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!

One thing worth mentioning: when you share plots or results on slack between meetings, please send some interpretation along with them. Point out what you notice, what you think it means, potential caveats, and what you're thinking of doing next. It's tempting (and very easy on slack) to just drop a figure with no comment, but even a few sentences of written analysis makes the conversation much more useful — it prompts you to think through what you're seeing, and it gives me something specific to respond to. And for what it's worth, seeing and discussing your plots is one of the best parts of this job, so don't be shy about sharing (: (See also: Communication.)

Lab Meeting

Lab meeting is every Thursday at 10AM. We follow a rotation where each person alternates between presenting a research update and picking a paper for journal club. The schedule is posted in the #lab-meeting channel on Slack.

Research presentations are a chance to get feedback, practice presenting, and keep everyone up to date on what's happening in the lab. See the presentations guide for tips on giving a good lab meeting talk.

Journal club works a bit differently from the standard format: one person picks the paper, but everyone reads it, and each lab member is assigned a figure or two to walk the group through. You should come prepared to explain your assigned figure (no slides needed), answer questions about it, and ask the group about anything you didn't 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. There will usually be many interesting papers to pick from in the #papers channel on Slack.

The Geiller lab also has lab meeting on Mondays at 9AM, and everyone in our group is welcome to join. If you're interested in hippocampal circuits, I'd encourage you to sit in on theirs as well — it's a great way to broaden your exposure and build connections across labs.