Professionalism and part‐time work (for student employees) - ganong-noel/lab_manual GitHub Wiki

(Thanks to Avik Garg and Josephine Dodge for writing the first draft of this guide)

In workplace, many things are said only once; it's important not to lose comments
- To build a habit of capturing everything, at first sending messages to PIs after meetings with everything you noted down is useful
The most important thing is not the quantity of work; rather, PIs must be able to trust that your work is accurate
- Work that is sloppy means that work must be later rechecked and thus likely redone

In doing research, it's important to communicate around deadlines
- Making sure PIs know what your priority is and have an estimate, even if wrong, of time until completion is the goal
Timely communication and checking for timing switches is important
- Meetings will often move around and making note of new timings and communicating promptly around meeting times and any slack messages during the day is important
Time estimates on work will likely be quite wrong, but they are still valuable
- Don't be afraid to give a longer estimate for how long something will take; time estimates also serve as a useful way for making sure PI and you are aligned on what the task should look like. If you think a task will take a long time, that is very useful to communicate since it might help find the gap in understandings.

It's expected that some weeks will be busy with classes
- Communicating this sooner rather than later allows for work to be rationalized and reallocated