Category Archives: Systems

Taking the stress out of conference prep

Fly stuff, Mentoring, Reflection, Systems

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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Lab writing retreat

Mentoring, Systems, Teaching

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

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.

Streamlining recommendation letters with google forms

Mentoring, Systems, Teaching

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.

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