Meetings
Expectations
See also Code of Conduct
- Unless otherwise stated, lab meetings will be in-person.
- Periodic meetings may be in-person or over zoom, though in-person meetings are generally preferred
- Whether in-person or remote, you are expected to be on-time, prepared to present (where applicable), and able to participate.
- Please notify everyone involved in the meeting as soon as you can if for whatever reason you are unable to attend, or if your certainty about being able to attend has changed.
- For scheduled in-person meetings, if you are feelings symptoms of a cold or other communicable illness, please inform others as early as you can that you need to switch to a remote meeting
- Be respectful of other people’s time and schedules
Staff and Trainee Periodic Meetings
Everyone in the lab should have periodic one-on-one meetings with Kevin to discuss your personal plans and goals, any roadblocks or issues that you are encountering, and just generally to check in.
Most often, “periodic” means once per week or every other week, though depending on your working style and need for support, you may increase or decrease this frequency in consultation with Kevin.
Before your first meeting, create your personal repository from the trainee template, then follow the instructions in the README within the PeriodicTemplate directory. If you’re not sure how to do this, try taking a look at the Coding and version control protocol. If you still can’t figure it out, Kevin can help during your first meeting.
Lab Meeting
Most weeks, there will be a lab meeting with everyone in the lab participating. If you have lab business to discuss, find the lab meeting agenda and add it as a bullet point.
The goal of lab meetings is to build community and help everyone have a sense of what the other lab members are working on, not to be completely polished.
Weekly progress (every week)
Each member of the lab should be prepared to present at least one thing that you would like help with or feedback on, but this can take many forms. Here are some examples:
- a plot or data visualization you’ve created
- a bug that you encountered in analysis code (whether solved or not)
- a paragraph or two from the results section of a manuscript you are working on
- a figure from a paper you read that you need help interpreting
The point of this is not to have a fully fleshed out product, but to demonstrate what you are working on and share your struggles along with your successes.
Paper snippets (every week)
Each week, you should share something from a paper that you read. Implicitly, this means you should be reading at least one paper per week. Note: you do not need to completely or even mostly understand what you read, just do your best to understand the overall goal of the paper, and if you can’t, be able to talk about what’s confusing.
Also be sure to log the paper that you read and a brief description in your personal trainee repository.
Research presentation (once every 6-8 weeks)
A critical component of doing science is presenting science. About every two months (scheduled in advance), you will prepare a more formal presentation of your work.
Lab members that are not presenting in a week should take notes and provide feedback on content, style, and / or clarity of the presentation.
Journal Club (once every 6-8 weeks)
Occasionally, you will be asked to present a paper in more detail than your weekly snippet. You should select the paper you will present at least a week in advance to allow other lab members a chance to read it. At minimum, your presentation should have a slide per figure (break large figures into multiple slides to make sure they’re legible), and you should be able to talk through the results and any methods that may be novel to some people in the lab.
Project-specific meetings
Individual projects may have periodic meetings with all of the people involved. Depending on the needs of the project, these meetings may be regularly scheduled or ad hoc, possibly with collaborators. The needs of this kind of meeting will likely be diverse enough that it is not worth spelling them out here.