Meeting With Liz

Elizabeth Page-Gould
Wikis > SPRQL Wiki > Meeting With Liz

Need to ask Liz a quick question or schedule a meeting? Login to Google Calendar, see what’s happening, and schedule yourself. It’s that easy!

As a lab member, Liz is always happy to meet with you! The first thing you must do is ask Liz to share her “Elizabeth Page-Gould” Google Calendar with you. Once you’ve added Liz’s calendar to your own calendar system, then you have access to her schedule. Liz will be in her office with her door open (or cracked) from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Mondays through Thursdays until the end of January 2016.

Before scheduling or dropping by for your first meeting, read the next three sections and think about them. These sections explain how to use Liz’s shared calendar and guidelines you will follow to keep your privileged access to her time.

Types of Meetings

Most of the time in the schedule is marked as “Drop-in” times, and there will also be open time slots for formal meetings.

Drop-in Meetings: You can stop by Liz’s office to ask a quick question when she is working on other tasks. Don’t schedule drop-in meetings in the calendar … just drop by! Drop-in meetings should generally be 5-minutes or less, and they should be the most common way you interact with Liz.

Formal Meetings: If you need a longer meeting, then just schedule one during an open time slot and it’s yours! However, be respectful to others and try to think in 15-minute increments (i.e., 15-minute meetings) and rarely schedule meetings for more than 30 minutes. The “older” you are in the program, the less time you should need, because you should be improving and gaining efficacy over time**.

How To Schedule a Formal Meeting

Scheduling a Meeting:

The fastest way to get an answer from Liz is to drop by and ask a quick question during drop-in times. If you need more than about 5 minutes, then schedule a formal meeting during an available time slot. You do not need to give Liz any lead time! That is, if there is an open slot in 3 minutes and you want it, then just schedule it and go to her office!

  1. Create an agenda for the meeting and derive an accurate and efficient time estimate.*** Most of your meetings should be 15 minutes or 30 minutes.

  2. View Liz’s main and unavailable calendars to find a time that works for you to meet.

  3. Reserve your meeting by creating an event in the “Elizabeth Page-Gould”/”lizpagegould@gmail” calendar. By default, meetings will be held in Liz’s office (Sidney Smith 4045), but she is happy to meet via Skype (Skype name: “page-gould”) if you cannot make it to Sidney Smith. If you want to meet over Skype, indicate “Skype” as the location of your meeting.

  4. Show up at Sidney Smith 4045 or on Skype at your reserved time. Liz will be there to greet you with a smile!

Cancelling and Rescheduling Meetings:

You can cancel any of your meetings with me whenever (e.g., even a few minutes beforehand) by simply deleting it from the calendar. If you need to cancel or reschedule a meeting, that is totally OK! Just make sure that you actually remove it from the shared calendar so that Liz can do other things or other lab members can schedule a meeting during that time. Please do not email Liz to alert her that you scheduled or cancelled a meeting, because that defeats the purpose of the shared calendar.

Guidelines for Scheduling Meetings:

Over the first year of implementing the system, a few potential trouble spots have been identified. Follow these guidelines, and you will not have any trouble:

  1. When you schedule a meeting in the calendar, make sure that it is associated with my “Elizabeth Page-Gould”/“lizpagegould@gmail.com” calendar, and not one of your personal calendars.

  2. Make sure that the timezone on the meeting is correct (i.e., Eastern time).

  3. Make sure that you are viewing both calendars when you schedule a meeting with me, so that you do not schedule a meeting during my unavailable times. You can hide these calendars when you are not scheduling a meeting.

How To Rock An Academic Meeting

Your meetings with Liz are a part of your training, just like everything else you do in school is. Knowing how to do a meeting right is an integral part of excelling in academia, as you have to meet with colleagues at job interviews, departmental visits/colloquia talks, and conferences throughout your career. Never forget that academia is a big-time, international game. If you want to play, then you have to bring it.

Here are guidelines you are expected to follow when meeting with Liz. However, you should reflect on them and internalize them, as you are being given this information to train you to excel in all your professional interactions.

Preparing for a Meeting:

  1. Always prepare an agenda for a meeting. This is the only way to be efficient and effectively use your time. After you have created your agenda, associate accurate time estimates (e.g., 2 minutes or 7 minutes; do not estimate in 5- or 10-minute chunks) with each agenda item. If you are on a job interview or departmental visit, these agenda items will take the form of questions that you will ask the person about their research or department. No matter how casual the meeting, you should walk in knowing what you are going to cover during the meeting.
  2. Do not email people to “confirm” a meeting that you have already scheduled. A confirmation is where you write, text, or call to ask the other person whether you are still on for the meeting. That’s rude, because you are demanding an action from them that requires their time (i.e., respond to you), when they already took the time to schedule the meeting with you. If you have reason to believe that the person will not show up, then you can send them a “reminder” that says something like, ‘This is a friendly reminder that we have a meeting at XX:XX today/tomorrow. I look forward to seeing you soon!” Avoid those, too, though, because it communicates to the person that you think they are a flake.

Meeting Initiation:

  1. Whoever originally requests or schedules the meeting should initiate it. Initiating a meeting means that you walk into their office (in-person meetings) or click the video call button (Skype meetings). When it comes to meeting with Liz, you are responsible for initiating any meeting that you schedule in Liz’s calendar.
  2. When it is time for your meeting to start, then walk in and say something like, “Hello! Good to see you!” Never begin a meeting with a question like, “Are you ready?” or “Is this a good time?” This is a meek and low-power way to begin a meeting. You want to convey confidence and efficacy to the person that you are meeting. It is also an inefficient use of time.
  3. Always knock loudly or clearly make your presence known at the start time of your meeting. A meek, quiet knock conveys meekness. Meekness gets you nowhere in academia; academics respect strong people with bold ideas.
  4. If the person you are meeting seems to be busy with someone or something else when you arrive, do not let this deter you. More than anything, do not wait outside without alerting them to your presence, because they will probably not know it is time for their next meeting and you may wait there for a long time. Knock on the door or otherwise announce your presence at the time your meeting is supposed to begin. In other words, do not expect the other person to be monitoring the clock and waiting for you. It’s your meeting, so take what is yours.
  5. If you arrive early to a meeting, wait until the scheduled start time before knocking. Do not initiate the meeting early. If you initiate a meeting before your scheduled start time, you are communicating to the person whom you are meeting that you expect them to be waiting around for you and drop whatever they are doing for you. Most likely, they have planned their time up until the start of your meeting. So, be considerate and wait until your meeting starts before initiating a meeting.
  6. If you are going to be more than 5 minutes late for a meeting, try to email or text the person to give them a heads up. Include a time estimate of when you expect to arrive. This way, they can reallocate their time (i.e., answer an email, run to the washroom, finish up the last bit of that analysis they were working on). Sometimes it is not possible to send them a heads-up message, because you do not have any connectivity, but do it if you can. No matter when you arrive, expect that the meeting will end at the original ending time. You should not expect the other person to push back a meeting. If you missed a meeting entirely, send an apology as soon as you can (e.g., “I am very sorry for missing our meeting today. The reason I missed it was … I respect your time, and so I hope that I did not inconvenience you too much!”).

Rocking the Meeting:

  1. Whoever originally requests or schedules the meeting is responsible for moving it forward efficiently. This is where your agenda comes into play. Address each item in turn, and move onto the next item when you feel it has been covered. Never ask the other person if you can move onto the next item on your agenda; it’s your agenda and you know what’s on it, so just move on. When it comes to meeting with Liz, you are responsible for moving the agenda forward.
  2. Always try to move through agenda items quickly and efficiently. Your time is precious and so is the other person’s time. You will always be respected if you are effective at covering a lot of ground in a short period of time.
  3. Sit down right away when your meeting begins; don’t stand awkwardly. Unless you are invited to do otherwise, sit in chairs that are setup opposite of the person’s desk. This is the setup in almost all academic offices. They may invite you to sit on a couch, chair, or piece of furniture by saying, “Sit wherever you like,” but generally go for the chairs on the other side of their desk. Do not move their furniture to sit in a different place than they have set up; respect their space.
  4. Especially when you do not know the person well (e.g., on job interviews or departmental visits), begin the meeting by asking them how they are doing and small-talk things like where they live in town or what they like about the department. You do not need to do this with Liz — and you even probably shouldn’t — but this is just some advice on how to break the ice with new people.
  5. This should be obvious, but be nice to the other person during your meeting. That is, be respectful of their consciousness. Don’t convey annoyance, mistrust, or passive aggressiveness. If you feel those things, then you have issues with the person that you need to address directly. Of course, you should always engage in debate if you disagree with something they say — especially something scholarly — but watch your emotional tone. In academia, whoever gets emotional has lost the argument.

Ending a Meeting:

  1. When the end time of your meeting has been reached, end the meeting. If you need more time, then drop by later or schedule a new meeting with the person. In the case of meetings with Liz, then you can extend the meeting if you know there is available time in the calendar after your meeting. Otherwise, please just stop in during one of the drop-in times or schedule a quick follow-up for as soon as you can.
  2. When leaving, thank them and wish them well! They should do the same to you!

Footnotes

** For example, Cara — a former post-doc in the lab who is generally a paragon of human existence — almost always scheduled 15-minute meetings. The longest meeting she ever scheduled was 45 minutes. She covered serious ground in those meetings, too, it was just that she came organized and moved the agenda along. The reason she was able to do this was because she was so advanced. She was looking to get things done and so she took care of business. As a result, she remains one of the most effective and productive scientists Liz has ever known. That’s your goal.

*** It is important to accurately estimate the meeting durations and not purposefully overestimate to make sure you “have enough time.” In addition to impressing Liz with your estimation skills and efficiency, this will allow the whole lab to have equal access to Liz when they need her.