Starting your own group is one of the most important steps in your scientific career — and one of the hardest.

Being invited to a Career Development Workshop at ISMB 2012 made me write down some of the advice that I had got when I was on the jobmarket a few years ago (and even put some of it on slides).

In a diverse and interdisciplinary field like computational biology it is very quite hard to come up with general rules that fit everyone. This is why I went down the self-indulgent route and revisited the CV and research statement I had prepared 4 years ago. (You’ll find a copy in the slides.) Some things are Ok, some things I would improve now — you will see, I’ll comment on this later. Let’s start with the basics: