How to manage meetings
- Please actively send out the meeting invitation from your calendar app so that your advisor can easily accept the event in his calendar
- Meet one time per week, more if possible
- Please send an agenda to all participants a few hours before the meeting starts
- Lead the discussion directed by your agenda
- Take notes when the discussion proceeds
- Please send a summary to all participants after the meeting ends and estimate when the next meeting will be
Meeting agenda format
- Checkpoint from last meeting
- Conclusions
- Open questions
- Assigned tasks
- Effort or progress since last meeting
- Problems solved
- Task completed
- What help you expect from participants
- Identify a new problem, but do not know if it is relevant, important, and how to solve
- Have next step plans, please help me approve
Meeting summary format
- Important topics discussed
- New tasks need to be completed
- Plans for next week
- Task priority statement
- Task assignments among participants
- When the next meeting will be?
Advice on effective communication
- Please make your statement concise and right to the point
- Eliminate redundancy, often keywords are good choices, do not use complete sentences
- Bullets will help
- Please keep relevant points close enough under the same topic
- When writing emails to advisor or senior researchers, please keep the body simple by only stating the macro results and discoveries in the body, but attaching a longer reference note to describe detailed explanations which the body text can refer to
