The structure of our 8-week student rotations
A 6-week challenge-based focus
We are gearing up to host several rotation students in our group this year as we try to identify our next doctoral student(s). This is our first attempt at setting up a structure for 8-week rotation projects.
The structure is inspired by how 37 Signals structures their work into 6-week cycles (explained in Shape Up). While we are not software developers—and few projects fully fit within 6-weeks (for biological reasons)—this approach provides a clear structure that works within the context of our academic year, that is effectively 4-5 6-week cycles long. It’s also very manageable for students to think in 6-week increments. Longer than that is too abstract. Shorter than that can be too granular.
What follows is a nearly-complete version of our rotation introduction that we’ll send to the students at the beginning of their rotation. It describes both the structure of the rotation and our evaluations.
Welcome to the Carini Lab for your rotation! We’re excited to have you join us as we both evaluate if we are a good fit for each other! We are hosting several rotation students this year. From these we’ll invite one, and maybe two students to join our lab group as a doctoral trainee. As you test out our lab, we’ll be looking closely at how you work. How you communicate. How you mesh with our existing team. And how you make us all work better together. These things are impossibly difficult to garner from paper applications and short interviews. The best way to measure them is to get you in here and get your hands dirty with real projects and real data. That’s why you’re here. Welcome!
You’ll be presented a challenge that is shaped to fit within a 6-week chunk of time. Your rotation is 8 weeks long. Week 1 you’ll get acclimated to the lab and have a safety orientation. You’ll get your space settled and have some time to get to know the excellent folks that already work with us. In week 8, you’ll tie any loose ends, report your results and “cool down” to get ready for your next steps in the ABBS rotation process.
In weeks 2-7 you’ll be head-down working to complete a challenge. The challenges are product focused. That is, we have a product in mind that we’d like you to produce. This will be spelled out for you ahead of time. To keep you focused, we’ll lay some guardrails out ahead of time and erect some fences as you make progress. Within these bounds, you’ll have nearly complete creative control of the project. You’ll already have some of the skills needed to produce the product we are asking of you. Some skills you’ll need to learn. We think the end products are reasonable. If it becomes clear that they are not reasonable, tell me and we will re-adjust by reducing the scope of the work (more below). It's not imperative that you complete all the products. But it is imperative that if you don’t complete them, you’ve clearly communicated along the way, conducted independent troubleshooting, made progress, and used your best judgement in what to do or not do.
You’re appointed at 0.5 full time equivalent (FTE), which equates to 20 hours per week working on Carini Lab work. Our expectation is that you are working up to your FTE on our projects (that is, we expect 20 hours per week of work). The other 20 hours of your “40-hour workweek” should be focused on other scholarly activities (i.e. classes, further training, workshops, coding or writing sessions, etc.). There is room to overlap these scholarly activities and your research with us. That is, you can “kill two birds with one stone.” But that is not an obligation. Ideally, these challenge objectives will take you no more than 120 hours to achieve (20 h per week * 6 weeks = 120 hours). We’ll check in in the third (about 40 hours of work in), and fifth (about 80 hours in) weeks of the rotation to discuss scope adjustments.
You’ll be evaluated by me and others against a rubric that consists of three parts, 1/3 of your overall score, each.
1. The quality and depth of your products. Here, we’ll evaluate you on both what you produced, the quality of the product, and how you got to the product. What challenges you overcame and your approach to overcoming those challenges. Keep in mind, this is not solely about quality or quantity. We don’t want 50 figures that are missing information or showing irrelevant or incorrect information. On the flip side, we don’t want you to spend all your time on one task and not get to other products. You will need to use your best judgement on the quality and depth of the products you produce.
2. How do you change the Carini Lab? Any time a new person joins us, the internal lab dynamics change in perceptible ways. We are all quirky in different ways, and we’ll expect that you are too. We welcome that! We’ll be paying attention to how you change our lab atmosphere. How do you uphold our values and standards about equity and inclusivity? How does your uniqueness add to the culture of our laboratory? How do you make us a better team? Do other lab members rise—or fall—to your level?
3. The quality and depth of your communication. We’ll be paying close attention to how you communicate within our setting. We use a hybrid system of communication with formal and informal verbal conversations (both in-person and virtually) and asynchronously in writing on Basecamp. Your communications skills will be evaluated in the context of how we work together to solve problems that are relevant to your rotation project. We are looking for clear writing and clear verbal communication. We’d like for you to be independent, but not to the detriment of your progress. So having a go at a problem, but knowing when to ask for help, is important. We ask for structured regular updates and plans virtually and will be evaluating your participation in—and quality of—those posts.
Once all rotations have been completed, and everyone has been evaluated, we’ll invite folks to join us. If you do not get an invitation, we’ll provide you with a written explanation of what we perceived as your strengths and weaknesses that led to that decision. Keep in mind, this is only our opinion in the context of what we need for our group. We want you to have a long and successful career. Your strengths (and weaknesses) will likely lead to a very successful dissertation with another research group.
There are likely dozens of ways to host students in lab rotations. We’ve not tried this before and there will likely be unforeseen pitfalls. We’ll adjust on the fly as needed.