Mid-semester Group Meeting

It can be challenging to find a time when classes are in session for my entire research group to meet. Partly this is because I restrict the possible times to be between 8am-5pm Monday through Friday. I’m not going to ask the students to come back in the evenings or on weekends (some of them live off campus), and I’m not interested in doing so myself either. Hence, getting schedules to mesh can be tricky. Students are typically taking five classes per semester, and have two 4-hour lab sessions per week if they’re majoring in chemistry or biochemistry. I have sophomores, juniors and seniors – all with different class schedules. Not to mention my schedule is also busy with classes, office hours and meetings.

This is why I hold my training sessions a couple of days before classes begin for new students joining my group. It helps them to be productive once the actual semester begins and they get busy. A student doing research for one unit during the semester commits to 4-5 hours per week. For two units during the semester, the commitment is 8-10 hours per week. Most students only sign up for one unit because they have such busy schedules and lives.

Day-to-day computational chemistry research is also, for the most part, a solitary endeavor. My philosophy is for each of my students to have their own independent project, and they plug away at it in bits and bites during the semester. Schedules rarely overlap so it’s not often I will find more than one student in my lab at any given time during the semester. There are no safety issues akin to experimental labs where you need to have a buddy system. And unless the student requires using the graphical user interface for building molecules or analysis, some of their work can be done remotely. The students enjoy this flexibility, and like me, they find that the most efficient way to do computational work is to do a little bit most days rather than find a single 4-5 hour block. You don’t have to babysit your calculations (unlike a reaction in organic lab) so after setting up and making sure your calculation hasn’t crashed early on due to a setup problem, you can come back and check on it later.

During the summer, the students work full-time on research. We have regular group meetings where they present their work. I also have “theory” sessions spread over several weeks of the summer where I teach them some of the nuts and bolts of computational chemistry. For the students, it’s like auditing a no-credit mini-class. No problem sets or exams, although there is reading. They don’t have other classes between 8am-4pm Monday through Friday, and neither do I, so it’s easy to schedule times for all those things. (When I train students before the semester begins I do cram in a little bit of theory in the full two-day session.)

Before the new semester begins, I work with my students to set up individual one-on-one weekly meetings so that we can check on research progress. However, in the lead-up to this semester I realized that there was some time on Friday afternoons that would occasionally work for all of us during the semester. None of my students had Friday afternoon labs, and only one had class until 2:30pm on Fridays. So before the semester began, we made plans to meet twice during the semester for ‘group meeting’. Why not more often? During the semester, a student only working 4-5 hours per week on research doesn’t actually make that much weekly progress so there wouldn’t be much to present. (In contrast, during the summer we have weekly meetings.) Three of my students were new to the group, so they’d only have had 28-35 hours of research done by group meeting time.

We had our mid-semester group meeting yesterday afternoon. I had prepped the students ahead of time with what I was expecting from them: a 6-to-10-minute presentation with 1-2 minutes of introduction, 4-6 minutes of results, and 1-2 minutes of “what I’m working on now” and future directions. For the two sophomores, it was the first time they were using ChemDraw; it’s an intuitive program and they did a good job drawing structures without me having to teach them how to do so. They were just learning arrow-pushing in organic chemistry, and while these were not included in their presentations yesterday, they remarked about it when a senior presented her work with color-coded arrows to show where nucleophiles were attacking and what made a good leaving group. At the end of last semester, when they were still first-years, I pitched doing research as complementing some of what they would be seeing in organic chemistry. (My group is studying small molecule reactions related to prebiotic chemistry.)

At the beginning of our group meeting, we drew lots to see who would go first. I groaned when I drew number 1, and the students laughed. A good way to break the tension! I did my presentation old-school with the whiteboard and reaction schemes drawn on paper. My students all used PowerPoint. We also discussed the pros and cons of both approaches. There was some Q&A after each presentation but I tried not to ask too many questions, and the students asked between 0-1 questions each, i.e., not many. One challenge is that projects can be quite different from each other so a student might feel inhibited about asking questions, or maybe because it was the first group meeting for a number of them. Overall, though, I have a good crop of students this semester and they all did a decent job on their presentations, even the first-timers! It's been a while since I've done mid-semester group meeting, but I was reminded that I should make more of an effort to make sure it happens!