Meeting with your grad school advisor is a stressful situation at the best of times. It can be anxiety-inducing even when we have spent the week preparing, have slides lined up, and are caught up with all the latest papers. But, often, it’s not the best of times. Often, it is the worst of times: your latest experiments have all failed; you’ve been away for the last few weeks and haven’t had time to prepare; the most recent season of your favorite show came out on Netflix and you spent the weekend binge-watching instead of making slides. Whatever the reason might be, sooner or later in your graduate school career, you will probably find yourself in a meeting with your advisor for which you are wholly unprepared. In this quick guide, we provide a roadmap for surviving a 60-minute meeting with your advisor when you have absolutely nothing useful to say.
0-15 minutes. As you walk into the meeting, remind your PI of some kind of mundane administrative task they forgot to do. Maybe it’s booking a room for a lab meeting, maybe it’s finishing to list the collaborators on a grant you two are working on. Whatever the task may be, suggest you should really get it out of the way before you start talking science. Preferably, this task might involve logging into an account your advisor has forgotten the password to. Help them recover the password. Help them perform the task. Talk about how annoying it is that these tasks always get in the way of science. You should be 10-15 minutes into your meeting slot time by the end of this process. Well done!
15-30 min. At this point in the meeting you will have to start talking about science. A good place to start is by recapping your project. Your whole project. From the very beginning. Remind them of how you even came up with the project idea. Walk them through all the different directions you’ve explored. Make sure to point out your PI’s invaluable contribution to the current state of the project at least a couple times. Bonus points if you find a way to bring up your rotation project in the lab. The important thing at this point of the meeting is to have fun with it and take the most meandering path possible to what you are currently working on.
30-47 min. You have successfully arrived at the halfway mark of your meeting. At this point you will inevitably have to show some form of data. The trick is, it doesn’t have to be new data necessarily, just data. Acceptable things that fit this category include old data plotted with a slightly different axis, summary diagrams with a new color scheme, or possibly even a plot you prepared and had the foresight not to show at a previous meeting. This is also a good moment to bring up how a competitor lab might be quantifying things in a different, and, naturally, much worse way. This comment will inevitably trigger a long diatribe from your PI. Sit back and enjoy the minutes-long break.
47-50 min. As you get closer to the 60-minute mark, you might start to notice a lull in the conversation. A good way of counteracting this is to pitch your advisor an idea they suggested to you a few months ago, but forgot about. It will be the best idea they hear all day!
50-60 min. You’ve reached the finish line. This is the perfect moment to relax and plan an ambitious list of future experiments. When estimating how many experiments you can do between this meeting and the next, the best thing you can do is ask your PI how long they think these experiments will take. How long could it take to make a new mouse line? A day? This is also a good moment to promise your PI you will finally do that experiment they have asked you for five times, but that you know you will never actually get around to.
Congratulations! You have successfully survived this meeting. As you leave your PI’s office, promise yourself you will be much more prepared for next week’s meeting. Or at least, you hope so… If not, you can always refer back to this list.