Being in lab is a good way of learning from others, helping others, building camaraderie, having fast and easy access to resources (and people) you need, and being relatively free from distractions at home (e.g., your bed or Netflix). That said, hours in academia are more flexible than other jobs -- but you should still treat it as a real job (40 hours/week) and show up to the lab. My primary concern is that you get your work done, so if you find that you are more productive at home (lab-mates can be chatty sometimes), feel free to work at home occasionally. If you have no meetings, no participants, and no other obligations that day, it might be a good day to work at home – but you can’t do this all the time, and I expect to see everyone in the lab on a regular basis (but see Noise Policy).
For graduate students, I understand having to be away for classes and TA-ing, but show up to the lab on a regular basis when you don’t have those obligations (but see Noise Policy for more details).
To encourage lab interaction, try to be in most weekdays during ‘peak’ hours (assuming no other obligations) – e.g., between 11am and 4pm. This is not a hard rule, you can work at home occasionally and I understand other obligations. But keep it in mind.
I do not expect you to respond until you are back at work ( you can safely ignore me until then). I do not expect there to be cases when I suddenly and urgently need something from you over the weekend (e.g., for a grant deadline), but should I anticipate that happening, I will bring it up in advance so we can plan accordingly. All this said, I realize that being told you can ignore my messages might not take away the stress of seeing my messages if you check work email or Slack in the evenings or on weekends. If my off-hours messages are unwelcome and cause distress, please talk to me, and I will be better at not bothering you during your time off.
Although I sometimes work weekends, I try to only do that when absolutely necessarily. Please respect that by making sure to give me enough heads-up about impending deadlines so that I can get things done for you (e.g., give feedback on manuscripts, etc) while maintaining my work/life balance. For more details, see Deadlines.
I love that lab members get along and want to spend time with one another. This is a critical aspect of a productive, friendly, and positive lab environment. But I also realize that you are all very busy and want to have a place to focus and work quietly.
Motivated by the concerns of some lab members, and in conversation with them, we have devised a set of policies so that you can all work effectively. These policies do not preclude socializing at specific, agreed-upon times (e.g., lunch, happy hours); in fact, we encourage you to! These policies also do not preclude meeting with one another to discuss research, classes, life, etc; again, we encourage you to! But keep these policies in mind:
1. General quiet time: Quiet time is between 9am and 5pm in the lab. Please respect other people's needs to work quietly in lab during those times by lowering your voice and generally keeping noise to a minimum. If you do need to talk, do it quietly and/or set up a meeting in a room with closed doors.
2. Headphone rule: If someone is wearing headphones, respect their need for quiet. Do not tap them on the shoulder to talk. Do not talk loudly next to them. Exception: if there is a fire alarm or other emergency and they are not aware, do alert them for their own safety.
3. Flexible work locations: Feel free to work from home, a library, an unused running room, or anywhere else when Policies 1 & 2 aren't enough, or you just need a day of privacy. With respect to working from home: no need to alert Krishna. It’s nice having people around to help each other and for us to talk in person, so do not work from home all the time, but do so when you need to.
In addition to weekly meetings (see meetings), and occasionally dropping by the lab, you can find Krishna in his office. His door is almost always open (usually in the afternoon); if it is, feel free to ask for a chat. He will always say yes, though sometimes he can only spare a couple of minutes or might ask you to let him finish typing a sentence. If his door is closed, assume that Krishna is either gone, in a meeting in his office, or does not want to be disturbed – so please send a message (Slack or e-mail) rather than knocking (unless you urgently need me).
One way of maintaining sanity in the academic work is to be as organized as possible. This is essential because disorganization doesn’t just hurt you, it hurts your collaborators and people whose help you need. When it comes to deadlines, tell your collaborators as soon as you know when a deadline is, and make sure they are aware of it the closer it gets. Don’t be afraid to bug them about it (yes, bug Krishna as well).
Give Krishna at least one week’s notice to do something with a hard deadline that doesn’t require a lot of time (e.g., reading/commenting on conference abstracts, filling out paperwork, etc).
Give Krishna at least two weeks’ notice (preferably more) to do something with a hard deadline that requires a moderate amount of time (e.g., a letter of recommendation).
If you want feedback on research and teaching statements, or other work that requires multiple back-and-forth interactions between you and Krishna before a hard deadline, give him as much time as you can; at the very least three weeks (e.g., manuscripts).
For manuscript submissions and revisions (i.e., which either have no deadline at all or only a weak deadline), send drafts to Krishna as soon as you have them, and bug him to give you feedback if he hasn’t responded in two weeks – papers are important!
Learning to present your research is important. Very few people will read your papers carefully (sad, but true) but you can reach a lot of people at conference talks and posters. Also, if you plan on staying in academia, getting a post-doc position and getting a faculty position both significantly depend on your ability to present your data. Even if you want to leave academia, presentations are likely to be an important part of your job. Additionally, every time you present your work, you are representing not just yourself but the entire research group.
It is therefore highly encouraged that you seek out opportunities to present your research, whether it is at departmental talk series and events, to other labs (within or outside of UT Austin), at conferences, or to the general public. If you are going to give a presentation (a poster or a talk), be prepared to give a practice presentation to the lab at least one week ahead of time (two weeks or more are advisable for conference presentations, and many weeks ahead of time are advisable for job talks, which require much refining). BrainTrust meetings are a good occassion to practice your talks. Practice talks will help you feel comfortable with your presentation, and will also allow you to get feedback from the lab and implement those changes well in advance of your real presentation.
UT Austin Templates for posters are available, and you can use those as much or as little as you’d like. Some general rules for posters should be followed: minimize text as much as possible (if you wrote a paragraph, you’re doing it wrong), make figures and text large and easy to see at a distance, label your axes, and make sure different colors are easily discriminable. Other than that, go with your own style.
Krishna is also happy to share slides from some of his talks if you would like to use a similar style. You’ll get a lot of feedback on your talks in any case, but other people’s slides might be helpful to you as you are setting up your talk. As with posters, feel free to go with your own style as long as it is polished and clear.
Letters of recommendation are extremely important for getting new positions and grants. You can count on Krishna to write you a letter if you have been in the lab at least one year (it’s hard to really know someone if they have only been around for a few months). Exceptions can be made if students or post-docs are applying for fellowships shortly after starting in the lab.
If you need a letter, notify Krishna as soon as possible with the deadline (see Deadlines for guidance), your CV, and any relevant instructions for the content of the letter. If the letter is for a grant, also include your specific aims. If the letter is for a faculty position, also include your research and teaching statements. In some cases (especially if short notice is given), you may also be asked to submit a draft of a letter, which will be modified based on Krishna’s experience with you, made more glamorous (people are much too humble about themselves!), and edited to add anything you left out that Krishna thinks is important. This will ensure that the letter contains all the information you need, and that it is submitted on time.
We’re all for open science, so research group members are encouraged (well, required) to share their code and data with others, whether they are in the lab or outside of it. Within Geoelements, you can share your code and data whenever you like. We share our code or data with the outside world as we develop everything in open. Generally, we will make our data publicly available simultaneously with the submission of the paper to a peer-reviewed journal. Currently, the best option for sharing datasets might be the UT Dataverse or DesignSafe CyberInfrastructure or Open Science Framework.
We will also share our work with the world as soon as we ready, which means preprints! The lab policy is to upload a preprint of a manuscript simultaneously with initial submission to a journal. The preferred preprint servers ares arXiv and Zenodo. We will also put PDFs of all our papers on the lab website, and you should share PDFs of your paper with whoever asks.
Funding for the lab currently comes from Krishna's start-up package from University of Texas at Austin, an NSF award, and industry projects. If you need to buy something, or have to charge a grant for something, let Krishna know and he will oversee the process.
At some point, you will likely be asked to provide a figure or two for a grant Krishna is writing, and/or provide feedback on the grant. Relatedly, you are entitled to read any grant Krishna has submitted, whether it is ultimately funded or not. Aside from being a good opportunity to learn how grants are written, this will also allow you to see his vision for the research group in the years ahead. Feel free to ask Krishna to see any of his grants.