First commitee meeting

[Tina_HP]

Hey guys. My first committee meeting is coming up and I was wondering what do you discuss in the first committee meeting? How many hours does a committee meeting usually lasts?

[Starling]

Mine was about an hour. I gave a powerpoint presentation and they asked questions and gave suggestions for future experiments. The questions were mainly about what I did and why (i.e. not scary comps-type questions). Your school probably has official guidelines, and there may be form to fill out or a short report you need to write.

 

It's really not that bad. Pretty much none of my experiments worked, and they still seemed happy enough.

[neuronix]

It usually lasts two hours.

 

Your committee members basically want to see that you have started to read intensively about your subject. Also, depending on whether your project is already planned, the meeting is a good way to narrow down the project so that it fits within the timeline projected.

 

You should WANT to get as much criticism now as you can (get shredded I mean, really) b/c it's better to know what the members think the faults of the project is now, rather than in a year from now.

 

If your department doesn't provide, I'd bring some coffee and cookies to the meeting so that your members like you and have a good experience. It's a form of psychological bribery.

[PermanentWaves]

Depending on what Department you're in (and what university), you may expect to be grilled by your committee at your first meeting. I know of some Depts here at UofT where the grad coordinators have had to ask the faculty to go easy on the first meeting.

 

Personally, I got creamed at my first meeting. Like Neuronix said though, this was probably for the best. It really helped me understand the expectations. My next meeting was so much better, and the committee commented on how much I had grown and the amount of work I had done. Now I've got my first-author paper just about accepted and am working on writing up the thesis. My supervisor said that, from here on, it's almost a formality. Definitely do not take it personally if you have a rough meeting. It's almost always an advantageous thing.

 

Good luck with the meeting. And yes, food is your friend haha.

[WaveSense]

You would only have a rough meeting if you are not prepared or your project is not well thought out. If you know what you're doing, why you're doing it, what could go wrong and what you can do when it does go wrong you'll be more than prepared. There'll the be odd what does protein X do in model Y published by Dr. Z in 2001 type of question, but don't feel bad saying I don't know.

 

None of my commitee meetings have ever been bad.. they last anywhere from 20minutes to 1hour and most of it was questions on why we were choosing certain models to test our protein of interest. Using proper end-points in our studies was another big topic of discussion, and really, that's what it's all about, discussing your project. It's not meant to be an exam.

[Potter]

Excellent advice from the posters above.

 

Don't get too worked up about it, your first meeting should help you figure out exactly WHAT is expected from you for your research.

 

In my experience, I always found that there was more arguing going on between committee members about what the project goals were. I just made sure I was on top of the science and everything was okay.

 

In addition to food (a definite must!) I usually printed out my committee meeting presentation for each member (nothing fancy, like 6 slides per page). That way, they could make notes, keep a copy for their records and be able to go back and read it if they wanted to refresh their memory about what we had talked about.

 

Hope it all goes smoothly for you

[Cnussey]

If you go past 2hrs your meeting will no longer be functional. You can easily let chatter build up to 2hrs, but if you chair it properly, an hour would be sufficient.

 

Town council meetings used to run to 4hrs (I've cut them to 2!), and all of my other committee meetings run for 1 to 1.5 hrs (sometimes we have lunch meetings and sometimes we permit joyful banter as well as business).

 

If you are getting things done and things are in order, then you can relax the chit-chat more

[Bede]

I found committee meetings easy. However, I had one guy on my committee who was really smart (fellow of APS) and would pick up typo's (The atomic force microscope has a vertical resolution of 0.1Angtrsoms instead of 0.1nm) and ask a whole bunch of questions about bond lengths and van der waals radii of different atoms, just to show me that the AFM couldn't possibly have that sort of resolution. Other than that, easy.