Weekly Meetings?

This post is to organise and plan the weekly meetings and ease the progress of my students through their studies. Please check other links on how to work effectively and organise your work. I expect everyone to have their own motivation to pursue their degree, not waiting for me to define tasks and tell what to do. These agenda below is to get know each other about our progress and help to achieve it by dividing it into small chunks.

Weekly Meetings:

We meet weekly to discuss progress of everyone and to decide the tasks to be completed until next week.

5-min Discussions:

In this part, everyone discuss the status of the cards assigned in Trello last week and any challenges that prevented the completion of tasks. The plans for the next week are planned (with simple tasks that can be completed in a week or two). This part is not a reporting aimed at me, but rather aims to inform all group members. Please be collaborative to suggest solutions to challenges faced by other group members, that is the purpose of being in a research group.

Please make the following guideline for this part:

Keep your discussions simple and to the point
Divide your work in weekly chunks. It is better to complete consecutive simpler tasks than delaying a big-task for several weeks.
If you are not assigned a task for that week, it is your responsibility to open a trello card for that week ( a card should have a deadline and a responsible person).
If you realize the details are taking too much time, or the discussions is not relevant to everyone then it may be better to continue these discussions in one-to-one meetings, or in monthly presentations.
Playing with your phone, talking with another one is not cool, please stay engaged in the meetings.
Be on time to the meetings.

30-min Presentations:

In most of the weeks, one of the team members will make a detailed research presentation. You can find the schedule in this link below. The expexted frequency 1 presentation per semester for undergraduate students and 2 presentations per semester for graduate students.

The guidelines for the weekly presentations are as follows:

The format is like a conference presentation: 15-min presentation + 15 min Q&A parts
The idea is to discuss a research idea (e.g. a paper that you are planning to write, or a chapter of your thesis) and present details, theory, simulation/experimental results.
The slides (less than 15) should contain a research idea, current state-of-the-art, novelty of the current work, simulation results and plans until next presentation.
After the presentation and Q&A session, the tasks (and trello cards) should be assigned to be completed until next presentation (2-month milestones)
Weekly Presentation Schedule

1:1 Meetings

I would like to have regular 1:1 meetings with you and feel free to contact me to ask for an appointment according to my schedule. I expect you to meet every 2-weeks, but this can be increased or decreased according to progress in your research. I expect you to arrange a meeting to show your ideas 2 weeks before your 30-min presentation. In 1:1 meetings:

Feel free to have other people, if it is a joint research project
Have some preliminary results, graphs printed, (or we can meet at your desk if you want to show results in your PC)
Discuss the main problems and challenges that you faced and try to make the meetings solution-oriented as possible
Take notes to prepare minutes of the meeting and write action points
After the meeting, create Trello cards and make necessary assignments (including me)
In the next meeting, please summarize the status of action points and discuss the delays, change of paths etc.
In the meeting please present the status of your quarterly milestones and yearly goals (see below).

Milestones

In the previous years we assigned yearly milestones to achieve your research targets, but there was a gap between weekly assignments and yearly targets, which didn’t help to plan your work. Therefore, I would like to propose quarterly (3-months) intermediate milestones, and yearly goals. Yearly goals can be such as completion of thesis, publication of journals etc., milestones may be development of hardware prototype, completion of experiments, writing draft of journal papers etc. You should evaluate your research and put ambitious but achievable goals, please be motivated and oriented to follow up your milestones and goals.

Daily Tracking

I am not going to do a daily tracking for you, but I strongly believe daily tracking your work creates the self-motivation that you need most. Seeing a difficult problem solved day one day is quite satisfying, then thinking it is a non-attackable difficult problem. The easiest and hassle-free method for that is using GitHub repos for your research files. A commit each day should be your motivation, even if it is a small change it will keep you moving. There are other time/task tracking software if you prefer, but please develop a method to show me your progress and motivate you by diving task/milestones into daily tracking. I’ll remind these in 1:1 meetings.