About RAPSCALLIONS

There are many professional skills that are useful or necessary in academia that are never formally taught. For example, there are computing resources and software that we should be familiar with but don't know. There are coding best-practices that we have avoided since our programming is self-taught. Even how we present ourselves to the world---websites and CVs---are rarely formally learned.

Over the course of a PhD we become adept at learning new skills independently. However, we decided that a structured environment would be beneficial to gain some of the professional skills that are most important for us to know. To this end, we began RAPSCALLIONS, in which we host periodic "hack sessions" to learn these new skills collaboratively.

Hosting

RAPSCALLIONS is inherently collaborative in nature, and relies on people willing to lead sessions even if they aren't "experts" on the topic. We are working on making a long-term system of organization for these sessions. In the meantime, if you have a topic you'd like to learn or one you're willing to lead a session for, please send us an email. The following figure shows a (non-exhaustive!) list of topics people expressed interest in learning based on an informal survey.

RAPSCALLIONS Sessions