All posts by ebolters@gmail.com

Taking the stress out of conference prep

The Annual Drosophila Research Conference is coming up and I’m busy helping 4 research students prepare for their poster presentations. Because I’m admittedly not great with enforcing student deadlines, my usual MO is to have everyone work at their own pace and then hurriedly deal with the fallout (i.e. 11th hour editing). This year I decided to try something new, that would hopefully prevent stress levels from topping the charts…and it worked! 

I know that many of my colleagues have efficient systems in place already (and may be wondering how I made it this far without them), but if you’re looking for a success story on streamlining workflow, read on.

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Home office? Meet the home lab

While flies are an amazing model organism for so many different reasons, they need to be kept alive. So when lockdown happened last spring, “what about my flies?” was a question in the fly community.  So many researchers brought their fly stocks home with them, hosting their new guests in bathrooms, spare bedrooms, and garages. I luckily was authorized to go into campus every couple weeks to make food and flip stocks, but a set of essential stocks still became our new pandemic roommates. 

Later in the summer, I still had limited lab access (and child care), but was itching to get some of our work up and running. Enter the creation of the home fly lab.

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Lab writing retreat

I’m a huge fan of peer review in the classroom: it gives students opportunities to interact with and be inspired by each other while building their critical review skills. Not to mention peer review on initial drafts reserves my time for more meaningful one-on-one interactions on more complete work. In contrast, student writing in my lab is usually a solo project where students work with only me. The process is effective (as in we get a satisfying finished project), but I feel a void in peer interaction. With three (three!) thesis students this semester (2 undergrad and 1 MS student), I decided it was a great time to create tools for whole lab writing instructions and review: the First Annual SuperFly Writing Retreat.

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The Year of Systems

In a recent “Happier” podcast, Gretchen Rubin challenged her listeners to choose a theme word that will guide this year. After much internal debate, I went with “systems” and am dedicating my year to figuring out how use systems and tools to best plan//organize/schedule so that I can do more of what I love and hopefully start to approach the much coveted term/feeling/idea of work life balance. I say this as a decidedly non-Marie Kondo type who usually resists organizational strategies like my 3 year-old resisting any normal foods, but that wasn’t working for me, so here I go on this organizational journey.

So, I started workflow boards on Trello, blocked off time in my google calendar, and finally got a planner that I actually use. It’s the planner that I’ll give the shout out to now because it’s been nothing short of revolutionary as far as how I handle my day. I started with the daily Passion Planner which forces me not only to plan out my working hours, but also to reflect on my progress to my “game changer goal.” Not being a planner person, I’m surprised how much I use it! I missed the big picture review and went back to order the weekly planner, which is the one I’ll keep going in the future. Am I converted? Only time will tell, but for now I’m grooving on having a checkpoint for my goals.

Fly food cooking school

When I first set up my lab, I realized that many things that worked for my large, R1 postdoc lab weren’t going to work for me in my new environment. One of the most important processes was making fly food. My first decision was to use pre-portioned 1L food packets from Genesse to save on time and possible measuring errors for my undergrad food makers (we use the Bloomington Formula). The next challenge was how to cook the fly food without an industrial-sized kettle. The size wasn’t a problem because I only needed to make small batches, but the equipment was a trial and error process…

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