When you first sit down with NONMEM1, it can appear considerably arcane. The “Zen” of NONMEM is that you’re speaking a language called NM-TRAN2; and you need to grok3 NM-TRAN. When you are writing a “model” in NONMEM, you are writing it in the language of NM-TRAN. The document you are writing in is a text file called a control stream, control file, or model file; it tells NONMEM what to do.
When setting goals, it is important that it is falsifiable — just like a research hypothesis. An acronym that can be helpful when setting goals, is SMART. With SMART, goals have to be: Specific Measurable Accepted Relevant Time-bound Specific What exactly is it that you are going to do? Define the exact action that you have to perform. Measurable How will you track your goal?
For your report, use the official university template if one exists. Think about how you will analyze your results before you have the results. Don’t follow the instructions from your supervisor blindly. Make sure you understand the reasoning behind the decisions. If you don’t understand why you do things a certain way, ask. When you present your work, you don’t want to answer any questions with “because my supervisor said so”.
One thing that GNU/Linux users are familiar with is the concept of a “package manager”. A package manager is a tool that keeps track of software for you. It installs it, uninstalls it, upgrades it, etc. On macOS there isn’t any package manager installed by default (perhaps the App Store could be seen as some form of package manager?), so for all you macOS users out there I highly recommend you install Homebrew.