Repost : Advice for meeting

How to manage meetings

• Please actively send out the meeting invitation from your calendar app so that your advisor can easily accept the event in his calendar
• Meet one time per week, more if possible
• Please send an agenda to all participants a few hours before the meeting starts
• Lead the discussion directed by your agenda
• Take notes when the discussion proceeds
• Please send a summary to all participants after the meeting ends and estimate when the next meeting will be

Meeting agenda format

• Checkpoint from last meeting
  • Conclusions
  • Open questions
  • Assigned tasks
• Effort or progress since last meeting
  • Problems solved
  • Task completed
• What help you expect from participants
  • Identify a new problem, but do not know if it is relevant, important, and how to solve
  • Have next step plans, please help me approve

Meeting summary format

• Important topics discussed
• New tasks need to be completed
• Plans for next week
  • Task priority statement
  • Task assignments among participants
  • When the next meeting will be?

Advice on effective communication

• Please make your statement concise and right to the point
• Eliminate redundancy, often keywords are good choices, do not use complete sentences
• Bullets will help
• Please keep relevant points close enough under the same topic
• When writing emails to advisor or senior researchers, please keep the body simple by only stating the macro results and discoveries in the body, but attaching a longer reference note to describe detailed explanations which the body text can refer to