Meeting policies

Meetings

Come prepared to meetings: You are/will be the person most familiar with your project, and thus the expert. Come to meetings with questions, results/progress, and where you are heading next. This can come in the form of a few slides, a few figures/plots, an outline or draft for something. The more specific and prepared you are for meetings, the more effective the meeting time can be used.

Take all individual/group/collaboration meetings seriously: This is good practice for presenting your results, for "thinking on your feet". Our goal is to be the most critical and supportive of the work coming out.

Take notes of what is discussed in meetings: This is true for individual, group, and collaboration meetings. Share with others if relevant. For example, you can make a shared folder and upload meeting minutes. These notes will provide valuable internal documentation for your research progress and gives you a way to reflect and think about how to proceed to next steps.

Procedure for preparing for meetings with PI:

We will have regular meetings, usually on the order of once per week. You are expected to come prepared with

1) any follow ups from previous discussions

2) what you worked on the previous week and new or updated data/analysis

3) questions/topics to discuss with PI or group

4) what next steps you will take

See slides for further information.

An example for research progress is here: https://utexas.box.com/s/ou56itiaub9nbvb7b1gm06gwtojqcdku For reference, you can compare with the final paper that drew upon these slides: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.2c07501

A lab notebook is highly recommended. Having a permanent location where you jot ideas, work through concepts, or keep track of data is invaluable in your research. Documentation is a critical skill in scientific research and the more you write down and organize the better. Develop a system that works for you.

An example set-up for keeping notes (group members only):

• Document that tracks your long/medium/short term goals and progress (example template)

• Notebook for general written notes and seminars (example)

• Notes for conferences (example - emacs/evil)

• Compiled summaries of literature search (example-Lyx, Joplin)

• short presentations describing the effort involved (example)

Wennie likes to organize things first by topic, project, sub-project, and then date. Codes are version controlled with git and other content is version controlled by date. There is also some documentation (notes, slides, README text file) that describes the purpose of the folder, what was done, and the main conclusions.

For software tools that help you readily do this, see Software Resources

Name files something descriptive and meaningful and version track if you anticipate making modifications over time.

For example research.pdf is not nearly a helpful name compared to oxide-charge-doping-study-and-literature-20220901.pdf

Group Meetings

We hold weekly group meetings. These are usually scheduled at the beginning of each semester. Visitors and prospective students are welcome. If interested in attending our group meetings, please ping Wennie to let her know your attendance.

See the schedule here.