Project Meetings with Ted

All PennLINC team members lead a scientific project.

Scheduling

For each active project, members typically meet weekly with Ted. However, if there has been limited progress due to other competing demands, meetings can be spaced to every other week (send Ted a brief note). In general, we try to avoid scheduling meetings without a clear agenda. These are scheduled by the trainee on a google calendar, which Ted will give you access to, and permissions to make new meetings. At the start of the week Ted will open up slots marked “OPEN FOR MEETINGS” on this calendar; a note will be posted to the #PennLINC_team channel on Slack when these meeting times are posted. Typically, meetings are 30 minutes, except in specific cases when a 45-minute or 60-minute meeting is necessary (pls discuss prospectively). To allow for a brief reprieve within long meeting blocks, meetings begin 5 minutes after the selected slot begins, and will end promptly on time. Please help manage meeting time according to priorities to prevent us from running over.

Secondary mentor

For projects led by junior trainees (i.e., CRCs, new data analysts, and rotating graduate students), Ted will identify a more-experienced team member (i.e., senior grad student, post-doc, or staff scientist) as a secondary/mid-level mentor. This is critical, as the mid-level mentor tends to be both a) more available and b) more technically skilled. The junior trainee should typically also have a separate 1:1 meeting with the mid-level mentor one or more times per week outside of the weekly meeting with Ted. The mid-level mentor usually is the second author on the paper, and serves as the “Reproducabilibuddy”. For more experienced team members project meetings are often 1:1; it is still a very good idea to identify the reprobilibuddy early on in the project.

Preparation

For these meetings, please update the Notion project board ahead of the meeting so project progress can be clearly tracked. My preference is that data at these meetings is presented in the form of RMarkdown or Juypter notebooks to enhance reproducibility; these can be embedded in Notion notebooks.