TIPS FOR A SUCCESSFUL INTERNSHIP
1. Establish expectations: Work out a plan as soon as possible! Reach out to your lab PI and any graduate student(s) you might be working with and schedule a meeting. . A few fundamental questions to consider:
Who will you be working with? How will you communicate with them?
Is your project specifically tied with work that’s happening in lab?
Is your project theoretical or computational in nature?
What computational resources can you access as a part of the lab?
What digital resources can you access as a part of the lab?
Understanding these will give you a good foundation to start your project.
2. Set up a regular meeting with your PI: Having a weekly meeting with the lab PI can boost your confidence when presenting at lab meetings, and it’s a good opportunity to get ideas if you are stuck. These insights are valuable and will also allow you to keep on track for project deadlines.
3. READ: One of the best things you can do when start a project is to get a sense of the bigger picture. Reading a lot of papers can help you gain a better understanding of your project and the lab’s main goals. It can also help you identify the areas you are interested in and the ones you really aren’t.
• Review papers give a great place to start. Publications are often hyper-specific and have limited use when you’re first being introduced to a topic. Often, there are many review papers published over the course of decades. This gives you a chance to see how the field has transformed and understand the biggest questions at hand.
• Your lab’s most important papers & materials: A good place to start is asking your lab PI to send you important papers. Sometimes, the lab will even have a folder of saved papers, which is great. These important papers are useful for the content they provide but also their references. Many topics are intertwined so looking at their references can give you further details on the specifics of any experiment.
• Don’t worry that it’s hard: When you’re introduced to a new topic the first papers will take a long time since you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the terminology and foundational concepts. Every paper that follows will be much easier to comprehend. You are basically learning to read in a different language – it’s exhausting at first so don’t beat yourself up about it.
4. Focus on the big picture & where you fit in: Work on understanding the main questions your lab seeks to answer and the overarching goals. Each research lab is working towards something specific. Being aware how your project fits in that overall structure is a useful tool.
• Your lab’s publications are not the only resource you have access to. There are many past resources which you can ask for including grant applications, PowerPoint presentations, and experiment protocols. However, these documents are very nuanced so it’s better to look at these after you’re more familiar with the topic.
• Labs have many moving parts. Often, there are a number of professionals and graduate students working on multiple projects. While you can only fully immerse yourself in your personal work, it’s important to understand the lab’s other projects as they are all connected. This could mean having a conversation with other members of the lab or asking for related papers. Having a heightened understanding of the project on a whole, will give you a greater understanding and appreciation for your work.
• This often takes longer than you might think. We will work on refining the overall vision at our weekly meetings, both in writing and in speaking exercises
5. Ask questions: You’ll regret trying to find everything on your own, because it’s almost GUARANTEED either your lab PI or the graduate student you’re working with can answer the question, or at least point you in the right direction.
• If coding is a large part of your project and you’re not sure what your error is, talking it out with someone else can help you identify the problem. That person can also provide you with suggestions or ideas.
• We will have office hours with some of our grad students so you have regular times where you can ask these questions and get help from each other
6. Write it down & figure out a system that works for you: Keep good documentation of things you do.
I use OneNote as a “lab notebook,” where I write down what I do every day and take notes on papers. The structure I have for sections is:
Background information (lab-specific papers, any notes from initial meetings with the lab PI, information on your project specifically)
Separate sections for topics of interest (this will depend)
Meeting notes (lab meetings, one-on-one meetings, etc.)
Day to day notes. I add a new page every day, write down tasks that I need to complete, and take notes here.
Important!! If you mention a paper that you read, or a figure that you made, in these notes, make sure you write the file name of the paper/figure. If you don’t, you will forget what the paper/figure was, and you will be very sad. :(
Since I need structure in my life, I also write a schedule of things to accomplish.
There are many other applications you can use to keep organized. It can be daunting to attempt to develop your own organizational method. Asking your lab PI or graduate student(s) about their techniques will give you great insight.
Personally, Zotero is a great way to keep notes, papers, and presentations all together.
Using google drive with your institutional email will extend the space you have access to. A free google drive originally comes with 15 gigabytes however using an institutional email will provide you with either unlimited or much greater storage.
If your lab uses Slack, or other messaging platforms, be sure to save all resources which are useful to your project. Looking through weeks of messages for something you thought may have been referenced is not a great use of time. Even just saving the publication’s name or DOI (Digital Object Identifier) will make your life easier.
7. Do a good job with your figures: If you create figures, make sure to label them with:
The date. If you can’t determine what the figure is, at least you can go back into your day to day notes to the corresponding date, which can help a lot.
What the figure is of (make this very clear — think of yourself two months later, looking at the figure. Would you know what the figure was of?)
On a related note, label axes and add titles to your graphs. This is helpful if your description of the figure is poor.
. **If you have a lot of figures that relate to a specific part of your project, put them in a labelled folder. It will be easier to find.
**Use underscores to make your figure names easier to read (especially if your description of the figure is long).
If you produce a lot of figures for your project, putting them in a PowerPoint can help you organize your thoughts, instead of looking at a bunch of random figures in a folder. Also, if you want to reference something quickly when you’re in a meeting, the figures will be easier to find.
When making a PowerPoint presentation, add all your resources to the end. This can include academic papers, videos, books, and company brochures. This is both an important resource all lab members and your future self.
8. Tricks for extracting data: If you want to compare your data to data in a paper, and the paper does not provide data for their figures, you can use a plot digitizer.
I like to use Graph Grabber, which is free and easy to use. You can download it here: https://www.quintessa.org/software/downloads-and-demos/graph-grabber-2.0.2.
Take a screenshot of the paper figure and save it.
Load it into Graph Grabber. Set the x- and y-axes by drawing a line from the lower to upper limits, and then provide the values for the lower and upper limits.
Trace out the points you are interested in, and it will return values that you can graph for your purposes.
9. Don’t be too hard on yourself: If you get stuck and are frustrated, get up and stretch for 30 seconds. It helps you refocus, and you get some “exercise” in (if you’re like me, and you sit at your computer for many hours a day). But take breaks. I know that I can’t work for eight hours straight, so I split up my work-day into two or three hour chunks, with hour long breaks in between. In my case, I practice instruments, go running, or watch YouTube videos. Caveat: Don’t get so distracted that you can’t refocus once you get back to your work. Make sure that work and relaxation are separate.