Speaker 1: So I've got a cheeky little bit of the corona, but that's not gonna stop me helping you. Let's look at supervisor meetings. So one thing I wanna say about supervisor meetings is that the most important thing is that you are in control of the meeting. The thing is, is if you go in and let your supervisor or your supervisors control the meeting, you're just gonna become a plaything for all of their ideas. The meeting's not gonna have any focus, and it's really, really annoying because you go into the meeting with these ideas and you leave more confused than ever. Trust me, I've been there loads of times. So when you take control of the meeting, you are the chair of the meeting. You are taking the agenda and you're running everyone through it, and also it means that you are doing the majority of the work before the supervisor meeting to make sure it stays on track. Another thing is that you should do this on neutral territory, i.e. book a room somewhere in your university near both of your offices so that it is a sort of like nice, level playing field for everyone. If you go into their office, quite often I find that it's just not the same meeting. Also, if they are desperate to do it like over coffee, which I absolutely hate, make sure you take your laptop and you still present formally to them, even if it's at a cafe. That is one thing I highly recommend because a lot of the times they see meetings as just like a way to kind of like not do anything for a little bit. Depending on who's in the room as well will depend on the vibe of the room. If it's just you and your supervisor, you can talk quite openly, but sometimes there's like a pissing match. If there's more than one academic in the room, they'll start kind of like trying to one-up each other all the time, which is really annoying. So you need to stay in control as the chair of this meeting, and here are the slides that I always include in the order I always include them in a supervisor meeting, and it hasn't failed me yet. Here we go. So the first thing is your opening slide, and all I do here is I say the date and the meeting and then obviously by me. This is just sort of a chance for you to get everyone in the room, the slides up, and this sets the tone for the meeting. When people enter a room and they see that there's a presentation with the date, they know that there's an agenda, and it puts them into like, you know, audience mode where they know you are in control. So that's very important. You can't go in just with some like pieces of paper and be like, oh, I did this, I did that. Make sure it's a formal presentation. Okay, then the first thing I do is start with a recap. I say what was agreed on last meeting, and also this is the perfect time to include good news because people want to hear that upfront. Here are a couple of example slides that I've shown in meetings in the past. So I used to have a meeting every two weeks. Look at all these. This is from 2013. This was one of my postdocs, and these were all of the group meetings that I gave as a formal presentation, and I would always start like this. So I would say, for example, if we were working on some papers, I would list the papers that we were working on, and then I would say where they were up to. They love this because academics love peer-reviewed papers because it makes their career better. So if you just sort of like get that out of the way right away and say, these are the papers I'm working on. These are the ones that have been published. These are the ones that need data. It just sort of like relaxes everyone. Everyone goes, okay, I get this. I know this guy or this person is working towards my interests as well. So it sets everyone off on a nice kind of level playing field. Then if there's any good news. So if there's a paper update, this was an example of the exact slide that I showed my supervisory team when we got accepted into a peer-reviewed journal. So make sure that you include all of the good news. Also, anything interesting. This is a slide that I showed after a trip to Dublin. So I went to the conference. I delivered an oral presentation, and these were the sorts of questions I got afterwards. I took a note of them. We used that as a little bit of a discussion and talking about whether or not these criticisms or these suggestions were useful for our project. So any good news that you've got that isn't related to the hardcore results that you've generated is a great way to start the presentation. But you only want that to be five to 10 minutes. You don't want it to go on for too long. But just start everyone in the right mood. It's a bit of social engineering in the room just to make sure like, okay, look, everything's good, everything's going well, because the moment you drop a little bit of negativity into an academic realm, everyone jumps on it. It's like blood in the water for sharks. Everyone gets really negative. So make sure that you start with what was agreed on last time and any good news you've got. That is very important. And then you go straight into the data. The data is all of the data that you've collected since the last meeting. Now, like I said, I had four nightly meetings. Those worked best for me. But it's important that you present the data as if it is a conference. You can't just throw up some raw data. You have to work, make sure that it's nice and understandable for a lay audience. And you have to remember that your supervisors don't know your project as well as you. So you do need to include like the refresher slides of any sort of like processes that you use to make sure they kind of understand what you're doing in the lab. I'll show you a little bit of an example about that in a moment. But you don't have to show everything you've done, by the way. Like a supervisor meeting isn't just a dump of data. No, it's about choosing the best bits of your data and also stuff you want to talk about. If you chuck loads of uncertain stuff, things that went wrong, things that whatever, it just muddies the water and it causes all this confusion in the room when you're sort of like having your supervisor meeting. So you don't have to include the things that went really wrong. You don't have to include all of the things that you really don't want to continue with. Be selective with the data you show them. You'll have a much better discussion about that data and where to go rather than just sort of like throwing loads of graphs and figures at them. Okay, so during my research, I would always produce an electrode, a transparent electrode in the same way. And so I would just quite often show them the process. Be like, remember this? Remember what I used to do? Like I've been doing this, is it? And it just helps refresh people's mind. So it's really important to provide that basis if it is complicated and you're not sure that they'll actually remember what you're doing. And then I would present any data. So I would tabulate data, stuff like this. I would use this as a way to talk about the data I have collected. Notice that I'm not including too many of the details. I'm just saying I did this, this is the result. Then we can talk about it. And I'd also include any sort of raw data presented in the nicest way possible. I wouldn't spend ages creating a figure, but just making sure that it made sense with how I wanted to talk about these figures. So this is some ramen image, you've got optical image, you've got the silver nanowires, carbon nanotubes and the overlay. So that's what we would talk about. And this was us to say, okay, well this is the surface of the electrode and this is what we can expect based on the ramen data. And that's it really. We go through all of the data that I collected that I wanted to talk about. Like I said, you don't have to do everything, just the data you want to talk about and allow people to have input. One thing I like to do is while people are talking, if it does go off in a little bit of like a discussion, I stop the presentation, I start taking notes down in the notes section. So down here, I would start taking notes of what people said. First of all, that shows them that you're listening. Secondly, it captures it somewhere so you know what to do later on and what to consider. But remember that you're in control of this meeting and it's really not a bad thing to say, hey everyone, okay, can we just move on because we've got a lot to get through but I'm gonna definitely come and speak to you a little bit later about that, you know, that sort of stuff just to keep the meeting progressing. Anything more than about an hour of one of these meetings is too long, people get tired and cranky. So you do have to be that driving force if you find people are just taking up all of that space with their opinions and words. The last thing, once I've showed the data, is I would talk about my conclusions based on what I've just shown. So I would say this is the data and this is the take home message from the data that I've presented. The reason this is important is because sometimes you show people the data and everyone's got their own opinion and they don't talk about it, they just assume everyone's got the same idea about the results, about the significance of the results. But here, this is for you to say, this is what I think the outcome is from this data. You know, whether it's successful, whether or not you need to do something else, all of that stuff and that is where the majority of the discussion of the meeting should be which is like the data you've collected, what do they think, how do they interpret it themselves, what do they think you should do next. All of that should be in this part and this should be probably about 20 minutes of the meeting once they've seen the data or the results that you've collected. And then, at the end, I would say what's next. What I think happens next is very important, i.e. what you think happens next is very important. You need to list the things like I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do this and this is where they get an opportunity to talk about the future directions and then that becomes the first slide of the next presentation in a couple weeks time or whenever you decide to have the next meeting. But it's very important that you do discuss what's next and you don't let it sort of like balloon out. You say, okay, what's achievable before our next meeting? For me, it was in two weeks. So we don't want to just let it sort of balloon out into this crazy sort of like series of experiments. We want to make sure that it's doable in two weeks and that we're keeping the overall kind of project outcome in mind. And also, going forward, I also often used to talk about any interesting papers that I wanted to take inspiration from that I'd learned something from in the last fortnight. So I'd say, hey, look, this is maybe a new idea that we may want to explore because this paper's just come out and they love that. They love that discussion. The supervisors want to know that you're actively involved in the literature and if you're taking inspiration from the literature, it just makes everyone sort of like more relaxed and it gives people an opportunity to talk about someone else's work and how that could influence your work. And it's just a nice way to finish the meeting, in my opinion. And so here's some example slides of the sort of stuff that I would talk about. So future, easy done. This was the last slide. I would try the fully laminated system and I would repeat Fisher's structures. I'd send a sample to UQ and then I was also working on the pattern and paper. So that was good enough for two weeks. And then here's another example. So here it's get a fresh load of flexible electrodes to UQ, get samples from Flisher, upscale the electrodes, and then double-sided electrode experiments. Like that was the sort of stuff, like you'll notice that it's quite broad, but ultimately it just provided structure for the next meeting so that then this slide would go first next time and then I'd say, this is what I did and these are the discussion. And then it would just snowball and snowball and snowball. And that's exactly how every supervisor meeting for me went. It was super powerful, it was super useful, and I highly recommend that you try this. You can get the template that I've shown here down in the description and make sure that you are chairing the meeting. Don't let your supervisors just sort of throw a word salad at you because I've been there, it's not helpful. And feel free to be as strong as a chair as you need to be to keep the meeting focused. If you like this video, go check out this one where I talk about all of the supervisor meeting mistakes that you're making and how to get around them. I think you'll love it.