chris martensa common pattern — and arguably failure mode — of research advising meetings is that they become essentially “status reports,” with the student trying to do everything independently between meetings, then telling their advisor what they did and their advisor giving them some kind of appraisal of that work (“good, keep going” vs “no, try something else”)
what i wish someone had told me in grad school, and what i now try to tell my students, is that you can instead view it as a “working meeting” where you (the student) get to set the agenda. have your first meeting goal be to answer the question “what are we working on today?”, not “what have you done since we last met”
if you don’t have a separate place for putting regular status reports (that’s another topic…) then more than likely, to provide context for the meeting’s goal, you *will* need to provide an update on your recent work — but the idea is it’s in service of synchronizing your collaboration, not to get approval or appraisal
this structure is a powerful antidote to the very common “oh no i haven’t done any work since last week, what do i tell my advisor” panic spiral
by thinking of the “meeting prep” task as defining the next step of work, and setting it up as the agenda for the meeting, you *build in* regular time to work on the project where you’re held accountable for showing up AND you get a body double/rubber duck
and it usually creates momentum/enthusiasm toward your individual work after the fact.
Jan de Muijnck-Hughes@chrisamaphone indeed!
For my project students I ask them all to send me a short email the day before we meet. There are three headings they must fill in: what have you done?; what are you doing?; & where are you going?
I also ask them to fill it in honestly, & add questions or issues they want to talk about.
Post meeting, I file it away in a notebook (currently OneNote for GDPR) with my personal thoughts.