At the end of each week (Friday/Sunday) make sure you update your project status on Asana. If your tasks are behind schedule mark the project as "At Risk" or "Off-Track" (if you are continously lagging, in which case talk to me immediately to rectify). The update should include three components:
- What have you accomplished this week.
- What if there is any bottleneck?
- What is your plan for next week.
Make sure your project on Asana is up to date. All in-progress tasks should have deadlines and an associated duration of when you expect to finish the task. Keep tasks short (<6 hours). Ensure you keep the tasks active and include a document explaining your findings/review/results when you move your task for review. Each project should update its status at the end of the week, preferably on Fridays and latest by Sunday. We will discuss the status/plan for each project on the Monday of each week.
These deep-dive meetings can be as frequent as you like if you feel stuck. But at minimum, we should meet once every two weeks. All meetings should have an Agenda and a Google doc describing the updates, questions on Asana Meeting Agenda. Please make sure the documents are available at least two hours before the meeting to prepare for our meeting, and the discussion is more productive. Sending documents beforehand eliminates the need to update me on your progress, and we can dive straight into the problem at hand. Ensure you have the deep dive meetings at least once every two weeks. Please create the agenda with the following outline:
- How may I help you?
- To discuss
- Updates
- Next steps
- Goals
Occasionally, one of our deep dive meetings or an impromptu meeting can be a free flow meeting. This meeting will have a core theme or context of what to discuss but will not happen in a lab/office in front of a computer. We will usually go for a walk and discuss Ph.D. life/career ideas or have a deep dive into your research problem while occasionally finding a spot to look at a graph or two. The free flow meetings are unconstrained, and we can get to know each other or the research problem at hand better. We may go for a walk around the campus during free-flow meetings
We'll have weekly Brain Trust meetings to discuss research challenges and collectively find new research insights and troubleshoot problems.
We will also use lab meetings (or ad-hoc scheduled meetings) to prepare for conference presentations and give people feedback on job talks or other external presentations. Lab meeting agendas and notes will be kept in the #braintrust channel on Slack.
Mentor-Mentee 360 is a Semesterly feedback loop between us (mentee and mentor) on the first week of the month. To prepare for the feedback loop, we will have a shared google document (private to you) and discuss the feedback/progress/plans/goals. True to its name, the meeting expects a true 360 feedback loop; you are encouraged to give your mentor feedback and say what's working and what's not without being judged. We'll cover the following topics:
- Feedback for your mentor, what's working and what's not?
- What excellent work have you done?
- What areas do you think you should improve?
- What are your goals for this quarter?
- How can your mentor help you?
- What skill would you like to develop/career advice?
Krishna will meet with undergraduate students at least every other week (or according to need); post-docs and graduate students should meet with their undergraduate mentee on a regular basis.
If you like to schedule a meeting with me please use https://calendly.com/krishnakut/30min.