1-on-1 Meetings

All lab members should have a regularly scheduled 1-on-1 meeting with me. This can be weekly or bi-weekly, and will often be used to discuss results and next steps in your project.

One strategy that worked well for me during my PhD and postdoc was to come to 1-on-1 meetings with slides.
These would include:

• agenda outline - what do you want to talk about this week
• quick recap of the current goals, approach, and TL;DR previous meeting
• figures showing the results from the week
• ideas for what you think your next steps should be

While I generally encourage you to figure out what works best for you, and won’t make this a requirement, I am putting it here as a suggested practice that benefits both of us. It helps me more effectively advise you and where you’re at in your project, and it helps you to make these slides - it makes you go the extra step to generate semi-presentable figures of your results, it prompts you to think of where you’re at and where you should go next, and you'll have many slides to start from when you have to present your work (e.g. in lab meeting). Over time, you become quite good at quickly putting together and presenting effective slide presentations.

Of course, we’re not always able to have new results for each meeting - sometimes we’ve been productive, but just thinking; sometimes life has happened and we haven’t made any progress on our projects. That’s ok, and I’m always happy to chat about anything, either why you think things aren’t working, some ideas you've been thinking about, or just generally how things are going. Regardless, it’s good to have the meeting on the calendar and we can always skip a week or have a quick check in if there’s not much to discuss. However, I would encourage you to not get in the habit of pushing back meetings, as a common failure mode of a PhD is a spiral in which you avoid meeting with your advisor because you don’t have results, putting pressure on yourself to have more results for the next meeting, which you then avoid because you don’t have “good enough” results, … you see where this goes.

This meeting can also be used to discuss career plans, etc. From my point of view, your scheduled 1-on-1 meeting is time set aside in my calendar for you, your research, and your career, and is there for you to use however you think would be most helpful.

Please note that 1-on-1 meetings are not the only time I have for you. I am always happy to discuss results: positive or negative, challenges you’re facing, or anything else you want to talk about related to your project, career, or science in general. You can always message me on slack, and if my door is open, please come in!

Journal Club

Journal clubs and lab buisness meetings are every Thursday, at 10AM.

Format:

• We follow a rotation picking a paper to read. Paper should be sent to the group 1 week before the journal club (i.e. EOD the previous Thursday). There will usually be many interesting papers to pick from in the #papers channel on slack.
• Each lab member is assigned a figure or two to walk the group through. (This approach makes sure we all read the paper, and avoids the trap of one person reading and presenting while others do not engage.)
• You should come prepared to explain your assigned figure (no slides needed), answer questions about it, and ask the group about anything you did not understand. If there are supplemental figures or methods associated with your figure, you should be familiar with those as well. It's OK to not understand everything fully - the point of journal club is to talk through and learn together.