The importance, and impossibility, of lab meetings

Wouldn't it be valuable to get everybody together on a regular basis?

Lab meetings are really important. Even if we don’t conduct essential business, gatherings are critical for fostering community. When we put the time aside to meet as a team to discuss progress, and simply hang out with one another, it makes a big difference for one’s identity as a scientist and can change student professional trajectories.

Which is why I’m so frustrated that it seems to be impossible to hold regular lab meetings.

I simply can’t find a half-hour or hour when everybody is available. This is just our reality in a regional public university full of post-traditional commuter students with busy lives.

What makes this so challenging? Schedules never line up.

Because I work in a PUI, as the label indicates, my lab is Primarily Undergraduate. Most of the students in my lab are taking full course load. That makes scheduling weekly meetings hard. What makes it an order of magnitude more difficult is that students are scheduling their jobs (on and/or off campus) around their course schedule. When students join my lab they usually have some other job for 20-30 hours per week, and I don’t usually have the funding for them to replace that amount of income, so that means they’re juggling coursework, employment, and and research at the same time.

At the moment I have a couple undergrads on the payroll at 10-15 hours/week, and a few who are volunteering. Getting two of them in the same room at the same time (even a zoom!) is hard, and all of them on a weekly basis? Nigh impossible.

And the people who are not undergrads? That’s just as hard.

I do have a postdoc working in my lab at the moment. She’s super flexible but also super busy and her collaborative project takes her away from campus a lot. But the graduate student is least flexible. I have one Master’s student, who worked in my lab as an undergrad, and now works full time in a government-sector science job while doing his thesis on the side. There’s no way he can regularly zoom for a meeting in normal-ish hours. It’s hard enough for him to get to campus a couple nights a week for graduate classes, as well as sneak away on weekends to do fieldwork for his project.

The only way I could do lab meetings would be try try to make it happen later in some evening, or on a weekend. And even if I tried that, that would still be hard to find a time. And I hope for obvious reasons you can see that I’m not going to attempt that anyway.

So, no lab meetings for the McGlynn lab. I have a variety of independent meetings with people in my lab to talk about their stuff, but when people work in the lab space the odds that anybody will actually overlap with someone else are smallish.

It wasn’t always this way for me. When I used to profess at a high-tuition private PUI, the undergrads in my lab tended to have little outside employment other than a bit of on-campus work-study. I could get the students together on a weekly basis rather easily. I’d just email everybody and ask them when they were on campus and available and BOOM, we’d have a weekly meeting time. It was so simple.

I realize that the difficulty in assembling a regularly interacting community is just one of the many ways that socioeconomic/ethnic disparities play out in STEM career outcomes. The reality is that even if I could pay students 15 bucks to attend an hourly monthly meeting, I still wouldn’t be able to make that happen! It’s so frustrating. I’ve tried to have regular zooms but then it ends up falling apart because most people can’t make it (for entirely legit reasons). That feels worse than not trying and creating a sense of a community that can’t stick together.

I do maintain a lab slack. Most of the students on this slack are not using it for anything else, and some folks aren’t on it as regularly as they would need to be for it to be adequately functional. So there is some sharing of work-stuff but it’s never really been a community of any sort.

Until recent years, I used to compensate for this shortcoming of an on-campus lab community by bringing students out to a field station for a few weeks or a few months. That really helped connect them to one another and also to create a belonging to a larger community of biologists doing field research. But now that I’ve leaned away from this work to emphasize working in our own community, this level of immersion is lacking. I think this is a shortcoming in the professional development of my students.

For those of you also running labs in regional public universities with students who have difficult schedules that don’t align for lab meetings, how do you foster a sense of community?

Yes, my lab meetings look exactly like this. A perfect representation. You mean you didn’t get this meeting room as a part of your startup?