There is always more to do, in both work and life, than there is time to do it. You are expected to work diligently during work hours, and to limit your work hours in the ways you need to to maintain your mental health.
Within reason, you may keep the working hours that make sense for you, but keep in mind that science is a team sport, and you should endeavor to be available, at least some of the time, when others are working.
Minimally, you are expected to be consistently available for lab meetings, your periodic group meetings with Kevin, and any project-specific meetings, though in all of these cases, every effort will be made to schedule these in ways that accommodate everyone's unique schedules.
Kevin tries very hard to limit his own work to weekdays between 8am and 5pm. Members of the lab may choose to work in the evenings or on weekends in order to have more flexible schedules during the week, but no one is expected to do so. People working irregular hours should keep in mind that responses from Kevin will most likely be delayed outside of typical business hours.
Internal lab communication is done using Zulip, which is a bit like slack, but hopefully less distracting. Zulip has both channels and topics
#meetings, #code-help)If you haven't used zulip before, please read this for an overview.
A great deal of communication may also take place on github in the form of issues and pull-requests. Email should only be used when including collaborators or other folks outside of the lab.
Expectations
You are expected to check your zulip and github notifications at least once or twice per workday. More frequent communication may be expected during some high-intensity periods, but except in exceptional circumstances, you will not be expected (and should not expect others) to respond in the evenings or on weekends.
You are also expected to manage your own notifications and reply schedules in ways that make sense for you. Because people may be working different hours, you may receive messages outside of normal working hours, but this does not constitute an expectation of response outside of working hours.
Time to rest and recharge is critical for physical and mental health. When you plan to be away for an extended time (more than ~2 normal work days) or during lab meetings/periodic meetings, please inform Kevin and anyone else that works on the same projects as you as far in advance as possible, and set yourself as away in outlook during that time.
Staff, students, and fellows have different requirements for reporting paid time off to the hospital. Please check in with Kevin if you do not know how to do this.
Expectations
Everyone in the lab should have periodic one-on-one meetings with Kevin to discuss your personal plans and goals, any roadblocks or issues that you are encountering, and just generally to check in.
Most often, "periodic" means once per week or every other week, though depending on your working style and need for support, you may increase or decrease this frequency in consultation with Kevin.
Before your first meeting,
create your personal repository from the trainee template,
then follow the instructions in the README within the PeriodicTemplate directory.
If you're not sure how to do this,
try taking a look at the writing code protocol.
If you still can't figure it out,
Kevin can help during your first meeting.
Most weeks, there will be a lab meeting with everyone in the lab participating. If you have lab business to discuss, find the lab meeting agenda and add it as a bullet point.
The goal of lab meetings is to build community and help everyone have a sense of what the other lab members are working on, not to be completely polished.
Each member of the lab should be prepared to present at least one thing that you would like help with or feedback on, but this can take many forms. Here are some examples:
The point of this is not to have a fully fleshed out product, but to demonstrate what you are working on and share your struggles along with your successes.
Each week, you should share something from a paper that you read. Implicitly, this means you should be reading at least one paper per week. Note: you do not need to completely or even mostly understand what you read, just do your best to understand the overall goal of the paper, and if you can't, be able to talk about what's confusing.
Also be sure to log the paper that you read and a brief description in your personal trainee repository.
TODO: baserow form or shared obsidian vault for keeping track of papers
A critical component of doing science is presenting science. About every two months (scheduled in advance), you will prepare a more formal presentation of your work.
Lab members that are not presenting in a week should take notes and provide feedback on content, style, and / or clarity of the presentation.
TODO - training resources for preparing effective presentations.
Occasionally, you will be asked to present a paper in more detail than your weekly snippet. You should select the paper you will present at least a week in advance to allow other lab members a chance to read it. At minimum, your presentation should have a slide per figure (break large figures into multiple slides to make sure they're legible), and you should be able to talk through the results and any methods that may be novel to some people in the lab.
Individual projects may have periodic meetings with all of the people involved. Depending on the needs of the project, these meetings may be regularly scheduled or ad hoc, possibly with collaborators. The needs of this kind of meeting will likely be diverse enough that it is not worth spelling them out here.