🤝 Regular Meetings
ConCat Admin Meeting
This is the administrative meeting for our Lab. Attendance is compulsory for PhD students, project students, as well as HiWis; trainees are encouraged to attend. The main purpose of this meeting is:
- to discuss ongoing tasks in our lab (tracked via ConCat Team Meeting GitLab)
- to keep each other updated with availability and any exciting news using a “Roundtable” format,
- to schedule the ConCat Colloquium.
Agenda:
1. Safety report
- In charge: Ibrahim and Savani
- Duration: Up to 5 minutes
- Content:
- discussion of any issues identified at weekly/monthly inspections
2. Administrative issues
- Duration: Up to 15 minutes
- Content:
- review of other tasks at ConCat Team Meeting GitLab
- vacation requests
- conference & business travel planning
- purchasing
3. Roundtable
- Duration: Up to 5 minutes
- Content:
- discussion of everyone’s availability for the rest of the week
- room for any important / interesting news to share
4. Colloquium Scheduling
- Duration: Up to 5 minutes
- Content:
- agree whether a ConCat Colloquium happens this week
- agree on topics for the Colloquium
- agree on location (online or in person / BA303)
Agenda and minutes are available on ConCat Team Meeting repo. Attendance will be tracked: if you cannot attend for whatever reason, let Peter know, it’s not a problem.
ConCat Colloquium
The ConCat Colloquium only happens if scheduled during the ConCat Admin Meeting.
This is the scientific meeting for our Lab, where team members are encouraged to discuss scientific issues, practice talks, discuss posters and abstracts, and improve writing.
The person chairing the meeting is assigned in advance, as agreed in the Admin Meeting. The chair is in charge of the main item on the agenda. This content should the provide a topic for a short, scientific discussion. Common options are (in order of decreasing priority):
Research Update
Prepare a few slides according to the following structure:
- give a max two slide intro about your project / work package,
- describe clearly what problem(s) you’re trying to solve,
- present your data using plots, not tables,
- summarise your progress and suggest future work.
The whole slideshow should be shorter than 10 slides.
Paper Summary
Let the team know the DOI of the paper in advance. By Wednesday before your session:
- choose the paper you will present,
- share the pdf file using the ConCat Zotero group,
- let the group know about your paper via WebEx.
This will let us read / skim the paper to have a better discussion. Your presentation should include:
- motivation of the paper from authors’ perspective (1 slide)
- any particular aspects that interested you (2-3 slides)
- any aspect you did not like (1 slide)
- summary of the conclusions of the paper (1 slide)
- any questions you have or want to discuss (1-2 slides)
- how do you plan to apply this in your work (1 slide)
Reading Corner
Prepare a short text that you would like reviewed:
- length of 1 paragraph at most, ideally only 1-2 sentences
- share the text with the meeting chair so it can be shared
Everybody will be asked to suggest issues and improvements with your text.
One-on-one Meetings
This is an irregular scientific meeting, initially scheduled with a weekly frequency to focus your project. These meetings will be most likely online via WebEx. This is your opportunity to get a slot of Peter’s time. Follow these tips:
- A short summary (1-2 slides) of your progress always helps.
- You know why you needed the meeting: Is it a scientific question? Technical problem? Administrative issue?
- For scientific issues: prepare slides with figures showing your data.
- For purchasing: we always need 3 offers - if you want something, you need to find the offers.
- Always have your raw data and any data processing you did with you and ready.
- Raw data should also be uploaded to datalab.
- After your first year, you are expected to use Jupyter notebooks for data processing.
- If you want Peter to review something before the meeting, send it in advance.
- For conference abstracts and posters, one day is enough.
- For manuscripts or longer texts, up to one week may be necessary.
By the end of your first year, as you become more independent, you should find yourself needing this meeting less and less; or the focus of the meeting may change away from dealing with day-to-day issues.
Review Meetings
By contrast with one-on-one meetings, the review meetings are more formal, scheduled initially with a 3-month frequency. During these meetings, we have an opportunity to review the “broader picture” of your project and course-correct if necessary. If you have a new project idea that you’d like to work on, this is the meeting to schedule and discuss it.
Please come to these meetings prepared. You should prepare and present a set of slides, discussing the following:
- Reflect on your progress in your work packages and Gantt chart:
- discuss any challenges and delays,
- mention any positives and achievements.
- If something went well: why and how do we do more?
- If something didn’t go well: why and what can Peter and you do to solve it?
During these meetings, we will review your 📜 Supervision Agreement and your 📊 Project Gantt Chart.
- Talk to Peter as soon as possible.
- We will discuss possibilities formally at the next Review Meeting.
- In general, your project is planned for 3 years.
- The funding for your contract should cover this 3-year period.
FGKW Team Meeting
Until further notice, no FGKW Team Meetings are scheduled. The below is no longer valid.
This is a meeting of the whole Chair, led by Prof. Gurlo. Everyone working or doing their thesis at the Chair is expected to attend. Topics include:
- New or leaving team members
- New publications
- Safety issues
- Broken & Fixed equipment at the chair
- Other news
The meeting is usually followed by a Colloquium (11:00 - 12:00), which may contain the following:
- PhD progress updates
- Project updates
- Pratice talks for conferences