Category Archives: Mentoring

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.

Continue reading Taking the stress out of conference prep

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.

Continue reading Lab writing retreat

Streamlining recommendation letters with google forms

It’s grad school application time, which means writing recommendation letters for our students. In the past, I’ve struggled to find a formula that works well for different students and situation. Of course, it depends on how well I know the student and how strongly I can recommend them*. Something that has worked well for me is to ask students to give me background info on themselves and the opportunity to which they are applying. I used to ask for this in the form of a resume and personal statement, but decided it might be easier/less intimidating for them to simply answer some questions in a survey.

Continue reading Streamlining recommendation letters with google forms