goals

The start of a new semester is usually a good time for research groups to take a quick intellectual inventory of the previous months’ accomplishments and to plan ahead for future work. At our first BAND meeting of the spring semester last week, we spent a chunk of time talking about finishing up a new, big batch of letters for publication, as well as looking ahead to see what projects people might move to after the letters are done.

Obviously, from an organizational level, looking ahead is smart in order to prevent any lulls in productivity. But what about personal goals? Student research assistants contribute to ongoing projects, but how can projects contribute to students?