We have had a few too many group meetings lately, culminating in nearly 4 in one week two weeks ago. After that we're down to a more reasonable one per week, but the timing has been changing each week, which is very annoying when one finds out that the one this week is at 5pm friday, which is the usual time for people to be leaving work on friday, not staying around for another hour and a half or more.
But one good thing did come out of the group meeting, I hit on a random idea (yes, it was sexy) relating to image analysis of some AFM data. Normally all the image analysis is done by hand, which is pretty tedious (can one say, 60000 tiles analyzed by hand?), but there haven't been any good ways (or people to implement them, perhaps) to do this in a more automatic way. I thought of one while in group meeting, and it seems pretty easy to implement and try out, and may even end up with some nice figures. So there's a bright spot, and at least it will be some programming that isn't dealing with energy model quirks.
2 comments:
One of my advisor's more irritating quirks is the Friday evening meeting. Usually he'll come by at 4 and say he'll be back "in an hour", then we wait around until about 7 when he actually shows up, and we finally get out of the lab by 8 or so.
The group I worked in at Tech always had their group meetings late in the day on Friday (either 4 or 5, don't recall) and this was also pretty agonizing.
Nai Chang still has her group meetings Fridays around 4pm.
I agree that Friday evenings (or late afternoons) are suboptimal times for that stuff, though I should mention that my favorite seminar time is Friday afternoon, which is what we had in applied math at Cornell. It ended up being a way to encourage the grad students to hang out with each other more. First, the talk was at 3:30 or 3:45 (depending on the year). Then we would go to the common room (the cubicles were all in one big room, which included some couches to hang out) for doughnuts, cookies, muffins, and other pastries (we had really good seminar food --- one of the best I have seen from any department at any school!). The speaker, profs, postdocs, and grad students would all talk for a while, and there would be both academic and non-academic conversations going on. Gradually, various groups of people would leave together and go out to hang out more, so the whole thing worked fantastically well. I have not seen a single other seminar series that I think accomplishes the whole package better.
There are times when I am working in the office on Friday evenings to finish some stuff, but I'd rather not. (There are other times I watch a baseball game and then work for a couple of hours at home on Friday night, but that actually isn't so bad.)
Post a Comment