Lab meetings are BS and a complete waste of time

[lrlrlrlrlr]

Lab Meetings. In my lab we have 2 of these dreaded meetings per week, from 9-11am. My PI is adamant that we have these meetings. One day someone presents all their data in an uncountable number of sloppily-put together powerpoint slides, and on the other meeting day 2 people have to do this, the idea being each person does a "mini" presentation but they have evolved to be 2 regular meetings crammed into one. Most people don't get anything out of them, peoples' presentations get stalled because of too many questions, comments and criticisms that lead to off-topic discussions, people sleep/play on their phones, and most people don't really care what other people are working on.

And the time..4 hours wasted per week. And the sitting! I hate all the sitting! I can't sit still for more than an hour. I find i am just spending the time thinking about al the things i need/want to do related to my own project. On days we have these meetings my day is screwed: I can't get everything done by a reasonable time, I'm exhausted from 2 hours of sitting, and forget working out- that won't happen. When we don't have lab meetings I get so much more done and can leave early enough that I have time to workout and cook a nice meal for dinner.

We have small group meetings once a week, where a few people working on a similar topic meet with the PI and we all discuss data/the field. These are much more helpful and worth it.

I'm curious, does anybody like lab meetings or get anything useful out of them? What are your thoughts?

[St Andrews Lynx]

Yeah, I quite enjoy lab meetings. Your set-up sounds like more of a slog than mine, though!

Some of the reasons I like them:

• Helps me keep up to date with what my colleagues are doing. From my day-to-day interactions I know if they project is going well/bad, if they're stuck on a particular problem; but I don't really see the big picture until the present their work to everyone. 
• Learning from others. Sometimes my PI will give feedback about an experiment design or remind the speaker "You should always..." In which case I've saved myself from making a mistake they made, or I can improve upon my approach before I need to ask anybody for advice. Or even if someone has nicely set-up slides I can copy their formats.
• Motivation to do work. I tend to run more experiments in the week leading up to my turn at the meeting, simply because I want to present good data.
• Stepping back to see the bigger picture(s). I find that the mere act of making slides helps me make sense of my (sometimes rambling) project & side-projects. I have to think about ways to present my material in a smooth narrative and spot the gaps in my project (e.g. I want to tell my audience that X proves Y, so what control experiments should I run to strengthen my argument).
• Learning about new papers or ideas. We always give some background on our projects (as well as doing separate literature presentations), and it gives me exposure to different subfields that I wouldn't necessarily read up on of my own accord, but I find interesting nonetheless. 

From what I've seen though, lab meetings can vary in quality. If people aren't learning from the repeated presentations and what others are doing - like, they still make messy slides meeting after meeting - or if the PI isn't moderating in a productive/critical way then it can be a slog. Having a bit of time between your presentations seemed to help my lab deliver better-quality ones (after only 2-3 weeks I didn't have that many new results to present, so my presentations became sparse and repetitive). 

Don't be afraid to suggest changes to the lab meeting format! If you can frame it as a "this will make us more productive" and have back-up from multiple lab members, you may well be able to improve on the lab meetings.

[Eigen]

On the one hand, they're meetings, and in any group, meetings are a part of life. You are all working (roughly) together towards a goal, and as such, having meetings to know what everyone else is doing, ask questions and offer criticisms/suggestions is needed. 

Part of this seems to be something you can work on personally- meetings, especially long, rambling pointless meetings- are a part of academic and non-academic life. They're eternal. Learn what you can do that helps you focus. Take notes. Take notes on your projects during the boring parts. 

I've generally found, however, that the more I can actually focus on being *at* the meeting, trying to pay attention and contribute, the easier they are to stomach. If everyone thinks they're a waste and tunes out, nothing ever gets better. 

For most people, these are also a very, very necessary time to learn oral communication skills. Your PI doesn't seem to give much feedback on this, though, or if they do others don't listen?

A lot of the advice depends on how senior you are in the lab, and your relationship with the PI. If you're senior enough, try giving advice to round out the "sloppy" talks. If your PI doesn't guide the meeting, and you're senior, do it yourself. 

Is it possible you're senior enough that the meetings aren't directed at you? Generally, lab meetings are to help junior members develop skills, and get critiques and suggestions on their work. If you're past that stage, you might not be getting a personal benefit. But on the flip side, it's now your responsibility to be there to help the junior members grow.

[Humulus_lupulus]

I didn't like the way lab meetings were going, so I talked to my advisor and made some suggestions on how to improve them for me and the other grad students. He took them to heart, and lab meetings, and lab procedures in general, are now a lot more productive.

[lrlrlrlrlr]

Sounds like you guys have better setups than my group. Some people have tried to make suggestions, such as shortening the meetings, having them less often, but the PI won't budge. I think if we had a big group meeting once a week for one hour MAXIMUM, it would be bearable. I am not a senior person, so I have no control over the meetings. I'm just a grad student. The only thing I can control is how I run my meeting. When I present, I make sure everything I show will take less than an hour. I try to present clear slides and give good background and focus on a particular aspect of my project for the meeting. I don't cram in every result of like 3 different projects (several people do this and it's terrible). I don't want to waste peoples' time. So for now that's the best I could do. Some people have told me they like how I give my presentations, so I guess I'm doing ok at trying to make it a not so  dreadful experience on my turn..

I still really dislike lab meetings. Some of us have actually started skipping them every now and then, or leaving them early or coming into them late because we have more important things to do. I am glad I have started doing this too, because I have gotten so much more work done and more data (a big plus for when it's my turn to present). And I finish all my work by a reasonable time, so I can leave not too late and maintain my fitness goals. It's time I take control of my PhD, and set my own time to do what I need to get done in order to finish by my completion point, and I have decided not to waste my time sitting for 4 hours per week in stupid waste-of-time meetings.

Edited March 20, 2016 by lrlrlrlrlr

[juilletmercredi]

I agree with you 85% of the way. The vast majority of lab meetings I have been to have been pointless and a waste of time, or at the very least boring.

In my opinion, lab meetings should either about coordinating operations of the research group and keeping everyone abreast of what everyone else is doing or about sharing interesting research that is relevant to the interests of the lab, in the form of article discussions and sometimes guest discussions. Lectures should be verboten, as a lecture is not a meeting (it's a lecture...it has a name!) Personally I think the best setup that has worked is an alternating weeks meeting of about 1.5 hours, where one week is for handling logistics and short roundtable updates on what everyone is doing and the other week is for promoting scientific discussion through a journal club or someone giving a short presentation of their research (30 minutes of slides total, the rest discussion) or bringing a guest speaker to lead a discussion of their work.

I'm like you and I have a hard time sitting still and paying attention for longer than an hour at a time, which I recognize as a personal flaw. Meetings are an inescapable and sometimes necessary part of working (although I think that the majority of meetings in academia are either pointless or too long. My experience with meetings in the corporate world have been much more positive; I actually look forward to some of them, and I don't dread any of them anymore). But I think they rarely need to be more than one hour long. 4 hours of lab meetings PER WEEK seems like such a waste of time.

[ShogunT]

Often happen in big bio lab, my spouse included. For hours, people working on different projects sit in a same room and start to talk about stuffs that are of little related to others.

I don't know the dynamics in your lab. But if it's good, and you are senior member of the lab, I would suggest you to try to talk with other members and see if you all can come up with some method to shorten the lab meeting. Then talk with your PI about it. Otherwise, there are things you have to take in stride sometimes.

[UrbanMidwest]

On 3/12/2016 at 4:02 PM, lrlrlrlrlr said:

 

I'm curious, does anybody like lab meetings or get anything useful out of them? What are your thoughts?

I suppose it depends on how they're run and how serious the students treat them. From what I gather from others and my experience many labs tend to be "we need to do something to make us look like busy-bodies because we're in a doctoral program!" It also depends on the discipline and the research interests of your fellow peers. I suppose that's where my arrogance comes in - I just think my research interests are far more interesting and relevant than some of my peers. When someone presents a weekly update on Mexican food trucks I just look away; I'm all ears (because she may come to me and ask if I liked it), but I look away for the fear of them seeing my smirk.

Edited April 27, 2016 by UrbanMidwest

[Quantum Buckyball]

I noticed multiple "short" meetings (30 min) worked the best. Our lab used to do 2-3 hr long meetings but it wasn't very effective as people pretty got bored after the first hour.

[TakeruK]

On 4/27/2016 at 10:47 AM, ShogunT said:

Often happen in big bio lab, my spouse included. For hours, people working on different projects sit in a same room and start to talk about stuffs that are of little related to others.

I don't know the dynamics in your lab. But if it's good, and you are senior member of the lab, I would suggest you to try to talk with other members and see if you all can come up with some method to shorten the lab meeting. Then talk with your PI about it. Otherwise, there are things you have to take in stride sometimes.

I'm part of three research groups, each with their own 1-hour weekly meeting. We're not as big as some of the lab group meetings that my friends in bio/chem have. But three meetings a week is a lot. I have one "primary" research group affiliation and I attend that meeting every week but I just don't attend the other group meetings when I don't have the time. I don't know how mandatory these meetings are (whether formally or informally mandatory). I definitely would not suggest randomly skipping group meetings, but after awhile, you can tell the difference between whether you're expected to attend certain group meetings or not. (In my department, almost everyone is part of 2 or more research groups so most group meeting mailing lists are something like 1/4 to 1/3 of the department, and you will never get full attendance).

I also second ShogunT's advice to do something about the format if that's possible. Again, this is something that depends on the norms of your group. At one group meeting, the format was terrible: there were 10 of us each giving 5 minute updates that were completely useless because 5 minutes is not enough time for the presenter to explain the context to the rest of the group and also get useful feedback from the prof. The format was basically each member getting a 5 minute conversation with the PI while the rest of the group is unable to be helpful in any way. We got together after a couple of weeks of this and asked the prof to change the format and now group meeting is a lot better!

I like my primary advisor's group meetings the most. We try to set a theme for a semester and follow that theme. For example, one summer, we all wanted to learn more about X so we decided to have it as "Journals Club" format where we selected important papers on the topic of X and signed up to do a 1-hour presentation on that paper and its implications. Last semester, the theme was "professional development" and we had a series of meetings where we talked about academic websites, applying for jobs, how to interview, how to give job talks, how to set up job talks, networking, academic vs non-academic jobs, and also research-jobs vs. teaching jobs. Currently, we are in a format where the goal is to generate our own research idea. So, we sign up for a week each and we pick one paper we found intriguing and that we think would be a good topic for a new research topic. The group also reads the paper beforehand and then together we all brainstorm and discuss new research ideas based on stuff from the selected paper. Then, the people interested can start a new collaboration/proposal. So far, one major proposal has been submitted from these meetings. Finally, in weeks where there isn't anything to talk about (maybe everyone is out of town or really busy or something), we just cancel group meeting. There is no point meeting just for the sake of meeting. We also have occasional meetings where it's just a practice talk for someone with an upcoming conference (and we are giving feedback).

Ultimately, I think the purpose of the group meeting is to provide something useful for the group members**, not for the PI. In most cases where I feel group meeting is not useful, it is because the PI is trying to get the most out of the meeting but not thinking about how it would benefit the group members (e.g. those "update" meetings that are useless to everyone else). In my field, it's more common to have weekly individual meetings with our PIs, so maybe that's why we're able to keep these updates out of the group meeting and focus group meeting on something beneficial to everyone. But I suppose that in groups that are so big, the group meeting is the only time the PI gets to interact with some members (but if this is the case, then I think small sub-groups is better than a giant group meeting!)

 

(** Another idea that I've heard from other groups but we haven't done ourselves is that some groups have an annual meeting where the PI goes over the budget for the entire lab and explains how they determine the budget. This helps students be a part of lab management but more importantly, it familiarizes them with how to financially manage a lab and how to ask for a start-up that's big enough etc. And another idea is the entire group helping another member 

[katpillow]

I am currently industry-side at a startup of about 25 people. We do a lab meeting once every two weeks, and it tends to go for about 1.5-2 hours or so (though can be as short as 45 minutes). All we do is present our current work if it's worth presenting, and do general lab-wide updates (i.e. information about our first clinical trials) and just keep ourselves up to speed. I cannot possibly imagine doing group meetings for 3-4 hours per week, it would eat up way too much time that could be spent in the lab getting shit done.

[lrlrlrlrlr]

On April 27, 2016 at 1:47 PM, ShogunT said:

Often happen in big bio lab, my spouse included. For hours, people working on different projects sit in a same room and start to talk about stuffs that are of little related to others.

I don't know the dynamics in your lab. But if it's good, and you are senior member of the lab, I would suggest you to try to talk with other members and see if you all can come up with some method to shorten the lab meeting. Then talk with your PI about it. Otherwise, there are things you have to take in stride sometimes.

I wish I had a saying. I'm no senior person...just a grad student. A bunch of us don't like the long frequent lab meetings. We've tried suggesting different formats like shorter or less frequent meetings but the PI said No. People fall asleep in them or just stare into space. There are only a couple of people who talk a lot in the meetings and enjoy them. The other day, I couldn't take it any longer after 1 hour and got so restless. But I think it's partially an issue with me because I cannot sit still and I just hate sitting. I have restless leg syndrome and need to be moving around a lot.

[bhr]

I'm sorry, but you just need to grow up. Not every class/meeting/event is going to be to your liking, and if you go to either industry or academia that is going to be a regular thing. Look at this as job training.

[Eigen]

On May 15, 2016 at 2:17 PM, lrlrlrlrlr said:

I wish I had a saying. I'm no senior person...just a grad student. A bunch of us don't like the long frequent lab meetings. We've tried suggesting different formats like shorter or less frequent meetings but the PI said No. People fall asleep in them or just stare into space. There are only a couple of people who talk a lot in the meetings and enjoy them. The other day, I couldn't take it any longer after 1 hour and got so restless. But I think it's partially an issue with me because I cannot sit still and I just hate sitting. I have restless leg syndrome and need to be moving around a lot.

Yeah, I have to agree with bhr. 

If people are falling asleep and staring into space in a lab meeting, I'd be starting to strongly consider whether or not those people were deserving of research funds for the next semester. 

At this stage in your lives, you should be able to sit and do something you don't love for a couple of hours. Is it the most productive use of your time? Maybe not. Has the person who is paying your salary decided that it's how he/she wants you to spend your time? Yes. 

Accordingly, spend the time in the group meeting, and spend it as a productive, mature, participant. Pay attention, take notes, and be an active part of the lab meeting. The person talking deserves you taking it seriously, and the person *paying you to be there* deserves the same thing.