Ecometeorology Lab Mentor-Mentee Compact
And Frequently Asked Questions!
Last edit: April 25, 2024
PI/Advisor/Coach: Ankur Desai desai@aos.wisc.edu 608-520-0305
What is a mentor-mentee compact?
Welcome to the Ecometeorology Lab (https://flux.aos.wisc.edu, #DesaiLab on X, @profdesai on X and Instagram)! As a member of the lab, you have certain roles and expectations as do I, as your advisor, mentor, principal investigator (PI), and coach. This compact seeks to lay those out in advance of our collaboration to ensure we are on the same page about how we will work together. Our goal is to mutually produce scholarship (across research, teaching, and outreach) that advances broadly biosphere-atmosphere science. It doesn’t matter if you are a K-12 student, undergraduate, graduate, post-doctoral scholar, researcher, visiting scholar, instructor/teacher, technician, outreach specialist, community volunteer, collaborating faculty/co-PI, or old fart like me, my hope is that your time in the lab is spent in an environment that lets you meet your goals, pushes you to new levels of understanding and skill, and fosters an atmosphere of mutual respect.
What does our lab do?
As noted on our website (https://flux.aos.wisc.edu ): “Our lab studies how organisms and abiotic features in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems influence and are influenced by climate and weather and how those effects change as you scale from plot to landscape to globe. We specialize in making long-term, ecosystem-atmosphere observations of emission or uptake of carbon, energy, and water, in particular using eddy covariance flux towers. We rely on theories from the disciplines of climate science, ecosystem ecology, biogeochemistry, micrometeorology, land surface modeling, atmospheric boundary layers. Our lab is highly collaborative, with many of our project revolving around scaling and synthesis of our observations with other groups around the world.”
Where does it fit into the broader ecosystem of science?
Our lab is part of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS) in the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We are also a core member of the Center for Climatic Research (CCR) in the Nelson Institute of UW-Madison. Projects and staff might be funded within AOS, but also CCR, the UW Space Sciences and Engineering Center (SSEC), and several departments across campus in L&S, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), Engineering, Nelson Institute, and others. Beyond AOS, students here can have academic program affiliations in Freshwater and Marine Science (FMS), Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), Environment and Resources (E&R), and related programs at other universities. Nationally, our lab is one of the site operators of the Dept of Energy Ameriflux core sites. We also have close links to the North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research site (LTER), the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), and European Integrated Carbon Observing System (ICOS). The point being, our lab has a lot of tendrils and is extraordinarily diverse in its research topics, settings, and academic and cultural backgrounds. All of us have a lot to learn from each other and that is ultimately, our goal! Take advantage of that!
What I Expect From You and What You Can Expect From Me
I may be your “supervisor” in some instances, but I am rarely your “boss” – we all need to take ownership of the work we do here. As a member of this lab, my hope is that you feel empowered to seek support when you need help. To do this, I expect that you will do your best to follow these expectations. Members of the lab are expected to:
Foster mutual respect and collaboration, including acknowledging and following the AOSS Building Code of Conduct and campus policies.
In return, I will maintain an open line for reporting and communication of concerns and help you find support when you need it. I will also support and provide information on policies related to vacation, sick, and parental leave, mental, emotional, and physical health support, cultural and identity aware mentoring, and accommodating disabilities
Take primary responsibility for successful completion of your project, thesis, degree, or training, including maintaining and tracking completion of milestones, scheduling and arranging committee meetings, knowing appropriate deadlines and policies, staying on top of research findings and literature, collectively working to secure necessary funding, and following requirements of your program/project for satisfactory progress (e.g., submitting annual progress reports for graduate students)
In return, I will prioritize timely feedback on submitted material, proposals, manuscripts, and required documentation, make time in my schedule to attend committee and group meetings, and advocate for your needs for successful completion. At the start of any project, we will mutually develop a work plan, for graduate students, an individualized development plan (IDP), or a mentoring/work plan, as appropriate, and review it at least annually.
Maintain an open, but appropriate and respectful line of communication with each other, respond in a timely manner to requests over email, Slack, and other media (within 1 business day during work hours), participate in weekly lab meetings when available, regularly schedule and attend project/individual meetings including making an effort to start and end meetings on time, and provide timely notice when on travel or likely to be late, or taking time off for vacations.
In return, I will seek to prioritize communication with all of you through email, phone/text, our group listserv, when directly @ in Slack or other direct message apps. I will respect work hours, noting emergencies can happen.
Actively seek professional development opportunities within and outside UW, and use those opportunities to improve your skills and share wisdom gained with the rest of the lab members.
In return, I will work to help you identify opportunities and help secure time and funding for you to able attend relevant summer schools, trainings, conferences, and the like, and also include all interested members in opportunities to contribute to grant proposals, manuscripts, and protocols.
Build independent external collaborations to help advance your scholarship goals, through networking, conference attendance, and regular attendance at department and campus seminars, colloquia, collaborator visits (talks, group meetings, dinners), and events, and learn from those to support building our scholarship.
In return, I will provide to researchers, including students, funding for you to attend at least one national conference per year, help defray cost of any meals or transportation for events, and be sure to include you in opportunities to meet collaborators. I will also advocate for adequate compensation for all lab members. All direct members of the lab must either receive academic credit and/or a salary/stipend for their contribution of time and expertise.
Abide by appropriate and equitable use of shared lab resources, including attention to lab, field, computational, and personal safety and trainings, allocation of time/space, and costs.
In return, I will provide necessary desktop and server-based computing, lab and field facilities, trainings on protocols and procedures, and provide and review all safety protocols prior to start of any projects, including our separate Safe and Inclusive Fieldwork protocol.
Cultivate a culture of open data/code sharing and equitable authorship credit through knowledge and application of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and CARE principles of open data governance, assigning CC-BY4 or equivalent code and data licensing, providing careful, routine, and secure documentation and backup of all research materials, abiding by policies within intellectual property or licensing agreements, and applying CRediT taxonomy process (https://credit.niso.org/) and AGU Global Research Collaboration policies for authorship contribution and inclusion, and acknowledging in writing all funding support in all materials.
In return, I will provide transparent and open access to all research and educational material to be collectively used across the lab and provide options for all lab members to contribute or collaborate on projects, and help adjudicate on appropriate levels of recognition for contributions. Students are expected to be first author on collaborative material (manuscripts, chapters) produced for use within educational outputs such as theses and dissertations. It is expected that work conducted in the lab on projects advised or funded by the Ecometeorology lab will include Ankur Desai as a co-author (usually second or last author), or co-investigator.
Hold yourself and each other to the highest standard of scientific ethics, avoiding manipulation or fabrication of research data or figures, plagiarism or misattribution for re-use of other’s creative works, not properly declaring and mitigating/avoiding conflicts of interest, keeping sloppy or incomplete lab notes, or presenting misleading claims to others based on material produced in the lab.
In return, I will hold myself to account for maintaining those standards, providing support and training for application of those, and cooperating in misconduct investigations should they arise.
Frequently Asked Questions
I need help! Who do I first contact for questions about – getting an account on the server, debugging my code, accessing the lab, or preparing/printing a poster?
It’s ok to need help and you shouldn’t feel bad, certainly in the beginning, for having a lot of questions and feeling like you are bothering me or others a lot. I worry more if you are not asking a lot of questions! There is a lot to learn! Be sure to bring up questions at lab meeting or in our one-on-one meetings. Our lab does not follow rigid hierarchies, we all learn from each other.
Make sure you read and get to know this document (and when you find good or better answers, help contribute or revise it)! The Ecometeorology Lab Slack is a great way to get help from peers, especially on coding (in the #coding channel). For basic set up (getting an account on the server, access to lab facilities, desktop computing and office space), start with me. Jonathan Thom is our lab manager, and as a longtime member of the lab, is an excellent resource for many things, especially on facilities, instrumentation usage, lab safety training, field access, supply purchasing, and unix/Python scripting. Questions about paychecks, appointments, visas go to our department administrator, Christi Balas Levenson balas@wisc.edu. AOS has a general purpose purchasing@aos.wisc.edu and travel@aos.wisc.edu for purchasing and travel booking/reimbursement, respectively. Our financial specialist, Carolyn Lipke cmlipke@wisc.edu is your go to for preparing fellowship proposals. For computing problems or installing new packages on the server, work with AOS IT guru Pete Pokrandt poker@aos.wisc.edu . Questions about graduate program milestones, scheduling defenses, and the like go to our graduate program coordinator, Dee Vanruyven ddvanruy@wisc.edu or undergraduate advisor Sabrina Manero smanero@wisc.edu for AOS majors. The student hourlies in the front office can help for scheduling and booking room.s
General research questions, especially on preparing presentations, posters, statistical methods are good general questions for everyone, but our more experienced researchers, such as post-docs, are expected to provide a mentoring role in this area. I can help with printing posters, and for our major meetings we often use the services of SSEC/CIMSS, through Maria Vasys maria.vasys@ssec.wisc.edu .
Who can I talk to if my mentor and I are not communicating well? Who can I talk to if I am having a conflict with another lab member?
It’s important to not let conflicts fester or get in the way of you thriving. In general, it is my job to help manage lab communications and collaboration, and if you are finding challenges, please come talk to me. If the issue is more with me, then there are several avenues. I would start with perhaps discussing strategies with other lab members, especially our longer-term members. Graduate students can reach out to the graduate program chair, Larissa Back lback@wisc.edu for support and advice, along with the graduate program coordinator and staff at the Graduate School. The department chair (when it is not me) is also a good resource, as is the department administrator, who can be a confidential resource for most issues (exception srelate to sexual assault and reportable crimes, which currently also applies to me as chair). Undergraduates can also reach out to our AOS advisor or the associate chair for undergraduate, Jon Martin jemarti1@wisc.edu. For non-student employees and other members, beyond the department chair and administrator, UW does have several resources, such as the Employee Assistance Office and the Ombuds office that provide support for both personal and workplace challenges.
For specific incidents with students that are concerning (issues around harassment, bias, and unusual behavior), you may also use the Dean of Students office which has a nice site of resources and mechanisms to alert them to a student who may need reaching out or support you need. Please also work with me so that we can work together to support you and the student of concern. University Health Service also has several resources for mental/emotional health support and counseling. Staff can also work with academic staff workplace resources, along with L&S leadership who manage situations of workplace issues (such as the Associate Dean for Operations and Staff Tina Nielson or Assistant Dean for Faculty HR Ben Weisse and our Associate Dean for the College Ruth Litovsky). For cases of concern about immediate harm to yourself or from others, or cases of sexual or violent assault, it is safe and appropriate to reach out and work with UW police.
Do I have to be in the office/lab in-person full-time or get permission to work remotely?
The best science happens in all sorts of places. We do not place restrictions on where/when you work, except for components that require time in lab, conference, or field. I do like to see all of you at least once a week and there is much gained from being in a shared work environment, so I encourage everyone to spend at least a few days a week in the office during regular business hours and attend lab meetings in person when possible. My preference for group meetings and committee meetings is to be in-person, but virtual or hybrid meetings are certainly fine. For extended periods working remotely (e.g., managing childcare) or outside Madison (e.g., to be close to a partner or on an extended field visit), we should plan several months in advance to clarify expectations. In summer, lab members often work remotely more often, and that is ok as long as work is getting done!
Am I expected to work/be available on evenings/weekends/holidays?
You are never expected to work regularly on evenings or weekends, unless stipulated in your job requirements or research plan. However, there may be times when a push requires some commitment or periods (like fieldwork) where long days or weekend lab work are inevitable. We will always work to identify those ahead of time and accommodate when that is not possible for you. You may find that evenings and weekends are some of the best work times and that is fine, you can set your own hours, as long as we overlap regularly (I generally am in office 9-4 M-F). If you are finding yourself facing burnout or working what feels like an unsustainable level of hours to maintain productivity, let’s talk and reconsider your tasks or appointment level.
If I plan to take time off, how far ahead of time do I have to make the request/announcement? Do I have to request time off or is notification sufficient?
You are encouraged to take time off to rest, recharge, when it fits your schedule, and for all official UW holidays. This time off would be considered paid time off for salaries employees (including graduate assistants), but unpaid for student hourlies. There are of course exceptions when time off requires pre-planning, such as when experiments or travel require working through what might normally be days off, and in that case, we should account for time off at later dates to compensate (or in some cases, get you additional compensation). For standard things, a notification over email or lab meeting about a week or two in advance is helpful, the earlier the better, especially for short-term employees (e.g., summer students). Technically, as your supervisor, you are requesting time off from me – however, as long as you present a plan for what milestones are upcoming and how those will be met, taking time off for standard things (e.g., winter holidays), then consider it a given, along with emergencies.
I prefer we hold a culture of high autonomy and high self-accountability for setting your schedule rather than requiring my approval for how you arrange your life. Science can happen at all hours, and sometimes it’s during time doing something else that your best ideas come! While most lab members do not have formal vacation days (an exception here are full-time 12-month researchers, who should take and declare leave on myUW), a 12-month employee might consider around 4 weeks off per year (pro-rated for partial appointments). If time off is going to exceed that, then let’s work out a more formal plan, including taking potential formal leaves. Paid parental leave is separate and subject to a new campus policy. Many graduate students prefer to catch up on research over time classes are not in session (e.g., early January, March break, mid-summer), as campus is quiet, so take that into consideration too. Please use email auto-responders when gone for more than a few days. If you plan to be working while on personal travel, be sure to know about how to use WiscVPN and other tools. If you will be in another country, but continuing to work and bringing a laptop or other research equipment or data, please reach out before you depart as there as certain rules and federal regulations we need to follow depending on the country (broadly called “Export control”).
What is a typical sequence for an MS degree or PhD degree? What is acceptable progress? When should I have a concrete idea for my project? Produce my first figures or present my work for the first time? Have a manuscript drafted?
For the thesis M.S, generally 2 years including summers, up to 3. First year is mostly classes, reading literature, gaining technical skills, and formulating ideas, that can get implemented toward end of first year, leading to analysis, conference presentations, thesis writing, and public presentation by the end of the 2nd.
Length for a Ph.D. can vary, including a function of whether an M.S. was first obtained, but generally expect four years after M.S., perhaps five if straight from bachelors. The first year would be finalizing classes, selecting and doing the Ph.D. minor, formulating ideas, and passing the advancement process. In the second, a student forms a Ph.D. committee, fleshes out the idea in more detail, finishes the minor and any remaining coursework, conducts research for an initial chapter, gains and builds independent ideas, collaborations, and presentations, and writes and orally defends the dissertation proposal in a preliminary exam. The remaining years would then focus on completing dissertation research and writing remaining chapters, and ultimately presenting that in a Ph.D. defense.
It's difficult to identify a specific time point where you might be expected to independently be producing ideas, research results, figures, and presentations, but after a year or so, you should have some initial results and ideas. I encourage students to write M.S. theses and dissertation chapters each as stand-alone manuscripts that could be submitted to journals for publication. So you might expect that to occur after the 2nd year.
Acceptable or satisfactory progress implies that you put your best faith effort into research progress and towards hitting degree milestones (course credits, advancement process, PhD committee formation, pre-lim, etc…), without hitting department or graduate school maximum time limits, and communicating those in annual progress reports and committee meetings. Research can have roadblocks and sometimes feels like two steps forward, one step back, and what feels like a high failure rate for experiments, but dedicated effort and self-care will take you forward. If progress is getting stymied, we can work together to identify what the roadblocks are. As long as that effort is made, the outcomes are supported by your committee, and you communicate those in reports, then satisfactory progress is met.
Should I attend all the department seminars? Take all the core classes? Attend all lab/department/project social functions?
Of these, I would prioritize our own weekly lab meetings (biweekly in summer), which are an important check-in with all of us to share progress, celebrate milestones, and get feedback on results. One on one meetings ideally should be happening at least every other week, but can vary depending on needs (perhaps weekly at the start or end, maybe longer spread when research results are still in progress). Committee meetings (whether graduate advising committee or dissertation committee) should be arranged annually (and require at least 3-4 months advance scheduling!).
Social functions are mostly your choice. There is much to gain from networking, meeting others, and having friendly relationships and activities with colleagues. That said, they can also be draining. Try to attend those that fit your schedule and energy levels. Definitely join in on lab socials, lunches, meet ups at conferences.
There are a lot of talks among department Monday colloquia, the student-run Wednesday seminar, CPEP seminar, SAGE Weston roundtable, and talks in other departments (Biology, Ecology, Civil Engineering, Forest Ecology, and so on). You don’t need to go to all. But I highly encourage everyone to make a regular habit of attending AOS department talks, including ones outside your field. You never know when an interesting idea from one field might inspire something in your own. Meet with the visitors time to time – it can sometimes lead to career-long connections! Follow your curiosity! Of course, go to the ones in our field and to the “big” lectures (e.g., Robock Lecture). There is likely more learning to be had here as a researcher than in the classroom.
The core class, which are the AOS 600-level sequence of dynamics (610/611), physics (630/640/637), oceanography (660) along with the 500-level technical courses (573/575) on statistics and programming are certainly worthwhile to take in ways that fill out your education, especially for AOS graduate students in 1st two years. They are also important for demonstrating breadth for the PhD advancement process. However, you do not need to take them all, or you might consider sitting in or auditing if you already have background in the topic. We can discuss a pathway that makes most sense for you. For our lab in general, the most important/useful graduate classes to take (or audit/sit in) are AOS 520: Bioclimatology, AOS 773: Boundary-Layer Meteorology, or AOS 532: Environmental Biophysics, along with skills developed in AOS 573: Computational Methods, AOS 575: Climatological Analysis, and if relevant, AOS 404: Meteorological Measurements. The AOS 953 Introduction to Ecology Research at UW can be a good intro seminar too. Plant ecology, ecosystem modeling, ecohydrology, soil physics classes in other departments can be useful. Courses that provide more skills for data analysis in Python, R, or FORTRAN, advanced statistical modeling (e.g., Bayesian), high-performance computing, turbulent fluids, or data management could also be beneficial.
Is my research project supposed to directly relate to the research grant?
Research grants have specific hypotheses and plans and the extent to which your specific research is tied to that grant will vary. Ultimately, the intent of a thesis or a research appointment is to conduct and communicate independent, novel research that advances the field. To ensure that is the case, it is important for you to take the lead in shaping the specific idea you will study, contributing your own input into how you will go about the study, and becoming the primary person who implements (or mentors others to implement) that and becomes the expert on the findings.
That said, giving the way funding in the sciences work, there will be some effort to make this part of your thesis or research idea line up some of advancing the goals and outputs of the research grants and fellowships supporting you. We will work together to determine how your research interests and/or thesis plans intersect with the funding that is providing your salary, benefits, research support, and/or tuition and how we will give back to the grant funding your work in terms of research findings and products (theses, papers, presentations, data, collaborations, outreach) and how you may need to acknowledge that funding and invite or include collaborators from the project in your thesis chapters.
What does a 50% graduate research assistant (RA) appointment mean? Can I work a second job in evenings/weekends?
The 50% label is intended to imply that you are both an employee (a junior-level apprentice researcher funded to work at 50% of a full-time appointment, or roughly ~900 hours per year for a 12-month 50% appointment) and a student (a researcher-in-training taking a full course load and meeting milestones of your degree program like the pre-lim, committee meetings, and thesis defense). The hours per week will vary, but the expectation is that the research component averages to around 20 hours per week, and student components (including coursework, thesis writing, seminar attendances, and committee meetings) a similar portion. The reality is that research can be all consuming, happen at all hours, and occasionally push our hours (especially as an experiment or writing reaches culmination, or at a conference or while conducting intensive field/lab work). Balancing that time with taking classes and living your life (and getting enough sleep!) takes practice and can be cultivated. Some tips and tricks that I use can be found in this essay I wrote: https://flux.aos.wisc.edu/unmanaged-time
Sometimes working a second job or a temporary position is needed to make ends meet. Doing so occasionally or as a “side-hustle” (e.g., a short-term consulting gig, or working as a shared ride driver) is probably ok. I would recommend against doing this regularly, as demands of research will eventually come into conflict with work and balancing personal life. Sleep is also important! If financial barriers are a significant challenge for you, let’s talk about some ways we can address those in a more sustainable way.
For those on fellowships or paid stipends, the expectations are similar. For student hourlies, focus less on accounting for every hour and more on accomplishing tasks within the expected level of time available over the course of your position.
I need a (monitor/hip waders/new chair/a certain textbook/server time/pay publication charges) to do my work. Should I pay for this out of my own pocket?
Materials needs to conduct your research and improve your ability to do and communicate that research are first the responsibility of the lab to purchase and acquire, following UW purchasing policies. These policies require things such as preferred vendors and systems for some items and ensuring sale taxes exemption where required. Please work with me to identify those needs and we can purchase those. You will generally not be able to get reimbursed if you pay for them yourselves, except in emergency (e.g., last minute hardware store run in the field), which will require extra documentation. Depending on the item, sometimes we can acquire immediately and other times we need to wait for the right type of funds to be available. Please note, any items purchased by the lab remain property of the lab after you depart, including items like laptops, portable hard drives, field clothing, and textbooks, unless explicitly stated otherwise. If you would like to acquire something to keep after you depart, then that would be a case where it is appropriate to use your own personal funds.
Am I supposed to cover or front the costs of traveling to conferences/fieldwork?
For the most part, no, with some exceptions, primarily for meals and local transportation, which are reimbursed after travel. For most trips, we can use department process and credit cards to book and pre-pay for meeting registration and fees, flights, and lodging. Booking those can be started through an email to travel@aos.wisc.edu . Flights must be booked using official UW travel booking portals. Lodging must be below UW maximum rates or one of the official conference hotels. Shared housing (e.g., AirBNB) is allowed, but there are some rules here. Car rentals are only allowed when needed and must follow UW policies on fleet or contract carrier usage and official UW driver authorization. Taxis and local transport (subways, bus) requires saving receipts for reimbursement. Meals are typically reimbursed after trips on a “per diem” or daily rate for meals and incidentals, without needing to save receipts. Fieldwork sometimes involves group meals and cooking, but can also be covered this way, following UW hosted meal rules (keep a list of everyone who shared the meal!). Combining personal parts of a trip with the work part is allowable (e.g., spending an extra couple days to site-see, or going straight from work trip to visit family and vice versa), but additional paperwork and cost comparisons are needed, as is consideration of research plans and use of leave time, so ask first. Sometimes there are incidental out of pocket costs, many of which (e.g., luggage charges, hotel wifi) can be reimbursed, but if unsure, ask first!
If covering these upfront costs is challenging, please reach out and we can arrange for cash advances (personal loans). It is important to follow UW policies and to complete reimbursement paperwork in a timely manner (< 90 days), and it can take 2-4 week for reimbursements to go through. If buying clothing for conference (usually business casual) or field (outdoor/weather appropriate layers and shoes) is a cost burden or unfamiliar to you, come talk too, as we can find some solutions and share tips. International trips require greater pre-planning, approvals, and requirement to carry additional health insurance, so start early on those. Acquiring additional student travel funding from the department or graduate school is always helpful and looks good on your CV!
How do I stay on “top of literature”?
Peer-reviewed journals and conferences are our primary currencies for communication of research results. There is benefit in building a library of papers that are relevant to your work, using a citation manager (e.g., Zotero). There is no easy way to stay “on top”, other than to make a habit of regularly reading and following literature, sharing interesting articles in weekly lab meetings, and learning to scan abstracts, skim results and take notes. Frequent reading, both of popular literature and scientific literature, doesn’t just build your knowledge but also helps you become a better communicator of your own work. The best writers I know are voracious readers, of everything from fiction for pleasure to technical manuals. Similarly at conferences, it is impossible to “see everything”, so make a plan ahead up time, get recommendations from colleagues, and focus on a set of sessions that are relevant to your work and/or interesting in general, and take notes.
Subscribing to Journal Table of Content Alerts can be a useful way to stay on top of literature, but they can also be overwhelming. I filter these into a separate folder. But in general, good journals to follow for our lab are: Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, Boundary-Layer Meteorology, Global Change Biology, and Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR)-Biogeosciences and JGR-Atmospheres. EGU’s Biogeosciences and the independent Environmental Research Letters are also good journals. There are also good articles in American Meteorological Society (AMS) journals like J. Climate, J. Hydrometeorology, and the Bulletin of the AMS, and American Geophysical Union (AGU) journals like Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Advances in Modeling of Earth Systems, and AGU Advances. Ecological Society of America (ESA)’s Frontiers in Ecology and Environment and Ecological Applications often have good articles too. Google Scholar and other tools exist that can provide recommendations once it knows your interests or keywords.
I also often post interesting articles I run across on our Ecometeorology Lab Slack channel #literature and will try to tag you if it lines up with your research. You should read those!
Are there introductory or classic papers I ought to read to get started?
Yes, I’ve started a list on our website at: https://flux.aos.wisc.edu/classicpapers
Am I required to publish my thesis in peer-reviewed journals, present at conferences, and/or write fellowships/proposals to fund my research?
Fundamentally, what we do as professional scientists is not all that different from professional writers. We communicate in professional settings about systematic observations on the nature of the universe and subject our inferences about those to scrutiny by our other scientific peers. That’s the whole job! The more your write (and read), the more you subject that work to peer-review, the more you review others work, the better you will get at the whole enterprise! You are not required to publish your thesis to graduate, but it is highly beneficial to publish at some point. Likewise, conference presentations are a primary way to rapidly learn from each other of recent research results and a great way to get feedback, build collaborations, improving your public speaking skills, and share challenges.
It is my role as PI to work out a plan with you to adequately sustain funding for your time here subject to satisfactory progress, usually, for graduate students, through a mix of research and teaching assistantships, and fellowships. However, gaining experience in grant proposal writing and grant management (budgets, people, time) is an essential skill to gain. So I highly encourage everyone to participate in proposal writing and to seek out and apply to fellowships to fund your own research. Independent funding also allows you to better tailor your research to your own interests instead of having to align with the grant currently funding you. Further, the more funding we can collectively raise for the lab, the more science we can do and more job security we can provide to everyone. I will always open opportunities for anyone in the lab to contribute to active proposals and we will occasionally use lab meetings to talk about the nature of science funding and the logistics of grant proposals (things that take up a lot of my life!)
Am I allowed to present our work to the public, participate in outreach as part of my position?
We welcome all lab members to conduct science outreach and present your work to members of the public in areas that relate to your areas of learning and research, as long as they don’t take away substantial time for core duties. Presenting to the public is an excellent skill to develop and often will help you sharpen your own communication skills and once in a while lead to new research insights from conversations that arise. Many of us have shared slide decks on topics like introduction to climate change, so ask for those. Please follow best practices on citation and attribution of claims, figures, and findings, and acknowledge support from the lab and our funders.
Is all the work produced by the lab fair game to just re-use in my own work? When do I ask for permission or just attribute credit?
We run a pretty open shop, and so for the most part, items (data, figures, slides) that are previously published or presented and shared with you are fair game to include in your talks with proper attribution. Figures in our “Shared” folder in the DesaiLab OwnCloud are meant to be re-used with attribution. Ideally, data sets and code have a license (e.g., CC-BY 4) in a Readme file that explicitly describes how to re-use and credit. There are a few instances where we have gotten special permission to access data or code, in which case, permission requirements may differ for those. If you just run across something, say on our servers, or hear about something in lab meetings, then good ethics obligates you to ask permissions and depending on the nature of the re-use, to invite collaboration or co-authorship. Note, re-use of figures from published articles in other work to be published in books, theses, or journals does require formal permission from the copyright holder, which is often the journal itself. If unsure, ask!
I am a woman, non-binary, a minority, don’t drink alcohol, have a hidden disability, first-generation, have ADHD, an introvert, not-Christian, a conservative, a parent, a caregiver for my elderly parents, an immigrant, never lived in a city, never lived somewhere so small, a poor test taker, or just overall nervous about whether I will fit in here. Will I and what should I do if I don’t feel that way?
Your identity and lived experience, trauma, beliefs, and legacy are part of who you are and impacts your perception, interactions, and responses. Everyone around you carries multiple identities and cultures, some of which may not be apparent to you, sometimes deliberately so. Systems of bias and oppression exist. These can make you be treated like an outsider, or feel like an imposter, or push you to double down on working “twice as hard for half the credit.” Science is hard, and the continual desire to create new knowledge means we are more often not knowing what we are doing than knowing what we are doing. Your identity, however, should not be determining factor in your success in that equation, but rather a lens through which your unique self lends insight into the universe. Please talk to me about how identity intersects with your work and how we might in the lab acknowledge, accommodate, and celebrate. It’s fine too to keep personal matters private. But let us know when something bothers you, whether an offhand joke or full-on discrimination, so that we can directly address it. Call out others when they exhibit actions that demean, belittle, exclude, or call into question someone’s intellect or ability as a scientist. Help re-build systems that are more inclusive. Attend DEI trainings and join affinity groups in the department and on campus. Share literature on inclusive science culture with the lab. These last several points apply to everyone in the lab, regardless of background.
Should I make a website? A Google scholar profile? Join AGU? Other things?
If you plan to stay in research for more than just a summer and publish your work in literature, it is essential for your career and collaboration to have an online presence through several venues. The ones I find most useful are: 1) A Google Scholar profile – while it may be empty until you publish work (conference abstracts do get indexed here), it is a way for editors, journals, and researchers to find you. 2) an ORCID – which is a unique identifier ID that is required by most journals that ties your authorship to your specific person. Your ORCID profile can also be used to track affiliations, awards, and grants. 3.) A GitHub account – this is the defacto system for collaborative code development and sharing of code. We have a lab page too that you can clone and share material. 4.) A website – this can be simple, but in your own words you can describe your interests, share photos/figures from interesting research, and post your CV. This can be a simple Google sites, Wordpress, or on a UW hosted page. You can add your page directly to our system (https://flux.aos.wisc.edu which is Squarespace based) or have it linked from our members page. 5.) Funding agencies are moving to hosting short 2 page CVs on SciEnvCV , so you might as well set up an account and put a CV on there. 6.) A professional headshot – useful for sharing when you give invited talks. The department brings a photographer annually every fall and will give you digital copies for free.
You may already have your own personal social media presence. You might consider how public profiles might be accessed, especially on X or Instagram and consider what statements or disclaimers you want to add or how to separate your profiles. X/Twitter in particular is still a good place to find new paper alerts and interesting discussion on academic careers. LinkedIn is popular in private industry, and having an account here makes it easy for recruiters to connect to you, so go ahead and make one! There are some academic specific ones like ResearchGate or Academia.Edu, but I haven’t found these to be super useful so far.
There are a variety of listservs in the sciences that might be useful to follow. You will be added to our lab’s google group (Ecometeorology Desai-Lab Ecometeorology@g-groups.wisc.edu ) and you are welcome to post there and share interesting announcements. For more general discussion, arranging social events, and the like, use the Ecometeorology Lab Slack. In our field, the Ameriflux listserv, Fluxnet listserv, and Fluxnet Early Career Scientist Network are good ones to join to stay on top of going ons in our field. The most active jobs listserv in our field is es_jobs_net.
Student memberships to American Meteorological Society (AMS) and American Geophysical Union (AGU) are both worth doing, as they will save you money on registration and give you access to various opportunities and communications. If these are a burden, let me know and we can help support initial costs. For some lab members, Ecological Society of America (ESA) may also be worthwhile. I am a member of all three and I view AGU Biogeosciences section as my primary home.
If you don’t see a common question here and have a suggestion for one – let me know! This is a living document and hopefully a useful primer to joining our lab and a reference that you can use as you progress in your studies and activities here! -ankur desai