My first experience of lab meetings was incredibly intimidating. I would spend hours trying to read through the discussion paper ahead of time and would find myself completely unable to participate in the group conversation about the paper when the time came. I felt insecure and inadequate. I had no idea which of my thoughts were due to my newness to science and which were legitimate discussion points, so I kept my mouth shut. And in doing so, I severely limited my learning and growing as a scientist during that time, allowing my emotions to overwhelm my entire experience of the lab meeting.
I have since learned that this negative experience may have been due to the style of the lab meeting and the expectations for conversation more so than my own inadequacies as a novice learner. I was first introduced to the practice of collaborative communication through my mentors at the University of Wyoming. Collaborative communication is a dialogue practice that aims for equity in conversation via strategies for listening and thoughtful communication. It is a complex practice, and I am still just learning. My collaborators at the University of Wyoming are working on applying a practice of collaborative communication in lab group meetings. I feel incredibly honored to be learning from them through a qualitative research project for which I am analyzing transcript data. This experience is again helping me to learn a wide range of R skills and ways of turning complex human thought/speech/dialogue into visualizations. I will include manuscript information here once it is available.
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AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
August 2023
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