computer Science I founded a startup rather than doing a PhD: NeuroNation. After 5 years it was time to part ways and go on a spiritual journey that lasted another 5 years. Then a realisation: “I am tired of supporting myself doing websites, I want more”.
This was the beginning of my PhD Journey. 9 Months a volunteer at Dr Ross Buchan’s lab at the university of Arizona, leads me to the soothing feeling of a first publication. This year, 2021, I almost became a molecular biologist - but for visa reasons I could not start my PhD.
In consequence, a much better opportunity opened up, a PhD position I am at now.
What can you expect from my Newsletter?
As someone who worked in IT for almost 2 decades I love my tools, hacks, hotkeys and workflows. When coming to Academia I was confronted with messy notes in MS Words Documents, Google Docs and plain Emails 🙈.
This does not work for me. It quite literally felt like a flashback of the 1990s. The world has moved on.
So during my academic take-off I started developing new tools and repurposed others. All this helps me immensely on my journey - and it keeps on changing.
I don’t think I am super smart or talented in any exceptional way, yet structuring my knowledge and doing it effortlessly seems to be something I manage to do well. Here is what my advisor wrote in my recommendation letter after being a volunteer in his lab for about 6 months:
This is not talent - this is simply effortless structuring and processing of knowledge. In this newsletter I will be sharing all the different tools and hacks that I already developed and will develop over time.
I call it Effortless Academia. As effortlessness, is one of my core values.
Online Course
After conducting a very popular workshop with 190 participants (which is more than every 10th of my Twitter followers), I decided to expand the material into an online course. It consists of an annotated and curated recording with additional material, like explanations, videos, notes and links.
In total 500+hrs of experimentation with knowledge tools went into the making of this online course. Energize your academic journey in this step-by-step session.
