Meetings and Notes

The structure of meetings and notes in my group

Notes

We use Dropbox Paper to manage project notes, with one document per project. The structure is:

  • Title, this will be “Student - Topic”.
  • Abstract, this is intended to be what you would write if you were to write up the project as a paper now. It should have 1-2 sentences each for: (a) motivation, (b) idea, (c) results. The results will have placeholders, e.g. you could write “We found that that approach scored X on dataset Y, outperforming prior work on the task.”, with X and Y to be defined later.
  • Key links, a list connecting to paper drafts, code repositories, etc.
  • Todo items, two lists, one is immediate next steps, which should be fairly specific, and the other is longer term plans.
  • Meeting notes, these consist of the date as a subheading, followd by two sections: Done, and To Discuss. Done contains a list of checked off todo items that were previously in the todo list. To Discuss contains items for the meeting.

1-1 Synchronous Meetings

All students in the lab have a weekly meeting with me and any other key collaborators on their research.

Before the meeting, students should check that the notes are up to date, including:

  • Todo list: Any future plans have been added as new items.
  • Done: All completed todo items have been marked as done and moved to this section.
  • To Discuss: Contains a set of items, each of which is brief (at most a few sentences), for us to cover in the meeting.

Where relevant, include links or copies of anything you wish to refer to in the meeting (e.g. figures, paper drafts, notebooks).

During the meeting we may edit the notes collaboratively.

After the meeting, create a new subheading for the next meeting, so there is somewhere to move completed todo items to between now and the next meeting.

Asynchronous Meetings

Halfway through the week between meetings, we go through the exact same process, except instead of going through the content in a meeting, I look at it and write comments.

For example, if the regular meeting is on Wednesday, the snippet should be done on Monday morning and I will try to have feedback by mid-afternoon.

Onboarding

When a new student (of any degree type) joins, we need to :

  • Make a Dropbox Paper doc
  • Join Slack, add link to the dropbox doc in our Slack DM
  • Create Sydney Git repository for code
  • Request card access to where my office is

PhD students also have a few extra steps:

  • Email ict.support@sydney.edu.au and ask for them to be on the printing exemption list
  • Work out your desk assignment
  • Order a laptop and screen
  • Join Sydney Git Team
  • Get a desk assigned and try to get you close to my other students

Annual PhD Review

On each anniversary of your PhD start date we will do a small review. This works as follows:

  1. Student answers the questions below, in as much or as little detail as you want.
  2. Student sends answers to me and co-advisors.
  3. We discuss the questions in a meeting.

This is separate from the university Progress Evaluation Meeting (PEM) system. It is intended to ensure that we take a step back to reflect on how things are going.

Questions:

  1. How could our meeting schedule and/or format be improved for you?
  2. How do you feel about your research progress?
  3. How stressed do you feel about your PhD?
  4. Are there research group activities you would like us to try to do?
  5. Anything else you would like to discuss?

Group Meetings

These are several ideas for formats of group meetings that I would like to experiment with.

Internal

During semester, we have weekly group meetings. These include a range of activities:

  • Practise talks
  • Peer feedback (e.g., on paper drafts)
  • Conference trip reports

Visiting Faculty

For either in-person or virtual visits from faculty, rather than just a talk by them, we could do the following (adapted from The Variation Lab):

  • Every student reads a different paper by the person ahead of time and prepares a question or two.
  • The visitor speaks about new stuff briefly (10 - 20 min).
  • Students ask their discussion / we engage in conversation.

Meeting with other groups

To connect with other labs, we would have a zoom meeting with multiple breakout rooms:

  1. Ahead of time, everyone answers a few questions about themselves and we share the answers.
  2. Everyone provides preferences of who they’d like to meet.
  3. We run a matching algorithm to form groups of 2-4 people.
  4. When we meet, we break into the groups, everyone introduces themselves and then discusses current research interests.

This could be done in the lead up to conferences to establish connections.