Chapter 4 Lab communication and organization
4.1 Onboarding
Welcome to the Gaynor Lab! In addition to the official UBC onboarding process (obtaining study/work permits, getting set up with payroll), which you should coordinate with the appropriate departmental staff members, here are some things that you should talk about Kaitlyn about doing when you arrive:
- Read through this lab manual!
- Join the lab Google Drive
- Join a shared Google Drive folder with Kaitlyn
- Join the lab GitHub organization
- Join the lab Slack organization
- Write your Individual Development Plan (Kaitlyn will share template and guidance)
- Get your keys (discuss this with Kaitlyn); if you are in the BRC, Katie Beall will order them for you, and you’ll pick the up at the UBC bookstore
- UBC offers access to software for students and staff. If you need MS Office, GIS, etc. you can download them here
- Complete any mandatory on-boarding courses on Workday
For graduate students & postdocs new to UBC:
- Join the Gaynor Lab and Biodiversity Research Centre Slack organizations (ask Kaitlyn for an invite if needed)
- Get your UBC card
- Set up a regular meeting time with Kaitlyn
- Set up a UBC Zoom account (will allow Zoom calls of unlimited duration… though one could argue about whether this is a “perk”)
4.2 Meetings
4.2.1 Lab meetings
During the winter terms, our lab holds weekly 90-minute lab meetings, in person on campus. The first ~30 minutes will be dedicated to individual updates and lab business/announcements. The remaining 60 minutes will be dedicated to the primary topic of the lab meeting.
All lab members will sign up to lead meetings on a rotating basis, and will be responsible for setting the agenda for their weeks. The purpose of these lab meetings is to solicit group feedback on research ideas and progress (and, occasionally, professional development). You might use this time to share a draft of a grant proposal, thesis proposal, or manuscript, discuss a paper relevant to your interests, or give a practice talk.
All lab members are expected to attend weekly, unless in the field, and to provide written comments on materials in advance of the meeting. In-person attendance is expected for those in Vancouver, but joining remotely is an option when traveling. Please note any virtual attendance or absences on the lab meeting spreadsheet.
We will rotate note-taking responsibilities and maintain notes in the lab Google Drive folder.
Prep work for lab meeting
The goal of lab meeting is not simply to provide updates on our research projects with one another, but rather to spend dedicated time thinking deeply about ideas as a collective. This is one of the few spaces on campus where we can meaningfully workshop our research with others, so make the most of it! Ideally, we can use the hour to discuss, rather than get up to speed.
Given this goal, we should all expect to complete some prep work prior to lab meeting in most cases (and plan to assign it when we are leading). Prep work is also valuable because many people (myself included) come up with better ideas when there is some time to let them marinate, and individual reflection prevents groupthink (a lack of creativity when a group coalesces on the same ideas together). This prep work may involve looking through a draft of a manuscript, proposal, grant application, poster, figure, or published paper that is inspiring your thinking. If you aren’t sure what to assign, ask yourself: what background information do I need to share in order for everybody to get up to speed before we discuss? How can I share this information ahead of time, rather than spending half of lab meeting presenting it?
All written materials should be shared with the group via e-mail by the Sunday before lab meeting (for Wednesday morning lab meetings). When sending material, always make sure to describe what you are sending and try to make it as easy as possible for the lab to help you. If you are asking for feedback, clarify what kind of feedback (big picture ideas vs. line edits on grammar). If there are particular things you are stuck on, or want to discuss, flag these in advance. If you would like to discuss research ideas, provide some questions that will seed the discussion.
All lab members should come to lab meeting ready to dive in. Ideally, if you are providing written comments, you should send them to the lab meeting leader in advance of lab meeting so they can review them and integrate them into their agenda.
During lab meetings
All lab members should come to lab meeting ready to engage. Passive attendance is discouraged, and Kaitlyn may speak with you if this becomes a pattern. However, it is important to recognise that everyone should be provided the opportunity to engage. Before speaking or asking a question, take a moment to think about how much of the discussion you have already occupied and leave openings for others to speak up.
Challenging one-another is an important part of the scientific process. Asking thoughtful questions trains your critical thinking skills, while defending your work prepares you for peer review, improves your scientific thinking, and helps to ensure you keep an open mind about the strengths and weaknesses of your project. Although we should be challenging one another, it is important to remember to share feedback respectfully and constructively. We all pour a lot of time, energy, and passion into our research and unnecessarily harsh comments help nobody. This resource from the University of Waterloo outlines the main points of how to give and receive feedback.
Feedback shared in the context of lab meeting does not merit coauthorship on manuscripts, although collaborations are encouraged outside of them, and it is good practice to recognize those who gave feedback in Acknowledgement sections as relevant.
4.2.2 Individual meetings with Kaitlyn (grad students)
During the winter terms, all graduate students will have regular 30-minute weekly individual meetings with Kaitlyn throughout the year. Meetings are a chance for you to get focused time with Kaitlyn to discuss and work on your research. Thus they are your time, not Kaitlyn’s. Even if you don’t have anything urgent to discuss, this regularity is important for maintaining open communication, and we’ll fill the time each week!
During the summer terms, meetings will be scheduled on an as-needed basis, around your and Kaitlyn’s field, conference, and vacation schedules.
Please see these guidelines for “What to bring to a meeting with your advisor” - I think they do a great job of emphasizing what these meetings are for, and how to get the most from them!
Each lab member will have a designated Google Doc (visible only to you and Kaitlyn) for agendas and notes for our weekly meetings. (Following templates posted on Twitter by Susana Wadgymar and Michael Hoffman.) By 11am on the day of our weekly meeting, update this file with the following information (don’t spend any more than 15 minutes on this, and don’t feel the need to use complete sentences):
- Make a short agenda of any things you’d like to discuss in our meeting, in addition to your research plans and progress (if you have anything else to discuss, which may not be the case). I may add to these as well.
- Annotate the plans from the previous week using the ‘Comment’ feature or by adding text in a different color. We’ll use these notes as a tool for assessing whether we are developing SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound) plans
- Write a brief self-reflection on the previous week. This reflection is open-ended, but I suggest discussing what went well, what you found to be the most challenging, what you did to try to overcome those challenges, lessons learned, things that I/others can help with, and notes to yourself on what you would do differently in the upcoming weeks.
- Draft a list of plans and priorities for the upcoming week.
4.3 Communication channels
4.3.1 E-mail
Use UBC e-mail for sharing written (non-code) materials or for other communication that would benefit from a searchable record or longer form.
You should check your e-mail daily during the work week (M-F). If you do not expect to be able to respond to your e-mails within a day or two, set up an out-of-office reply. Do not expect responses to emails after regular business hours on weekdays, or on weekends. However, because we recognize that lab members should be able to create a working schedule that is right for them, lab members should not be penalized for sending communication during these times.
Note: Most students have both a student and employee email addresses. You are encouraged to avoid using your employee email address. UBC provides you with your student email address for life. Your employee address is tied to your employment. This means that if your GRA runs out, you are at risk of losing access to everything associated with that email.
4.3.1.1 E-mail etiquette
Borrowed from WildCo:
Always remember to use a respectful tone and pay attention to proper spelling and grammar when communicating with others about your research. Start emails with a greeting (Dear Dr. So-and-So …). There is a tendency to be informal in communications, but many of your mentors or senior colleagues may prefer somewhat more traditional communications – why start off on the wrong foot? You can adapt to their style (and yours) as the conversation continues.
Try to keep emails brief and to the point. What response do you need and by when?
Be prepared to follow up on an email if you haven’t had a response in 1-2 weeks. Many people are overwhelmed with emails and simply can’t keep up, so a non-response likely reflects an oversight and people will be happy for a reminder. (Continued non-response after ~3 emails likely means the person is too busy to engage at this time. Try knocking on their door or calling their office if it is important.)
If there is an action item or deadline associated with your email, make it very clear (e.g. bold, included in the first line or few). For example, avoid saying “Here is the draft of the paper.”, but instead say something along the lines of “Here is a draft of the the paper. It is in [early/final] stages and I am hoping for feedback on sections XX and YY, by ZZ date.”
If you are sharing documents with external partners, clear any communication with Kaitlyn. This is not about micro-managing, but ensuring smooth relationships with the lab’s long-term collaborators.
4.3.2 GitHub
Use GitHub issues within the appropriate project repository for discussion of data management and analysis. This allows for an easily-searchable record of notes, decisions, and discussions that can be easily linked to specific code.
You should set up your GitHub notifications so that you receive an email whenever there is action on a GitHub issue in a repository to which you contribute. You will then be able to stay on top of conversations and respond directly to issues via e-mail.
For specific questions on coding problems, please try to create a minimal reproducible example. Ensure that others can run and interact with the material being shared.
See more on the use of GitHub below.
4.3.3 Slack
We have a Gaynor Lab Slack organization, to be used for quick questions or topics for group discussion. Keep in mind that Slack does not have a permanent archive, and that GitHub is better for any project-related conversations for which an easily-searchable archive is preferable.
New channels can be suggested/added as needed (but do not overload with public channels, new channels should be suggested to the lab and agreed upon by everyone).
For non-time-sensitive questions for Kaitlyn, add them to your agenda for your weekly meeting and plan to discuss them in person, rather than using Slack. As a rule of thumb, if you have a quick question for Kaitlyn that she can answer from her phone on the bus, send it via Slack; if it will require more time, action, or thought, send it via e-mail.
4.3.4 Phone
In general, communication via phone or text message should be avoided. For urgent situations or emergencies, you may call or text a group member’s cell phone. Please reserve this form of communication for rare cases so that we can all maintain our work-life balance and boundaries. Before calling or texting a lab member for anything work-related, ask yourself if having the answer now will meaningfully change the outcome over having the answer by the next working day.
4.3.5 Google Drive
We have a Gaynor Lab Google Drive folder, which contains meeting notes and relevant shared documents. We will also use this folder to store lab publications, presentations, photos, and data. Everything in this folder should remain internal to the Gaynor Lab unless permission is given to share it more widely.
In addition, each lab member will have a designated Google Drive folder shared only with Kaitlyn. This folder will house the Individual Development Plan and weekly meeting notes. Beyond that, you can organize it however you prefer. However, any Google documents that you wish to share with Kaitlyn should be placed somewhere in this folder so that they can be easily tracked down later and not get lost in the vast universe of shared Google Docs.
4.4 Lab collaboration
For those of us working in the same study systems, we should take a collaborative approach to sharing data, resources, and ideas, in the interest of doing better science as a team!
For the Gorongosa-based researchers, we have a shared, flexible research brainstorming document in the Google Drive folder. This document serves multiple purposes: not forgetting our ideas, sharing feedback on ideas, keeping track of data sets and collaborations, coming up with potential student projects, and making sure we loop each other in on projects that interest us and don’t duplicate effort. If you add an idea to the doc, please add your name, and nobody should move forward with or “give away” an idea without checking in with the person who put it on there. We should not feel like we have to hide ideas from each other, nor that we can’t pursue an idea that someone else is also interested in. Please keep this document internal to our lab for now. I know there is no shortage of good ideas and I highly encourage cross-lab collaboration, but I want to be sure that everybody who is using this document understands the ground rules.
Additionally, there will be opportunities for collaboration through co-authoring lab papers. These papers will typically be led by one lab member with some expertise in that subject and all other lab members who are interested in the topic are invited to help. These papers may be meta-analyses, systematic reviews, conceptual frameworks, or other types of research that probably wouldn’t be part of a graduate thesis and can benefit from the lab’s diversity of knowledge. We aim to write around one lab paper a year and expect every lab member who’s interested to have the chance to lead one. We have a document in the Google Drive to record ideas for potential papers.
4.5 Offboarding
Leaving the lab is an important transition and a little planning goes a long way toward ensuring your work can be continued and that you leave with everything you need. The formal offboarding process is still under development. Nonetheless, before your last day, please make sure you have done the following:
- Discussed timelines with Kaitlyn. If you have papers, analyses, or other projects that are not yet complete at the time of your departure, make a clear plan with Kaitlyn for how and when these will be finished. This conversation should happen well before your last day, not on it.
- Ensure access to your files. Make sure that all of your project files, data, and code are up to date in the lab GitHub organisation before you leave. You will retain access to your personal GitHub account and any repositories you have contributed to, but confirm with Kaitlyn that you have copies of everything you need for ongoing work after your departure.
- Flag any barriers to project completion. If there are factors that may prevent you from completing outstanding work after you leave (e.g., loss of software access, data access restrictions, time constraints) raise these with Kaitlyn as early as possible so we can work around them together.
- Ensure you have collected any personal belongings from the lab, and that all equipment that you have used is cleaned, in working order, clearly labeled, and stored in the proper location.
- Your CWL account will persist after graduation as an alumni account, but access to some UBC services will change. Most notably, your UBC student email and any files stored in associated Microsoft 365 services (OneDrive, SharePoint) will be decommissioned 18 months after graduation. Before you leave, ensure you have downloaded or transferred any files you will need for ongoing work. Remote access to most UBC Library electronic resources will also be restricted after graduation, though alumni retain access to a subset of resources via the alumni UBC app. See UBC IT’s alumni email transition page and the UBC Library alumni resources guide for details.
4.5.1 Reference letters
I am always happy to serve as reference for past and present members of the lab. When asking for a letter of reference, please reach out at least three weeks before the reference is due. Writing a letter under a shorter timeline may be possible, but the quality may not be as high.
To help me write the strongest possible letter, please provide the following when you reach out:
- A current CV.
- A description of the position or opportunity you are applying for, including any specific criteria or competencies that will be evaluated.
- Any aspects of your time in the lab or your broader experience that you would like me to emphasise.
- The submission deadline and any instructions for how the letter should be submitted.