MERGe Lab Expectations

Ensuring gracious professionalism since 2024

Last Updated: Feb 10, 2026

This document is an attempt to lay out expectations for working in the MERGe Lab, run by Prof. Lilly Chin.  

Academia is infamous for having a “hidden curriculum” – expectations and rules that are never fully taught. While there are tons of official university policies and trainings on how to conduct research professionally, these often do not adequately reflect the day-to-day life of what it’s like to be in a specific lab under a specific advisor.

This document seeks to put everyone on a level playing field by making all of these hidden norms as explicit as possible. We are collaboratively defining our own lab norms that are in the gray area between official university / department policies.

This document is a living document. It is intended to be edited over time based on the feedback of all members of the lab, not just Lilly’s opinions. Please add comments and suggestions in the doc or call a lab meeting if things don’t seem right or something needs revisiting (see Appendix for example comments).

Table of Contents                                                                                        

I. Code of Conduct        3

Goal Behavior        3

Behavior to Avoid        4

Unacceptable Behavior        4

Conflict Resolution        5

Common Potential Sources of Conflict        6

II. The Role of an Advisor, According to Lilly        9

Who is Lilly Chin?        10

III. What Lilly Expects from an Advisee        12

Work Time        12

Off-Work Time        14

Other Research Inputs        15

Research Outputs        16

Non-Research Outputs        19

-----------        20

[wip] What Does A Successful N-th Year Student Look Like?        20

[wip] Graduating and Offboarding        20

IV. Required Meetings        22

Weekly 1:1 Meetings with Lilly        22

Lab Notebook        22

Weekly Lab Meetings        23

Annual Check-In        24

V. Lab Organization and Maintenance        27

Lab Jobs        27

[wip] Physical Infrastructure        28

[wip] Digital Infrastructure        29

Social Events        30

====        32

Appendix: Examples of Comments and Suggestions        32

[wip] Appendix: Prior Values from the Code of Conduct        32

[wip] Appendix: How Do I…        32

Communicate My Research?        33

[wip] Appendix: Research Resources        45

[wip] Appendix: Social Resources        46

Navigating UT        46

Surviving        46

Fun in Austin        46

I. Code of Conduct

In order to have a productive lab that pushes the boundaries of robotics, we need people to be able to fully engage with their research: technically and socially. This is impossible to do if you are spending a significant amount of your time dealing with unwelcome behavior. As a result, we need to ensure that all lab members treat one another with respect and courtesy – and a shared understanding of what “respect” and “courtesy” mean.

This Code of Conduct provides guidelines about how we should interact with one another as members of MERGe Lab. This Code of Conduct was made with input from everyone in MERGe Lab and will be revisited regularly (at minimum, annually during our Annual Check-In). We aim to have this Code of Conduct be concrete and clear about our values and principles.

Goal Behavior

We want MERGe Lab to be a respectful and collaborative environment. We want to create a space where people are supportive of each other. This means sharing resources and expertise, but also not being afraid to give constructive criticism. To create this culture, we all have a responsibility to model the behavior we'd like to see in others. Here are some guiding principles:

Have (Lots of!) Open Communication

  1. Be collaborative and supportive – Research is not a competition. The best work is done collaboratively, building off of each other's expertise and skill sets. We aim to help each other with our projects and share resources when possible
  1. Ex. If someone makes a sensor board and they have extras, they should give a copy to other people
  2. Ex. If someone orders too much tubing, they should label it and put it in a communal area so other people can use it.
  1. Be willing to teach and learn – No matter your background or seniority, you have something to offer MERGe Lab, even if it's just asking questions. Asking and answering questions is inherently valuable. There are no bad or dumb questions.
  2. Give constructive feedback -- There are always things that we can improve on as a lab -- social dynamics, research focus, mentorship quality, etc. We can only get better if your criticisms are shared in a helpful way
  1. Be honest but kind. Always have a recommendation for how to improve.
  2. If more detailed negative feedback is needed, it should be given 1:1 and not like a public shaming

Take Care of Our Spaces, Ourselves and Each Other

  1. Be organized and aware of other people’s use of the lab across physical, digital and social spaces – The lab space is a shared resource for all of us and takes a communal effort to keep accessible. Always leave the lab and equipment in a better state than you found it.
  1. Ex. If someone has an experimental setup laid out, do not touch it until you have asked the person first
  2. Ex. 3D printing tools should be cleaned up so the next person can use it immediately
  3. Ex. Make sure the 3D printers are clean and follow the lab calendar
  4. Ex. Make sure that packages are kept tidy and clean
  1. Be respectful of other people’s time – Everyone is busy, so we want to make sure that we respect everyone’s time. Be organized and punctual to meetings, and give a heads-up if an emergency causes you to be late.
  2. Prioritize your health – The most valuable part of this lab is you. No matter how intense or competitive the upcoming deadline may seem, it is most important to take care of yourself before anything else. Drink some water. Eat regularly. Get enough sleep. Breathe some fresh air. Research can wait.

Behavior to Avoid

These behaviors can create an unfriendly environment and should be avoided. Committing any of these behaviors doesn’t make you a bad person. It just shows room for growth. If you commit any of these behaviors: just apologize, reflect for a second and move on.

  1. Mean-spirited criticism – While there is always a place for feedback, we want to make sure that we give it in a way that is helpful. Make sure that the criticism is directed towards improving the work, not maligning the person.
  2. Lack of communication – To make the most of our limited space and resources, we need to make sure that we do not trespass on other people’s space. Failing to communicate your intentions can lead to hard feelings. Err on the side of over-communicating rather than under-.
  1. Ex. starting a long print without a heads-up to other lab members
  2. Ex. using other people’s equipment without asking permission
  1. Self-Isolation – We have a lot of lab spaces and it’s easy to not see other people for a long period of time

Unacceptable Behavior

In general, things that can be classified as Abuse, Harassment or Threats constitute a violation of the Code of Conduct. This may include:

These behaviors all seriously impact the wellbeing of the lab and will not be tolerated.

Every employee at UT Austin (except for those specifically listed as Confidential, such as the Ombuds Office) are legally required to report instances of sexual harassment, sexual assault, interpersonal violence, and stalking to the Title IX office. This includes professors, undergrad and grad TAs, GRAs, and RAs: essentially everyone in the lab. If anyone in MERGe Lab learns of such behavior, we will escalate immediately to the university level rather than attempt conflict resolution within the lab.

Conflict Resolution

Informal Conflict Resolution

Ideally, we would like conflict to be resolved by a conversation between the individual parties. Here are some guiding principles for how we’d like conflict to be managed:

  1. Set expectations early and check in frequently – The best way to avoid conflict is to not have it in the first place. Avoid miscommunication by having a clear conversation early on about responsibilities and expectations
  1. Early communication allows for things to shift around without hard feelings
  2. As things progress, make sure to have frequent check-ins to ensure that everyone still agrees with the original plan or if modifications need to be made
  1. Bring issues up early – Problems tend to get worse if they are allowed to build up and grow with resentment. If there is a problem, say it early
  2. Have issues resolved 1:1 rather than in public – Things can get more tense if they are brought up in a public setting. Try not to have issues escalate to the point where bystanders are getting involved

Formal Conflict Resolution

If you see or experience a Code of Conduct violation that cannot be resolved individually, schedule a meeting with Lilly to discuss the situation. During that meeting, we will discuss potential ways to address the situation before reaching out to the accused. Lilly will do her best to act as an unbiased 3rd party between the two parties to find a compromise.

If you do not feel comfortable reaching out to Lilly directly OR if she can not serve as an unbiased 3rd party, here are other resources that can help:

General, for everyone:

  • Confidential for students, even for Title IX related events

Students only

Staff only:

We will generally try to manage conflicts within the lab first, with Lilly serving as mediator between the affected parties. However, if the behavior persists, we will engage official university grievance policies, with the consent of the original party. Violations of Title IX will be reported immediately according to mandatory reporter laws.

Common Potential Sources of Conflict

These topics are crowd sourced from Annual Check-In discussions

Mental Health

In May 2025, we were most concerned about dealing with anxiety / mental  health in research.

“When you’re anxious, you’re already not going to get things done”. – David.

This means that you should take time off as soon as you recognize that you’re burnt out. If you’re not doing anything in lab, leave lab and go do things that recharge you. This may include

Research is hard and long term, so you don’t have to finish your work in one go. There will always be more work, so go slow and take your time.

“I finished my project and my reward is getting 2 more” – Joseph

Conflicts around Authorship

In Nov. 2024, we were most concerned about how to navigate conversations around authorship – who contributed what and what order they will be on the paper?

People are diverse and multifaceted which means that the interpersonal conflicts between people will also be varied. In general, the answer is to have a conversation with Lilly as early as possible. She has more experience with authorship conflicts, so the earlier that she knows all sides of the story, the earlier she can mediate. If the conflict is between MERGe Lab and an external lab, she will always serve as your advocate. This means understanding your side of the story as clearly as possible.

More general guidance is provided in [WIP] Authorship / Credit Disputes and [WIP] External Collaborations, but here are some scenarios that we would like to work through together as a lab.

What if you’re in a collaboration with another student, but then one person gets busy and disappears? How should the work and authorship credit get redistributed?

The person who got the work to the finish line deserves more credit than the person who initially had the idea or only contributed in the early part of the project. There’s a saying that “the last 10% of code takes up 90% of the development time”. While this is obviously an exaggeration, it does reflect the fact that delivering on a project to the very end does count for a lot.

Ideally, the person shouldn’t have completely disappeared. A best faith effort should be made to reach out to the person and talk to them about the situation. Ideally, they will realize that they have not been contributing as much as the team desires and put in more effort. If not, we will then need to talk as a group how the work will get distributed or if the project can move forward.

If the student is in our lab, this conversation will be between Lilly and the relevant parties. If the student is outside of our lab, we will need to involve the other professors in the discussion.

How / when should we reach out to collaborators?

In general, as long as it’s just discussing ideas or showing things to other people, everything is fine – no need to involve the professors. However, once hardware starts getting shipped or code starts getting developed past an initial prototype, then professors need to get involved to make sure to see if this direction is developing beyond just a hobby / side project.

Same guidelines apply. Probably the professor discussion will happen after everyone settles back into normal life.

Generally, the collaboration will have some regular “tempo” meetings (once a week, once every other week), where the professors are regularly meeting. The students may meet more frequently than this, but as long as the professors are keeping track of progress, the collaboration should hopefully be going well.

What if in the initial planning conversation, you were designated as second author, but you feel like you’re doing too much work?

Please schedule a meeting with all relevant parties in the collaboration so we can discuss next steps. You should either pull back the amount of work that you’re doing or the designated first author needs to put in more work.

II. The Role of an Advisor, According to Lilly

This section is written in first person to emphasize that these are all Lilly’s personal beliefs about advising.

As an advisor, I see my job as supporting my advisees to achieve their goals through the pursuit of research. I do not have a set career output in mind for my trainees. Whether you want to continue in academia, do technical work in a company / startup, advise on science policy, or something else, I want to provide a supportive environment for you to achieve those goals.

As a result, I need to know what your goals are. It is ok if they change over time (or even if they become non-technical!), but having a concrete starting goal is helpful for both you and me so that we can work towards them together.

My advising support comes in several forms:

  1. I provide funding, space and equipment for your research projects. This requires there to be a strong alignment between your goals and my research interests as the money I get is tied to expectations from funding agencies.
  2. I provide technical advice and feedback on your research projects. I have broad systems integration experience in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, science and technology studies, and disability studies. I have applied this experience to robot design, medical devices and critical theory. I will draw on this experience to help you scope your projects rigorously and in a timely manner.
  3. I provide a group of peers with complementary research interests by funding an entire research lab. I recognize that I do not have the full expertise to answer every question that you may have, so placing you with other researchers will help inspire your thinking.
  4. I provide access to my network of professional connections. Research is not done within a vacuum; you will want to be in dialogue with other researchers. I will help you start this dialogue by suggesting people who are aligned with your goals and making introductions. My main networks are in soft robotics, tactile sensors, robot mechanism design and robot manipulation. I am trying to actively expand into wearable sensors, human-robot interaction, disability studies and design studies.

If these resources are not what you need to achieve your goals, we should have a conversation on whether or not I am the best advisor fit for you. There is no shame in not being a good fit for each other! It just means that I may not be the most effective person to help you with your goals.

Who is Lilly Chin?

In addition to a good research fit, there must be a good personality fit between the advisor and advisee. This section will talk more about who I am, my personal background, and how they affect how I do research.

Name and Titles

My given name is Lillian (lih-lee-un), but I go by Lilly (lih-lee, pronounced like the flower). Either is fine. However, my name isn’t Lily. This doesn’t bother me too much if you spell it like that, but it does tell me you’re not paying attention. My last name is Chin, pronounced like the body part (but actually “gold” in Chinese).

I use she/him pronouns, similar to how Chinese pronouns 他 and 她 sound the same ("ta") when spoke out loud. In practice, this means that I default to “she” series pronouns, but prefer people to use a mix of “she” and “he” series pronouns when referring to me. In this document, I only use “she” pronouns for consistency and legibility. Example: “I was talking to Lilly earlier. He’s my advisor. Have you met her? She told me his guinea pig was very cute.”

My preference is that graduate students and postdocs call me by my first name, especially if we are working together. This applies in all contexts, both oral and written communication. I am trying to teach my advisees how to be a peer researcher to me and other professors. Calling me "Dr. Chin" or "Prof. Chin" inherently emphasizes a non-peer relationship, making it harder to teach mutual respect.

I'd also prefer that undergraduates working in my lab call me by my first name as well. If they are not working in my lab (ex. taking my class), I would like them to call me Prof. Chin since we do not know each other yet. If you are taking one of my classes and work in the lab, please call me Prof. Chin / Dr. Chin when around your peers.

I recognize that in some cultures, it can feel deeply uncomfortable to call supervisors by their first name rather than their titles like Prof. Chin or Dr. Chin. Please refer to me in a respectful way that is consistent with your cultural background.

Background and Expertise

I am a queer Chinese-American woman. I am the daughter of immigrants, making me a second-generation American. My parents are pharmacology / chemical biology professors at Emory University, so I grew up with an understanding of the American university system. My parents' jobs also meant that I grew up in an upper middle-class household. I am currently able-bodied with the occasional flare up in my mental health.

I did undergrad and grad school at MIT (2013-2017, 2017-2023). I majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science there, with minors in Comparative Media Studies and Mechanical Engineering. I did my PhD under Daniela Rus, with David Mindell and Yufeng (Kevin) Chen on my thesis committee. I did a postdoc at the NIH under Leo Cohen and Tom Bulea (2023-2024). I started at UT Austin as an assistant professor in 2024.

I consider myself a systems engineer across the entire robotics stack. My primary skillsets are in mechanical design and embedded systems, but my broad knowledge base has enabled me to mentor students in mathematics, materials science and computer science. I have significant interest in the social sciences, especially science and technology studies, infrastructure studies, and disability studies and am eager to mentor / collaborate with folks in this space.

III. What Lilly Expects from an Advisee

By joining MERGe Lab, you sign on to the expectation of independently working and contributing to novel research. But what does it mean to “do research” ?

At the highest possible view, the production of research is like any other manufacturing process. It takes inputs of:

And produces outputs of:

This section will discuss these inputs and outputs in more detail. It will largely focus on time as the primary input and papers as the primary output.

Work Time

Lilly does not have any expectations of where or when advisees work. As long as consistent progress is reported at weekly meetings, then she has no problem with people doing work remotely, people working night shifts or people taking time off as needed.

There are a few exceptions to this:

Open-Office Policy

Although Lilly is physically separated from the student space, she maintains a similar open-office policy like the student space. Treat her office like you would treat your fellow students’ space. Specifically,

As of Fall 2025, Lilly now has door signs and a window for her office that should make this more clear.

Similarly, Lilly will try and respect your office space

Avoid Working Fully Remotely

Lilly strongly discourages people from working fully remotely.

On the research side:

On the personal side

Summers

Lilly does not have expectations of whether you should spend your summer in the lab or not. If your goals are to go into industry, then an internship may be a better use of your time than doing research in the lab!

Here are some suggestions for how to judge how best to use your summer:

Off-Work Time

There are no clear policies from UT on how much vacation graduate students can take, but this Chemical Engineering website recommends 12 vacation days per academic year in addition to school holidays. Lilly is fine if you take more than this; she cares more about consecutive days of vacation rather than one-off days.

In general, she does not expect you to work on the weekends or to work more than 8 hours a day. For undergraduate students, as their role is not to perform research full time, the general expectation is 10 hours of work a week. In order to meet deadlines, you may find it necessary to put in that extra time, but this is recognized as an extra effort. Likewise, there are no expectations for you to check email / Discord when you are off-work.

As a corollary to this, off-work time is considered precious to Lilly and something to be mutually respected. Give Lilly a clear heads-up of deadlines as soon as you know them so she can adequately plan her work / off-work time accordingly.

In return, Lilly will do her absolute best to do the same. She will try to communicate as early as possible when she needs something with a clear explanation why. If her asks are unreasonable to achieve on such short notice, it is her fault (not yours) and she will fully accept the consequences for that.

Extended Time Off Work

If you need to take time off longer than 1 consecutive business day (ex. longer than a 3-day long weekend), then Lilly would like at minimum a 1 week heads up. Lilly does not need a heads-up if you take a long vacation during the following times:

If you are expecting to take time off longer than 2 weeks, then a 1:1 discussion with Lilly should be scheduled at least a month in advance to discuss who will take on your responsibilities and how to plan for your research trajectory.

Please do not schedule a vacation during the 2 weeks before a major conference deadline. This includes:

but goes for any conferences that you are planning to submit to. This holds even if a major school holiday occurs during this period.

Of course, personal emergencies happen that we cannot schedule for. Your number one priority should be to you and your loved ones, not work. Lilly will do her best to help you accommodate your emergencies as well as plan with you on how the rest of your work will be managed once the crisis is over.

Other Research Inputs

Generating Ideas

Graduate school is training for how to become an independent researcher. In other words, after your PhD, you should be able to generate your own research ideas based on the experience you’ve gathered.

At the beginning of your PhD, Lilly will provide some ideas to help you “warm up” and get accustomed to doing independent research. Over time, though, you should be taking more and more initiative in the idea generating process rather than expecting to be directed at all times.

Developing Skills

You were hired to MERGe Lab because you have skills that complemented well with the research directions that the lab is going AND because you have a solid social/technical foundation to learn new skills.

While Lilly is well-versed in many different fields, she is not an expert in all aspects of research. She will try her best to teach you what she knows, but eventually you will hit a limit of her time and knowledge. This is normal and expected, since we are doing new original research! It is important to learn how to learn from other students as well and not just from Lilly. Reach out to your labmates and other resources; this will help cultivate your skills as an independent researcher.

Project Teams / Subgroups

A lot of the work done in MERGe Lab is interdisciplinary. Since everyone has complementary research interests, you may find yourself naturally self-assembling into teams. This impromptu team-building is encouraged so long as it is clear who is contributing what. Have these contribution conversations early and often to make sure that everyone agrees with the project direction.

Lilly will never force you to work on a team that you do not work with. She will only start an explicit collaboration between group members if there is a mutual interest on all sides.

External Collaborations

In general, the lab is very pro-collaboration. If you start working with a student for a class project or meet up with someone at a conference, you do not need to let Lilly know. These are student-to-student collaborations, which are necessary to form your own research identity. Lilly highly encourages you to go and make friends. Share how your research is going and people will respond in kind!

However, if this collaboration grows to the point where you are buying equipment or a large amount of supplies specific to this project, then you will need to bring Lilly and the other professor into the conversation. Some specific scenarios are discussed in Conflicts around Authorship in the Code of Conduct and in Authorship / Credit Disputes.

Finding Funding

Funding the research activities of MERGe Lab are largely Lilly’s responsibilities. Her day job is making sure that the lab has enough money to run smoothly. She will try to limit the amount of pressure that you directly receive from the funding agencies so you can focus on research. If you are interested in experiencing what grant writing is like, let Lilly know and she can include you in the writing process of her next proposal.

Note: any money (e.g. fellowships) that you can bring in helps alleviate the financial burden. Bringing in your own funding also means that you will no longer be obligated to work on what is mandated by Lilly’s funding agencies but instead explore your own research ideas. Resources for finding fellowships can be found in the Appendix.

Research Outputs

As academics, papers are the main output that we shoot for. They are proof that we have completed work that is recognized by our peers as having pushed the frontier of human knowledge. If it isn’t published, it’s as if the work didn’t happen.

We shoot for papers because they give us the primary academic currency: citations. Academic reputation is measured quantitatively (for better or worse) by how many people reference your work in their papers. The idea is that the more people who cite your work, the more influential your work is.

Thus, to succeed as academics, we need to publish papers that:

This section will give a high-level overview of how paper-related discussions are resolved in this lab. For more information on how to actually write papers, please check the Appendix.

Where We Publish

We primarily publish in robotics venues, which inherit from the norms of computer science. While most other fields primarily publish in journals, we primarily publish in conferences. This means that there are significant differences to our publishing cycles:

We primarily shoot for the following venues, in rough order of prestige:

This is not an exclusive list, just the venues that Lilly has the most experience submitting to. If you have experience for another journal, let’s discuss!

Conference Reimbursement

If you are a (co-)first author for a conference paper, the lab will fund your registration and travel for the conference. If you are a non-first author for a conference paper, we will have to look at the state of the lab travel budget and if the conference is domestic / international.

To get approved for travel, please go to https://utdirect.utexas.edu/apps/services/requests/ and click on Travel Authorization Request. Fill the form out and assign the request to Kate Hardin (EID: klh3822)

Travel funding is always tight, so please be respectful and professional with how you use lab money. Save all receipts. Here are some examples of allowable and unallowable things to get reimbursed.

When you come back, fill out a Travel Reimbursement Request at https://utdirect.utexas.edu/apps/services/requests . Make sure you have all your receipts ready as you will not be able to add on receipts after the fact.

 If you have any questions, please reach out to our lab admin, Kate Hardin (kate.hardin@austin.utexas.edu), before you travel, as she will be the one to process your reimbursement. If any travel is in violation of the above principles, Lilly reserves the right to refuse to reimburse you.

Authorship / Credit Disputes

Debates about authorship and project ownership can be some of the most bitter conversations in academia. To minimize conflict, we highly encourage conversations about authorship to happen as early as possible, with frequent check-ins. This can even be right at the start of team formation. It is not gauche to bring this up and will save significant heartache further down the line. If despite these efforts, there is still conflict about the authorship order, we will refer to our lab’s Code of Conduct and Conflict Resolution guide to resolve disputes.

The general rule of thumb is that the first author is the person who “herded the cats”. They are the one who got everyone  to work on the project, completed the technical work, and was the primary lead for writing up the results. Co-first authorship will be given when multiple people provide an essential contribution to the final product. A classic example is one person providing the mechanical design and another person writing the controls for that robot – the project would not have happened without both people’s contributions.

Notably, the first author may not necessarily be the person who had the initial research idea! Having an idea is not the same as execution; it takes dedication and perseverance to actually see a project to the end, while managing unexpected issues. The person who came up with the initial idea definitely deserves authorship credit, but loses the priority of being first or co-first if they do not commit to the end of the project.

Non-Research Outputs

As an academic, you will mainly be evaluated by your research output. But, you are a person outside of that! I encourage you to participate in whatever interests you have, as long as you are mindful of how that affects your primary work.

If you are planning to do a lot of non-research a semester (whether for coursework, service or other personal reasons), Lilly would appreciate a heads up that this semester will be busy for you . We can come up with a strategy together on how to sustain momentum.

Some other notes:

-----------

[wip] What Does A Successful N-th Year Student Look Like?

This section is under construction!

Someone asked me this during an interview and it’s an honestly a really good question

Get a PhD when 3-5 other people with PhDs says you’re worth it

Research tree idea

First year - not expected to publish. Obviously nice, but working towards getting settled down

Bill suggests “rotation project”

Really wanting to have you become independent and start generating own projects

Generating Ideas

[wip] Graduating and Offboarding

This section is under construction!

Lilly needs to learn more about how UT works

* Need some sort of repository for both digital and physical artifacts

* Storage for completed projects? Should be similar to the listing for when put projects away so minimal overhead have to do

        * Name, date, paper that the work is associated with

* Digital should be done on hard drive so that people aren’t walking off with stuff

        * Cloud storage -> cold storage? (which is also backed up by cloud because have your things in 2 palces)

* Exit interview

IV. Required Meetings

To provide consistent advising and support, the lab needs a regular meeting structure. This maintains project momentum, allows the lab to hear about what other people are working on, and lets us help each other.

The agenda for these meetings are all roughly:

Lilly is more than happy to meet outside of these scheduled meetings as well. Feel free to stop by her office at any time to have a spontaneous conversation or schedule something more formally.

Weekly 1:1 Meetings with Lilly

Lilly would like to meet with you every week in-person in my office (EER 4.820) at a regularly scheduled time. That way, we can have a set rhythm with a shared whiteboard to discuss efficiently. If necessary, it can be over Zoom with advanced notice. Grad students are expected to meet for 1 hour, while undergrads are expected to meet for 30 minutes.

In general, err on the side of more communication rather than less. “Ghosting” is hard to interpret, as it is unclear  if things are going well, poorly, or you are not working on the project. A  particularly tricky problem is more fun to discuss than smooth sailing!

If you need to miss a scheduled meeting, that’s totally ok! Just give Lilly a week’s notice beforehand and whether or not you will be able to provide an asynchronous update over Discord. Lilly will assume that if you are missing for a personal reason that you will not be able to provide an update.

Lab Notebook

During these 1:1 meetings, I will ask you to bring a lab notebook that contains notes on your progress and experiments. Having a written record of what you are trying and why is super helpful, both for us to discuss at our 1:1 meetings or to refer back to for future work. There is no required format, other than for each “page”, you should have a title and date. Upload a brief README.txt file in your Box folder saying where your lab notebook is

The rule of thumb is any data that you show in our 1:1 meetings should be easily accessible to Lilly, ideally in your lab notebook. She often needs to show results fast to potential collaborators, so it’s important to have it as easily accessible as possible.

Resources on Maintaining a Lab Notebook

These resources tend to be more bio focused, but can easily be applied to the engineering context

Examples of Digital Lab Notebooks

Examples of Physical Lab Notebooks

Below is an example of one of Lilly’s lab notebooks during PhD.

Weekly Lab Meetings

Every week, we will have a whole lab meeting over lunch – food will be provided!

For the first half, we will go around the room and provide quick updates on research and lab infrastructure.This can be done orally or with slides, whatever your preference is. This is a great time to share cool results with the lab or to ask for general advice on problems that you have encountered.

For the second half of lab meeting, we will have a presentation, either as an update on current progress, preparation for an upcoming research talk or presenting a paper for Journal Club discussion. Please upload your slides to Box with the date so other members of the lab can reference them later.

Journal Club Format

The goal is for Journal Club to be a conversation about interesting papers in the field. We will discuss not only the science presented, but also the effectiveness of the figures, writing and presentation

Before lab meeting:

During lab meeting:

Annual Check-In

At the end of every school year, we will take a one week break as a lab to clean up, reflect and prepare for the next academic year. Ideally, this will be between the end of the spring semester (approx. May 7th) and the ICRA conference (approx. May 13th). This will be us looking back on how the year went, as individuals and as a lab.

There are three major things that we’ll do this week:

(1) Annual Reflection

Everyone who will be staying in MERGe Lab the following year fills out the Annual Reflection form and schedules a 1:1 meeting with Lilly to discuss how they filled it out. For undergraduates not staying for another year, it is optional to fill out this form. Please let Lilly know if you would like to have a reflection meeting.

Note that this is NOT an evaluation of your performance, but just a tool to be used privately for feedback. Lilly will not look at what you write, nor will she ask for it. Lilly will fill out her copy privately as well and will not share it with you unless you explicitly ask for it.

After we both fill out the form, we will meet and discus how we can improve for next year. Please make sure you save your file so that we can refer to it in future years.

(2) State of the Lab Meeting

During this week, we will reserve one day for doing a big State of the Lab Meeting + cleaning. Lilly will first do a presentation where she will go over:

  1. Lab Updates:
  1. Lab member milestones - joining and leaving
  2. Research
  1. How Lilly pitches the lab’s work
  2. Paper statuses
  1. Published
  2. Submitted / Demo’d
  3. Wrapping Up
  4. Still Cooking
  5. Ideas
  1. Conference updates
  2. Collaborations
  1. Social event review
  2. Lab funding
  1. How funding works for the lab
  2. Gory spreadsheets
  3. Success on what Lilly has submitted or not
  1. Looking ahead

  1. Review of Expectation Documents
  1. Highlight important topics from this Lab Expectations document
  2. Review Lab Code of Conduct
  1. What are our values?
  2. What behavior do we want to see?
  1. Rotate the lab jobs between the grad students
  2. Open floor discussion of lab issues
  1. Seeded with Annual Check-In Meetings questions and previous State of the Lab meeting discussions

(3) Cleanup

After the State of the Lab Meeting, each member of the lab will take some time to clean up their digital and physical footprint

  1. Digital Archiving
  1. Uploading files from personal computers to Box
  2. Archiving lab notebooks – providing a README to files or making scans
  3. Writing up project statuses to the Lab Wiki
  1. Physical Cleaning
  1. Deep clean of lab, including going through old project boxes
  2. Decide whether things will be saved, displayed, reused, disposed

V. Lab Organization and Maintenance

The “tragedy of the commons” is the idea that shared resources often become overexploited by individual greed. If people do not steward a common resource collectively, then the entire shared resource will get destroyed, resulting in a loss for the entire community.

To avoid this, we need to do our best to be good stewards of our communal lab space! This means that in addition to research, every person must contribute to organizing and maintaining our lab space. While our Annual Check-In will help do a deep clean, there are several day-to-day activities that must be done as well.

Lab Jobs

Everyone who is not an undergrad must sign up for one lab job. These jobs help to maintain the physical lab space by designating a point person for each area / piece of equipment. These point people will update the lab on their job during Weekly Lab Meetings.

Lab jobs will rotate every academic year so that multiple people know how to keep the lab functioning. As more people join the lab, more roles will be created and subdivided to ensure accountability across all members of the lab.

If the responsibilities of the lab job ever feel like they are taking too much time away from research, please bring this up in 1:1s or lab meeting so we can redistribute the jobs more fairly.

As of Sept. 2024, the list of lab jobs are:

  1. Entropy and Safety
  1. The lead for any official lab representation to UT entities (ex. Inventory, EHS)
  2. Monitors the overall cleanliness of the lab
  1. NOT responsible for cleaning up after other people, but responsible for getting people to clean up after themselves
  1. Mail
  1. Prepare a cart of people’s orders so all Lilly has to do is bring the credit card and hit pay
  2. Every day, checks on what packages have been delivered to the lab and pings the relevant people
  3. Coordinates with the lab admin to order food for lab meeting. Picks up the food and brings it to the conference room
  1. Gets to decide what we eat :)
  1. Sticky Zone
  1. Responsible for organizing and maintaining all equipment in the sticky half of lab (4.884)
  2. Ex: Elegoo printer, Carbon printer, silicone casting setup
  1. Dry Zone
  1. Responsible for organizing and maintaining all equipment in the non-sticky half of lab (4.884A)
  2. Ex: Bambu printer, Instron, electronics bench, mechanical bench

Other potential lab jobs in the future

[wip] Physical Infrastructure

This section is under construction!

We are still evaluating how effective our current processes are

What is Our Space?

Labeling Items

Lab should not be full of random Amazon boxes and McMaster bags! All items should have a home.

For generic stock material (ex. fasteners, breadboards, etc.), it should be clearly labeled with what the object is, ideally in a communal box. It’s ok if tools are out and about, but it should still be clean and tidy.

For personal research projects, please make your own box and label it with a sharpie + sticker with the following information:

You can be as (dis)organized as you want inside the box, but keep things externally neat.

Safety

Respecting Other People’s Space

[wip] Digital Infrastructure

This section is under construction!

We are still evaluating how effective our current processes are

Box 101

You can download a desktop version. Doesn’t have to just be access through the web interface

Everything Else

Other tips I’ve been told:

1. [ ] Have a Discord channel specifically for printer time coordination

2. [ ] Pay for a password keeper to do password management across the lab. Make it your own, not tied to the university

        - I suppose the lazy way would be to just keep that in the lab Discord, lmao, with role permissions to secure access only to lab members

3. [ ] Make a wiki and fill it with [[How To]]

4. [ ] Have a general spreadsheet for keeping track of lab trainings for equipment

        1. [ ] If something is done repeatedly, make a video about it and slap it onto lab trainings (ex. Instron training)

Social Events

Lilly would like MERGe Lab to be a place where people feel excited to come to and collaborate with colleagues. However, she can’t enforce a social atmosphere onto a group, since culture is made up of many individual actions. The best she can do is to hold events and offer suggestions.

Formal Lab Events

Suggested Social Structures (without Lilly!)

Below are some ideas that Lilly has for lab members to do without her. Due to power dynamics, it’s important to have spaces where the boss isn’t involved.

====

Appendix: Examples of Comments and Suggestions

Leaving comments directly in the document

Should be brought up in 1:1 meetings or lab meeting

[wip] Appendix: Prior Values from the Code of Conduct

Saving older language for the Code of Conduct. Our values change and that’s ok!

This section is under construction!

Our Code of Conduct is currently manageable, but we can keep this as temp space just in case

[wip] Appendix: How Do I…

This section is under construction!

Lilly will eventually be moving this to the lab website

Communicate My Research?

Writing a Paper

The quality of a paper’s writing should be considered just as important as the technical result. If the work is done but it isn’t published, then there is no record that the work was ever done. Even when it is published, if people can’t understand the work, then no one will cite you.

Inspired by George Whitesides’ approach, Lilly likes to write papers by working on successively more detailed outlines and figures. Organizing the work is one of the biggest hurdles in the writing process and should be tackled first, before too many words are written. By sketching figures and arranging bullet points, we can make sure that the paper follows a logical skeleton. Then, as the work progresses, all we need to do is fill in the skeleton with more detail. This also significantly reduces stress for the weeks before the final conference deadline!

Here are some early outlines of this paper. You can see how many of the figures and sections in the final paper directly stem from these whiteboard sketches.

Outline model (link to Whitesides) + draw figures

Introduction

Why do we need a Figure outline?

From Bill:

I think a framing that might be helpful for motivating why you should draw a figure outline before having your results is that, the figure outline is sorta your Hypothesis in the scientific method. As engineers it's easy to think about paper writing as "we build the thing, test it, and write up a report on the results", but as researchers we want to think about our work as based around Research Questions, which should have a set of hypothesis associated with them. Thus a figure outline before you have results are really a set of hypotheses about the sorts of results you expect to get.

Tools

Writing guidelines for undergrads

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003453

LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively

How To…

This section is a list of things that I would like to give as a reference library to my students so they can refer to things if they have questions. It's a combination of FAQs, lab protocols and also just good social skills for being a graduate student.

Essentially by doing this, I hope to export more of my own knowledge into a form that will build institutional knowledge. Hopefully this will make [[04 Offboarding]] easier, since there will be a culture of sharing things.

I am currently hoping to have this on my website, so condensing things down into PDFs that are then linked to on the website as resources. I don't want to have this vault be the thing that I'm publishing.  It should be in permanent PDF form rather than floating around Google Docs because the idea is less about having a living document but a **library**.  Just like a library, the resources should be vetted before being added into the system.

#TODO Double check with [[To Learn]]. That section is full of unprocessed things for me to learn from when I was a grad student, so there may be something that current grad students are interested in.

> [!info] For each How-To, specify at the top what we're doing and *why* we're doing it this way

Communicate My Research

Read

if you feel overwhelmed by your lit review, it's because you haven't really figured out what question you are really trying to ask yet so everything seems relevant

(copy Anusinha's advice)

Lit Review

---------

1) Subscribe to table of contents for relevant journals. Look at them and open up interesting ones

2) Subscribe to alerts for PIs

3) Be smart about reading papers - https://learning-modules.mit.edu/service/materials/groups/104453/files/d17f69da-6016-424e-92f1-6950e580a691/link?errorRedirect=%2Fmaterials%2Findex.html

4) talk to other people to leverage their backgrounds

5) first chapter of theses are good for mini-lit reviews that are not as formal as actual review articles

Don't feel super bad about doing an in-depth literature review! Eventually you learn that most research is crap and realize what you should build off of. You also don't have to build from scratch too many times in life.

http://www.pgbovine.net/opportunistic-paper-reading.htm

http://www.pgbovine.net/reading-conference-proceedings.htm

- Update the spam list of links and stuff (robotics, HRI, CMS)

- go through the robosoft stuff and pick out interesting profs

- supplement with the other version

- actually looking at the stuff that shuguang already pre-selected as "good stuff"

- needing to actually understand robot kinematics

http://softrobotics.org/newsletters/

https://scf.acm.org/2017

Buzzwords

---

* somatosensory

* Morphological computation

* biohybrid actuators

Write

**Writing papers**

Just as important (if not more!) important than the technical work

* What is a research paper

        - Journal / conference hierarchies

        - Phases of a paper: Send, revise and resubmit, publish!

        - What to expect from reviews

                - How to do your own [[Reviewing Papers]]

* How-To: write your first paper

        - Idea of "figure contracts" -- agreement of what figures should go in there first. That way, students can just slot in there

Robotics specific advice for writing https://tokekar.com/docs/Tokekar-WritingPapers-Talk.pdf

UT specific service:

https://uwc.utexas.edu/services/presentations/

https://uwc.utexas.edu/services/writing-appointments/

#TO-PROCESS  Unprocessed after this point

* "the reason that we're always scrambling at the last minute for writing is because writing is part of the research process. Writing forces you to be more specific which then provokes new quetions which then provokes new work and yadda yadda"

* "the only thing worse than trying to get someone who is bad at writing to write 150 page thesis is then having to READ that. Save yourself the pain and train them in writing"

* Have a checklist for paper publications so they can hit all the points

        * Legible figures

        * Spelling and grammar mistakes (read out loud)

        * Going through the outline as go along

        * Time to get it to me for early versions

                * Emphasizing bullet points

                * https://uwc.utexas.edu/

#TO-PROCESS : Process the following into a nice way for students

* Also include the Whitesides "how to write a paper" and the CS "how to read a paper"

* For papers: https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/

## Clear communications

https://untools.co/minto-pyramid/

* Put your conclusion first

* Then the key takeaways

* Then the details of how you got to that point

https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-write-email-with-military-precision

Use keywords

- ACTION – Compulsory for the recipient to take some action

- SIGN – Requires the signature of the recipient

- INFO – For informational purposes only, and there is no response or action required

- DECISION – Requires a decision by the recipient

- REQUEST – Seeks permission or approval by the recipient

- COORD – Coordination by or with the recipient is needed

## Misc

[InspiredOne/Latex-Templates](https://git.vegacore.net/InspiredOne/Latex-Templates)

Very opinionated haha: https://users.umiacs.umd.edu/~jbg/static/style.html

Talk Good

- How-To: give a talk

hook = what's new

angle = why's it a good story, why should I care

[Pitch Database](https://www.theopennotebook.com/pitch-database/)

Behave at Conferences

Communicating your Work

My big piece of advice is for every meal you have at the conference, share it with someone new you haven't met before. It's a little scary to go approach people, but anyone who is wearing a lanyard is feeling just as lost as you are! Just say "mind if I join you for lunch" and make some new friends! The people you meet are more important than the sessions you attend, so don't feel bad for skipping an oral session if you are having a good conversation with someone. Also, do not worry about trying to get to know professors now. Making friends with other graduate students now is helpful because you will all grow up to be professors, postdocs and industry engineers!

- How-To: give a poster

        - Posters are a billboard for your lab

        - Visual communication

https://support.spoonflower.com/hc/en-us/articles/204266984-Tutorial-Creating-a-Fabric-Presentation-Poster-from-a-PDF

- Rule of thumb: every meal should be eaten with a different set of people every day

        - Do not just hang out with our lab members! There should be at least one person you do not know for every meal

        - Approach someone with a lanyard and say "hey do you have lunch plans?". They are just as lost as you are and as eager to make friends

        - Best to meet with people in similar stage as you because as get older, people will be in similar career stage as you

                - Do not feel pressure to socialize with professors! When Lilly was at conference, hung out with other graduate students at conferences. Now that she's a professor, those people are professors now too. How it seems like all the professors know each other.

- If there is someone you particularly want to meet, ask Lilly for help

- "best track is hallway track" -- meeting and hanging out with people and discussing research with them in an informal situation

        - Watching other talks and going to poster sessions is really good to see what is out there and get a sense of how to do good and bad communication of research, so can do it in the future

        - Talks are giving you some common ground to refer to with other people, but number one goal should be making connections to other people. Sometimes this means leaving the conference venue! This isn't a problem as long as you refer to the Rule of Thumb - adventuring with other folks may be best way to forge collaboration

- People are watching, so be mindful about how much alcohol you are drinking

Figure Design

- [How to Create Publication-Quality Figures](http://cellbio.emory.edu/bnanes/figures/)

- [Adobe Illustrator: a 2.009 tutorial](http://web.mit.edu/2.009/www/resources/illustrator/crash-course/index.html)

- http://web.mit.edu/zoya/www/posterRecommendations.pdf

- [Making Science and Engineering Pictures: A Practical Guide to Presenting Your Work](https://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-10-001-making-science-and-engineering-pictures-a-practical-guide-to-presenting-your-work-spring-2016/)

Review Papers

**You are looking for reasons to reject**

* If I were writing this paper, what would I be embarrassed about?

* Does this research make sense?

* Was it important to answer the question?

* Is this paper worth reading my time?

* Why did they do this?

* What questions were left unanswered

* Is this paper repeating work already done?

* Did they actually invent anything

[Peer Review - Best Practices](http://mitcommlab.mit.edu/broad/commkit/peer-review/)

Video Design

## Videos

[Royalty Free Music by Bensound | Stock Music](https://www.bensound.com/)

Probably best software: [https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/)

Robot Demos

- Oh god robot demos: https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/nailing-the-demo

Do Research

Lab specific protocols

Look at Obsidian

Software Tools

* [Posetree.py](https://generalrobots.substack.com/p/announcing-posetreepy-wrangling-timestamps) - useful library to manage robot vs. object pose by forcing you to spec it out

* [ Missing Semester of your CS Education](https://missing.csail.mit.edu) - shell, git, command line 101

#TO-PROCESS

[https://github.com/burghoff/Scientific-Inkscape](https://github.com/burghoff/Scientific-Inkscape)  

https://www.migadu.com/

 

Notes in Obsidian on HOw to use the shell and Vim

Mechanical Tools

* [Mechanism Library](https://www.dmg-lib.org/dmglib/main/portal.jsp) -- steal the idea of dead guys from the 1800s and watch pretty things move #research/mechanisms

#TO-PROCESS  Below this point is unparsed

* "functional modeling design theory" - not sure what this means but was in a tab

[TRIZ Matrix / 40 principles / TRIZ contradictions table](http://triz40.com/TRIZ_GB.php)

[Resources](http://rebecca.li/resources/)

[Problem Sets](http://web.mit.edu/2.70/Resources.html)

[Reference Topics in Mechanical Engineering](https://mechanicalc.com/reference/)

surface modeling for forceps - spend some time and go through all solidworks tutorials - also

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX8nTbuzrXo

Part 2: https://youtu.be/7srmWBFYe1I

Keyboard shortcut for opening keyboard shortcut solidworks

[https://www.mathworks.com/help/robotics/index.html](https://www.mathworks.com/help/robotics/index.html)

Metal lasercutting - [https://www.oshcut.com/](https://www.oshcut.com/)

Silicone sheets - [https://www.mcmaster.com/86435k41](https://www.mcmaster.com/86435k41)

Neat IoT microcontrollers - [https://lowpowerlab.com/](https://lowpowerlab.com/)

PCB with fab - [https://jlcpcb.com/parts](https://jlcpcb.com/parts)

Documentation

# Lab wide

* Look at [[230809 -- general jlipton prof advice]] and see what the students said was directly helpful in terms of resources

        * Write out what expectations are including this documentation style

        * Not only what, but *why*

# Personal

* Have students always provide weekly updates in some sort of written / communication form. Don't care what form it is so long as exist and present it in our weekly 1:1s.

        * Why: can concretely see progress week to week which is nice when going gets tough, practice your communication skills, easier for you and others to refer back (self-documentation)

                * If you're having trouble with something, first thing I'm going to ask to see is your lab notebook

                *

        * Options

                * Lab notebook

                * Slides a la [Greg's weekly MEng updates](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HCTyaqW4ndbI-zOZbWjLaLAXkE1kC7TFi21hEF3ExWk/edit#slide=id.g1a0f7985beb_0_0)

                        * John Boothroyd also does this and makes it a master document

                * Personal Notion / Obsidian

                * Make a [[240203 -- weekly accountability to Kris and James|weekly update]] doc

        * Warn them about trap of making it pretty. Point is not to be pretty but way to easily get your thoughts down and then turn it into something communicable to outside people

                * Can talk about way of refining and have diagram if you want to be pretty. "If you think pretty, that's great! but I don't think pretty"

                        * Your brain -> scribble notes -> rough draft presentable -> research paper -> portfolio

Teach Others How to do REsearch

UROP exit interview

* Have UROP make one slide per check up meeting so they can staple on together to have a finished thing at the end

* Writing detailed documentation at the end of it to hand off

* Not just exit interview but midway interview to see how it's going for the UROP experience ot try and improve -- performance as mentor as well as UROP experience

-- Written form having 3 positives and 3 negatives to help break the ice

-- Also sending questions in advanced -- very specific, address the skills they wanted to learn coming in + expectation change

* "How risky do you want the project to be"

* If have too many interests -- "what papers are easy for you to read? you're going to be reading these for many years"

https://austinhenley.com/blog/lessonsfrommyphd.html

Get My Own Funding

Postdoc fellowships

* Schmidt Science Fellowship, of course

* https://research.fas.harvard.edu/postdoc_opportunities

        * Mostly bio

* https://pathwaystoscience.org/Postdocs_Portal.aspx

* UC President Fellowship

        * https://ppfp.ucop.edu/info/how-to-apply/application-instructions.html

        * November 1st and requires a UC faculty member to serve as primary mentor

        * (Have similar programs for other schools, like CU, UMich, CMU, NYU and Chapel Hill)

* NSF Engineering Postdoc fellowship program

* UCSD CS Postdoc fellowship program: https://cse.ucsd.edu/research/uc-san-diego-cse-fellows-program

* Ford Foundation: https://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/FordFellowships/PGA_171940

Have a Career in Research

Maybe too old school

Getting a Job After your PhD

* Post-grad job applications for CS: https://csguides.github.io/grad-job-guide/

Postdocs

* How to find national lab postdocs: https://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/RAP/index.htm

* How to get a postdoc: https://twitter.com/bakirtzisg/status/1383242555437973507

        * Very network driven and just shoot your shot

        * Recommends this: https://spie.org/Publications/Book/2535499?SSO=1

* Know your rights as a postdoc: https://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Computer_SciencePostdocs_Best_Practices.pdf

Faculty Jobs

* Pre faculty application list for grad students: http://sylviaherbert.com/resources-applying-faculty

[wip] Appendix: Research Resources

TODO: Fully parse this out and create MERGe Lab version of these

[wip] Appendix: Social Resources

Navigating UT

Surviving

* https://shomir.net/advice_for_students.html

* https://www.stat.cmu.edu/~aramdas/checklists.html

* https://www.youtube.com/c/CaseyFieslerPhD

https://gradresources.org/crisis/

* Disclaimer that the website is faith-based but the hotline is run independently: https://www.chronicle.com/article/suicide-hot-line-for-graduate-students-ends-its-religious-affiliation/

Fun in Austin