ECODE Lab

First meeting

When you first join the lab, you’ll have a meeting with Emily (and if you’re an undergraduate, potentially a grad student mentor as well) to discuss getting set up to work with us. Here are some practical things that should happen at that meeting:

  • Discuss your long-term career goals (to the extent you know them) and what you hope to get out of your time here
  • Identify a project for you to work on, or first steps towards identifying a project for you to work on (the time frame on this depends a ton on your career stage/goals)
  • Go over lab expectations and Code of Conduct
  • Set up nuts and bolts stuff
    • Slack invite
    • HPCC access
    • Github Organization access
    • Google Drive access
    • Physical access to lab (assuming some day we won’t be in the middle of a pandemic)
    • Get added to [../people.html] page of website if you’re not going to work through the self-paced onboarding materials

Self-paced onboarding materials

Lab Philosophy

Open science

stuff about why open science is good

To this end, we have the following policies:

  • All research code should be version controlled and available under an open source license (we tend to default to the MIT License, but can be flexible). In general we encourage developing code in public Github repositories. We understand that this can be intimidating at first, so it’s okay if you want to start out with a private repo, but it definitely needs to be made public at the time the paper is submitted for publication.
  • In most cases, papers should be submitted to a preprint server before they are submitted for publication.
  • Collaboration and free exchange of ideas is encouraged! This inclues at conferences, via blogging, on Twitter, and more.

Lab management

An organizing principle of the ECODE Lab management philosophy is to minimize the extent to which Emily is a bottleneck. Corolary: when she is the bottleneck, make sure she is aware. This is less of an issue now than it will presumably be as the lab grows, but it’s good to get in the habit early.

To this end, we have the following norms:

  • Peer feedback/share writing

  • Lazy consensus

  • Non-hierarchical (but with recognition of power structures)

Workflow for getting stuff done in the ECODE Lab

What it makes sense to cover in onboarding will depend on your role in the lab.

Things just about everyone should learn (if they don’t already know):

  • Git

  • A programming language (C++, Python, R, or maybe Javascript)

  • Learn git
Search