What you can expect from your supervisor (i.e. me)
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Basically, I am here for you, regardless of whether you are a postdoc, graduate or undergraduate student. I am invested in your success and I consider success as the ability to graduate and/or move to a new position to fullfil your dream. I’m not particularly concerned about what type of job or position you attain after spending time in my lab, I simply want to ensure that your time with me as an advisor or mentor has helped you advance your career. I write letters of reference for lab members, help getting work written up and published and, most importantly, I write grants to help fund the work we do in lab and to pay for salaries and necessary cost in your study. My job is essentially to clear the road so that you can get your work done.
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I tend to advise every graduate student/post-doc/technician/undergraduate slightly differently and the roles of each are also somewhat different. My goal is to foster a scientific atmosphere where you can learn, but I won’t be able to teach you everything you need to know. This is because each project will need something slightly different, and I am not all-knowing, nor do I want to be an expert in everything. This is why you are in the lab!! If there is something you need to learn that I’m not an expert in, I will try and point you in the right direction so that you can get there on your own. Hopefully I can learn something too in the process. That is perhaps the most rewarding aspect of supervising others!
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I am running weekly lab meetings where we can catch up on work progress during the week and where you get feedback on ideas or problems you have encountered along the way from me or from other members in the lab. Other than that, I have an “open door” policy, meaning that my door is open for you if you need to ask a quick question or two. If you want to have a longer meeting, for instance to go over a presentation, manuscript or just some tricky analyses, I prefer that we book a time. I can usually arrange a time with rather short notice and I highly prioritise meeting with my students and postdocs. There’s also the possibility of sending me an email or using our various Slack channels to get feedback – the latter has the benefit that more people can chime in with help or suggestions.
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I will help you edit and prepare manuscripts, grants, posters and talks. I generally return drafts of papers within a few days unless I specifically say so. I prefer to see everything before it is submitted, no matter how minor (conference abstract, poster, paper, grant, etc) — this helps me maintain quality and helps ensure our success rate. With regards to feedback – I tend to be direct with you when I find areas that need improvement and I try to be as clear as I can with my expectations. If you don’t hear from me, it is because I think you are making progress. If I determine that there are performance issues, I will develop a performance improvement plan, and expect weekly and monthly improvements following this rather specific feedback. This is relatively uncommon however. On the other hand, I will tell you when you have done a good job on the big things — for example, we celebrate when an accepted paper or successfully funded grant , if someone gets a job or graduates, etc.
We follow the IJME rules for authorship rules. In principle, the following things are required for inclusion as co-author on a publication from the lab:
All lab members must use lab notebooks; even if you are only doing computationally based analyses. These lab books belong to the lab, and must stay at the university at all times (including after you finish working in the lab).
Much of this text has been inspired by (or taken from!) similar content on Rubén Rellán-Álvarez’s and Gina Baucom’s lab pages