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”)
Ethan Cecchettiwhat 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.
Philip Guo@chrisamaphone yep, brings back memories of grad school ... i had a friend (for reals a friend, not a 'friend' as in me) whose mind was clearly churning on non-research most of the week, and then the night before each advisor meeting he'd panic to scramble to do something so that he could show progress and have something to say
Kat@chrisamaphone oh wow i like this framing for work 1:1s too!
jcreed@chrisamaphone I realize in retrospect that I had a lot of good frank-meetings that worked like this --- I'd say "here's what I was trying to think about about, but I got stuck" and he'd typically probe in a constructive and friendly way as to why, & help jointly figure out what to do about it...
but I agree with you that it's an important thing to make it incredibly *explicit* that this is ok. grad students don't necessarily know that a "normal/ok/acceptable meeting" can look like that.
@chrisamaphone or actually I'm trying to grasp whether this falls under the "just a status report meeting" or a "working meeting" in your analysis. Am I correct in parsing your intent in thinking that the thing that makes it a working meeting is that the feedback goes beyond "ok good vs. no this is bad" into an actual collaborative research conversation?
bc that is the thing I remember about a lot of meetings, that some of the "actual real research work" conversations took place in them
bc that is the thing I remember about a lot of meetings, that some of the "actual real research work" conversations took place in them
@jcreed no i definitely agree with you that that style of frank-meeting counts as a working meeting, and i had similar experiences — but i saw that nature of the meeting as something *he* brought to it, not something I could proactively ask for, i suppose
@jcreed which is to say, yes, you parsed my intent correctly! it was definitely an important revelation to realize that was a way that meetings/research could even work. but it took *additional* years of experience (on the other side of the advising relationship) for me to understand that the input students bring to the meeting can determine this; it’s not just some unpredictable emergent serendipitous phenomenon
@chrisamaphone ah yes good this makes a lot of sense --- I agree that I perceived it as "a thing that Frank brought to the meeting", and that, although just sort of *modeling* that working meetings as good is one thing, explicitly talking about their value is even better
@chrisamaphone or, like, as I think you're saying, helping the student to a place where they feel comfortable in that role of agenda-setting
Trisha Lynn 🇵🇭 🇺🇸 🇨🇦@chrisamaphone Perhaps it's different for Master's students and/or my program is different because it's an online one, but every meeting I've ever had with my supervisor has been because I've asked for it. Most of the time, I ask for in-person/video conference meetings only when I don't understand his emailed feedback or responses to my questions. Is that not typically how it should go?
@trishalynn there’s no single right way for it to work — if you and your advisor both prefer most of your communication by email instead of meetings, that’s totally fine! a lot of faculty (including me) are so overwhelmed by email though that having a blocked-off time for each student is the only way to make sure i actually interact regularly with them
@trishalynn but I do think it’s worth knowing that there are other models, and you have (or should have) some agency in choosing it. if you feel like you’d benefit from a weekly meeting, for example, you can ask for that.
profs don’t know your needs or preferences unless you tell us, and our default ways of doing things are not always the best way for you
@chrisamaphone I'm pretty happy with the system we devised. I would prefer that our meetings have a different duration because they regularly end up being my preferred duration, but I understand that shorter meeting times can be aspirational. :D
HoldMyType@chrisamaphone i didnt get such work meetings till last year