Jumping in at the deep end

[Suicide Junkie]

1) You may want to spend some of the last few turns building spaceyard bases in orbit of your homeworld, thus permanently increasing your total build rate. Such bases are handy for repeat building units, while the planet builds the ships to carry them.

By the time your E-Build year is up, you should have new spaceyards operating on the first colonies, and can build more colony or war ships from there.

2) In the game setup, starting resources are set anywhere from 20k to 100k.
This applies to minerals/organics/rads and research as well.
Whatever you would have normally researched is good.
Some people will use it to complete one of the large theoretical techs early as well.

It is hard to justify a 50k theoretical when you're only producing 3-5k of research a turn, but the bonus can make it easier to think about doing it to get at the techs it unlocks.
In the end, you're still going to get and spend the same amount of points, so the choice depends entirely on your needs at the time.