In lab vernacular, few words can elicit a fiery range of emotions like group meeting.  Fear, panic, apathy, anger, frustration, embarrassment and nausea are not uncommon responses as a graduate student or postdoc reads the lab schedule and realizes theyre up next week.  While some will feel they havent had enough time to obtain new data, others will feel a tremendous amount of pressure since its their only talk of the year.  But whos to say how many group meetings we should give in a year? You.

Given the diversity in group meeting structures throughout universities and companies, its unreasonable to impose a one-size-fits-all method to running group meeting.  The large size of some labs results in an annual or semi-annual group meeting presentation.  On the other hand, smaller labs often prefer to run more of a round-table format where all members share their results or problems each week.  Visit 10 different labs and youll probably find as many variations on their group meeting structures.

While PIs will argue correctly that group meetings provide an opportunity to practice giving seminars, communicating research and receiving constructive criticism, students generally see them as a time-consuming nuisance that seems to come around too frequently.  But, unlike Congress, surely we can compromise.  There must be a number of talks that would provide us with the needed practice and preparation, while not wasting too much of our time in unnecessary preparation.

Should we find consensus on the correct number of group meeting seminars to give each year, perhaps labs would be willing to modify their group meeting structure to accommodate the results.  We can all agree that requiring a daily group meeting seminar from each lab member would be a bit over the top so hopefully the resulting data would convince any labs employing this schedule to move the meeting to a less frequent timetable.

What do you think?  At what point does giving group meeting become more of a burden than a benefit?

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