Communications

English as the language of science

English is the language of international science and the language that is expected in all office conversations. You may use other languages for social interactions, but not for scientific discussions. It is to your benefit to practice conversing in English, whatever your current comfort level is.

Timeliness and Candor

The two basic principles of communication are timeliness and candor.

• Timeliness refers to how early you communicate potential issues to your advisor, lab mates, and collaborators. It is always better to err on the side of being too early than too late. This is key to managing expectations. For instance, if you are having personal problems that would result in loss of productivity, your advisor would prefer a quick email/slack message so that he can make the necessary adjustments to cut you some slack as well as guide you to potential solutions. I assure you that it is much better to disclose such things early. There is no need to disclose deep personal details if you are not comfortable doing so.
• Candor means that you should always be honest in your communications and feedback. Being polite works in social interactions but it does nothing for scientific rigor. I subscribe to radical honesty - everyone, including your advisor, lab mates, collaborators, etc., would very much prefer you say exactly what you think of the ideas, directions, and quality of the work. You can be respectful but honest at the same time.

Meetings

Meetings are a necessary component of effective communications. That said, unnecessary or badly run meetings should be avoided at all costs. In the MAVRL, we believe in a high meeting tempo - very regular short meetings, as opposed to infrequently held long ones. Again, this is related to timeliness.

As a group member, you can expect, barring special circumstances (e.g., travel, exams, etc.), to have an opportunity to meet with your advisor at least once a week. Here is a general overview of how meetings are done in our group:

• Subgroup meetings once a week. They are as short as they need to be. You are not expected to have updates at every subgroup meeting, but this is probably the most important forum to get regular feedback on your research from your advisor and lab mates. If you just quietly work in your corner, you can either go down a blind alley for a long while or you might have made innovations in techniques that other projects in the group can benefit from.
• Group meetings once a week. Their purpose is three-fold: (i) to discuss group-wide issues (e.g., computing, infrastructure, morale, etc.); (ii) to practice your presentation skills to a wider audience that might not be intimately familiar with the details of your research, and (iii) to seek feedback on your research and cross-pollinate ideas.
• Collaborator meetings that involve your advisor should be held either biweekly or monthly depending on the project tempo. For subgroups that relate to a specific project, these will substitute for the subgroup meeting for that given week. Nevertheless, you should make it a habit to have regular offline communications with your collaborators, e.g., a simple exchange of email once a week to exchange brief updates on what each of you is doing and what you can do to help each other (data exchange, etc.).
• 1-on-1 meetings every quarter. These meetings are to discuss your overall research progress and for you to provide feedback in private. You can also request ad-hoc meetings as needed if there are things you need to discuss urgently (see Timeliness in the preceding section).

Collaborations

The goal of collaboration is simple: to achieve research that is greater than the sum of the individual contributors. If this goal cannot be achieved, collaboration is worthless. A successful collaboration requires three key ingredients:

1. A common problem of interest to all parties
2. Complementary expertise
3. Regular communications (see Collaborator Meetings in the preceding section).