Communicating

This document contains information on how the lab communicates – who talks to who where about what.

You should never feel bad about contacting anyone (including Colin) when you need things. We’re all expecting you to be proactive about communicating how things are going and if you need any help. We do tend to assume that “no news is good news”, and that you’d reach out if you needed anything – so please, reach out whenever you need something!

Getting Help

Everyone – including Colin – expects you to reach out when you need help. It is not a burden, you are not getting in the way of people getting things done, you do not need to feel bad about it.

That said, there’s a few things that you can do to help get yourself unstuck faster. Even if you can’t get yourself unstuck, these steps will make it a lot easier for someone else to help you:

• Search the resources you have – this book, Slack, email – for possible answers to your question.
• Make sure you’re asking questions about the actual problem you’re trying to solve, not the solutions you’ve attempted. This is a good article about this problem.
• If you’re having an issue with code, create a reprex. Make sure you read this article on creating a good reprex.
• Ask as many people as possible:
  • On Slack, we have channels like #help-no-stupid-questions and #code with most of the lab in them, which means they’re a great spot for more general questions which anyone might able able to answer.
  • For more project-specific questions, prefer asking in the project’s Slack channel rather than in a DM.
  • This both maximizes the number of people who can help you out, and maximizes the number of people who can be helped by your question.

Again, no one is going to think less of you because you’re asking questions. We’d much rather help you get things right the first time than have to help you fix things that were done wrong!

And if you get an answer that’s not in this book, please add it as a new section or open an issue about it!

Slack

Slack is probably the most active venue for communicating with the rest of the lab. Slack is an online messaging platform which lets users send messages in a number of “channels”, making it very useful for communicating about a number of related projects at once. Instructions for getting on the Slack are included in the new member checklist.

Each project we work on has its own Slack channel, and we try to keep messages in the most relevant channel. We also have a number of channels for casual conversations – the “random” and “general” channels are open for any topic, and “journal-club” is for sending links to interesting papers. Feel free to create new channels for anything you want – your research project, statistical methods, dog pictures, it’s all fair game.

We don’t pay for Slack, which means that messages expire after three months and files expire as more files are sent. If you’re going to want to refer back to a Slack conversation, try and capture it in an email or, better yet, as part of this book.

If a channel is public, you’re welcome to join it¹. If you think a conversation is interesting, you’re welcome to jump in. We’re pretty open with who’s allowed to help with what projects; if you think you can be helpful with something, you’re more than welcome to ask if you can help out. A corollary here is that we don’t usually ask the entire group who would be interested in working on a project; we assume that the people who would be interested will tell the people running the project that they want to help out.

Note that Colin is not on the Slack. However, some other CAFRI-affiliated faculty and postdocs are on the Slack (as are a handful of students from CAFRI-adjacent labs); don’t assume that only CAFRI students will see your texts.

Emails

We primarily use email to communicate with Colin or with people who aren’t on the Slack. It’s more rare for students to email each other without also including Colin or a non-CAFRI person; there’s nothing wrong with it, but these conversations usually happen on Slack instead.

That said, you should not feel bad about needing to email people, including Colin. If you don’t get a response within 24 hours, it’s perfectly acceptable to “reply” to your original email with a message such as “Just wanted to make sure you saw this”.

Generally, when writing an email, you should start with the thing you want from the other person. You can follow up with context, explanations, and more after that, but you should start off the email with your main point. Burying the reason you’re sending the email means the recipient is less likely to understand what you’re asking for.

Meetings

We occasionally have whole-lab meetings, sometimes on a semi-regular schedule. These tend to get set on a semester-by-semester basis; you’ll get more information via email if there’s any scheduled for this semester.

A lot of students have regular meetings with Colin on either a weekly or bi-weekly schedule. You may need to reach out to him to set this up, but you should not feel bad about doing so. You should set this up early each semester, as schedules tend to fill up as the semester goes on.

In your 1-on-1 meetings with Colin, you’re expected to be the person driving the agenda and content of the meeting. This is a good time to show off status updates or ask questions, about your research or anything else. It’s also a good time to get clarity on the things you need to do through the semester and year to stay on track to graduate. Keeping on top of this is your responsibility, and it’s a good idea to set up a document to keep notes in about what topics you want to cover in your next meeting and what you need to get done before the next one.

You can also feel free to ask for meetings with other students, either as one-off things to work on a project or get help with a problem or as more regular scheduled events. They might say no if their schedule is too full, but there’s no harm in asking!

Footnotes

1. There are some private channels which are invitation-only and which are hidden to non-members. If you can see a channel, it’s public and open to you.