Date: 2023-02-11
I rant for way too long on the benefits of informal groups of colleagues (broadly defined). I urge you to join or create a group if you’re a junior, and to encourage their formation, if you’re a senior. I provide some examples of groups I’ve attended and one that I’m still attending, concluding with some tips and tricks for managing informal groups.
When I refer to informal groups of colleagues I’m just referring to groups of colleagues that meet without any formal obligation or oversight. The group’s formation could have been encouraged by a senior, but that senior is not present in the meetings. Also, I’m not being strict about who counts as colleague or who doesn’t. If you’re in a group of colleagues, and you’re meeting without any formal obligation (e.g., attending the meetings is not part of your job description), then most of what I discuss in this post should apply.
Getting a PhD can feel pretty lonely at times. At my department the last year of your masters can also feel lonely since you start an internship, as well as a thesis project, and you stop having your schedule filled with classes that you attend with your fellow students. Being the new person at a lab/company/organization feels daunting. Having colleagues to share that experience with makes it all the much more bearable. Still, if the nature of the job leaves you working mostly independently from each other, and are always surrounded by seniors/managers, you end up feeling like it’s hard finding the time to share, vent, and relax. Importantly, and I would like you to seriously give this some thought, the seniors/managers may be much more approachable, empathetic, and down to earth than you think. I’ve seen many people feel a lot of distance from a senior that seriously cares for them, and wants to be a good close mentor. Still, I know some war stories, from people working in overly competitive environments, or in places where seniors are tough on juniors (even when it comes from a good place). Such situations usually give rise to the all too prevalent impostor syndrome. The only way to defeat the impostor syndrome is to share your feelings, defeating pluralistic ignorance (shout out to André Mata for explaining that to me). Even that sometimes is not enough. You get the impression others feel like impostors when they’re not, and you’re still the only real impostor there. Trust me, you’re wrong, you’re not an impostor. All this to say, informal groups of colleagues can be great for your mental health, and they give you a network of people that you can rely on for getting answers for personal and professional questions alike.
My PhD program—LiSP (Lisbon PhD in Social Psychology)—is a joint collaboration between the several institutions in Lisbon that offer PhDs in social psychology. This means the program got applicants (it is no longer open to applications) from all the institutions involved, and we got to attend classes on all institutions, during our first year. After our first year though, we start working separately from each other, within our own institution. Moreover, depending on the institution, we may be part of a lab that meets more or less regularly, with more or fewer fellow colleagues. This lead students to feel more isolated after the first year, and made the case for having student lab meetings much stronger. When I got on to the program I believed they had already had active meetings, but I also recall their momentum slowing down. I don’t recall exactly when now, but we started to try and get the meetings to happen more frequently and have greater attendance. I’ll be honest, attendance was always an issue, but we did get the meetings to be more regularly, specially when we decided we wouldn’t cancel a lab meeting even if no one had volunteered to present. The meetings also became more and more informal, giving us a place to share and be social. I don’t think I’ll ever forget how they helped me stay sane during the pandemic.
Back in my department, my advisor, Sara Hagá started to host the WriteOn Workshop, a writing workshop developed by Barbara Sarnecka. What made this writing workshop so different is that it didn’t have any lectures. The workshop was also not a one off event, in our case it was a year-long class. In each session, we had quiet writing time, we had a feedback forum, and we commented on Barbara’s blog posts/book chapters. To be clear the format was Barbara’s brainchild, but I think Sara’s execution was great, as well as how she managed to adapt it to our department’s constraints/needs (e.g., the sessions had to be shorter). This writing workshop doesn’t fit the definition of informal groups colleagues I gave at the beginning. It doesn’t fit it yet… Barbara’s plan included the possibility that students would continue meeting informally, after they had participated in a rendition of the workshop. Sara encouraged us to do the same and we ended up forming a group that continued to meet, following more or less (more often less than more) a similar session structure. Many thanks to all the colleagues that accompanied me in that group, for putting up with me, for all the good they did to my mental health, and for the quality writing feedback they provided.
When I was participating in WriteOn, I was reminded of an R summer
school, lectured by Marcelo
Camerlo I had attended over at
ICS. If I recall correctly, Marcelo had
suggested we set up an R user group where we could share code, tips,
and tricks about using R for data analysis. To the best of my
knowledge, that never materialized, but the idea seems to have stuck in
my mind. I remember thinking how WriteOn’s session structure could be
adapted for an R user group. We could have quiet writingcoding
time, we could discuss blog posts/resources on R, and we could give
feedback on each other’s writingcode. I discuss this idea with
Magda Sofia Roberto, and with
former LiSPer Cristina
Mendonça, when we were planning
several training initiatives on data analysis, for our department.
I ended up giving a workshop on linear mixed models over at our research
center—CICPSI. I pitched
the idea of forming an R user group, and thanks to all the people that
joined, RUGGED was born (stay tuned as I’ll
probably write even more about RUGGED in the
future). Seeing RUGGED grow, and seeing my
colleagues contributing to RUGGED
projects has been amazing! I look
forward to our meetings and to seeing our
projects starting to take shape.
If this sounds like the sort of group you’d like to be part of, take
a look at RUGGED’s onboarding
page.
I hope this has been enough to persuade you to at least consider joining or creating such a group. Take your time to think, but don’t hesitate reaching out to your colleagues to if they want to set up such a group. If you know of groups that exist already, or feel like joining RUGGED, go for it! In case you’re a senior… well you can always set up a group with other seniors…but you can also encourage the juniors that you mentor to form such a group. Suggesting that they form a group will show them you care for them, and you’re not trying to divide and conquer. It will signal that you understand what they’re going through, and that you’re the type of person they can reach out to. If you do it right it, their group will not serve to keep them from engaging with you and with other seniors, but as place where older colleagues tell newcomers the seniors in the group are open and nice to juniors. I mean, I can’t guarantee it will always work out that way, nor that nasty things like bullying won’t happen in the group… Still, bad things can always happen, we can only work to build good ones and incentivize others to do the same. Anyway… If you’re a senior, I would also like to encourage you to say that you’re free to come to one of their meetings should they ever wish to speak to a more experienced person, about what’s like working in the field. If you’re junior, I would suggest inviting seniors over to one or more meetings about career development.
Now that I’ve made my case, and shared my experiences let me just give you some tips and tricks on how to manage informal groups before I sign off. I see myself as severely lacking in social skills (other than public speaking which I weirdly enjoy), so I would take my advice on how to build and manage informal groups with a large grain of salt. Still, I would like to share with you what has worked well for the groups I participate/d in.
In my experience, skipping meetings leads to an erratic schedule, and keeps people from setting a recurrent event in their schedule, and in their memory. This is particularly problematic for lab meetings or meetings where there’s a rotation of who is speaking that week. As soon as you start canceling meetings because there’s no volunteers to present you run the risk of having an erratic meeting schedule. Moreover, you risk creating the incentive for people not to volunteer just so they can get out of another meeting. If you have an informal group, that aims to be an environment for sharing and letting off some steam, not meeting because no one volunteered to present sends the message that you’re all business (since you’re not meeting when there’s no business to discuss).
When you feel like meeting every week is to much of a burden on everyone’s schedule, you consider meeting biweekly (as in once every two weeks not twice a week). This gives you a better shot at not skipping meetings. I feel like meeting less than twice a month runs the risk of being harder for people to track of when you’re meeting, and to setup a recurrent event in their memory and schedule. If you’re meeting biweekly, my advice is that if you ever skip a meeting (which I advise against) you refrain from anticipating the next one, as that means reconfiguring the recurring event on people’s schedules.
I confess I suck at following this advice, as I’m usually the reason the meeting gets prolonged after everyone already wants to leave. Do as I say, not as I do I guess. Meaning, try to keep the meetings short, not too short so that people don’t get a chance to share, just try to leave people wanting more, instead of feeling like the meeting went on for too long. When people feel like the meetings extend for far too long they are less likely to come, particularly if they feel busy. This is also a cultural thing as we Portuguese have the habit of long saying very goodbyes, and continue to bring up new topics after we’ve said goodbye ten times already (I’m very guilty of this myself).
If you’re the one who started the group, or if you’re spearheading its logistics it is easy to feel like other people are not as involved as you are. I know that can feel sad, but I advise you to try and make your peace with that. Maybe, if you think about it, you’re less involved in other groups than other people there. Regardless, if you want the group to be informal, showing you want them to contribute, but you’re not pressuring them to, makes them feel valuable but not pressured. Again, I’m probably guilty of pressuring people to contribute and participate more than they want to, but I am trying to change that.
Thank you so much for reading!
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