Meetings and scheduling

Eleanor’s public facing calendar is here.

If you’re a student or collaborator, or have already received an e-mail from Eleanor about meeting, please either (i) use the Calendly link or (ii) e-mail Eleanor directly to suggest a timeslot which is empty or marked “Free” on my calendar. Otherwise, please contact Francisca Terrassa.

Group meetings

We meet weekly (typically on Thursdays) as a full group in 253. Prospective group members are recommended to join a meeting. During term time, postdocs and graduate students are expected to attend.

• The first meeting of the month is a ‘general update’ meeting, where each group member can give an update. These can be something cool you learned or did this week, a problem you want group input on, or a technical point.
• Other meetings are topic-based including science talks by group members, fieldwork updates, workshopping figures, discussing curriculum and teaching, methods, writing proposals or general skills items (e.g. practicing elevator pitches for students).

Individual meetings with Eleanor

All group members are invited to schedule meetings using the calendly link http://calendly.com/eleanorfrajka. This automatically adds the meeting to my calendar and sends you a confirmation e-mail that you can use to cancel or change the meeting.

• When you sign up for a meeting, please try to put it at the start or end of the available time range, so that meetings are back-to-back. This allows me to get on with focused tasks outside of regular meetings.
• When you sign up for a meeting, please use your name (possibly followed by the purpose of the meeting).
• If you no longer need the meeting, please cancel it using the cancellation link in the confirmation e-mail.
• For additional notes on online meetings, see here.

Suggested meeting frequency:

• Postdocs and PhD students, up to weekly for 1 hour,
• MSc and BSc students, up to every-other-week for 30 minutes.

In special circumstances, additional meetings can be scheduled, for instance if you are stuck and have exhausted other available resources (including other group members) to get unstuck. If none of the times in Calendly work for you, then let Eleanor/Francisca know.

Availability

This quarter, my regular availability for group members and collaborators is:

• Mondays 12:30-16:00
• Tuesdays 14:00-16:30
• Wednesdays 10am-11am and 12:30-16:30

for 30-minute and 55-minute meetings, bookable with my Calendly link (external). These are bookable 60 days into the future, and up to 1 day before the date. Choose the length according to your agenda for the meeting, but note that MSc and BSc meetings are normally 30 minutes. These times may also be scheduled for recurring meetings with group members and sub-teams.

‘Office hours’ are bookable by group members as well as UHH students using the office hours link (external). These are bookable 2 weeks into the future and up to the time of start. Drop-in is possible, but prior bookings take priority.

• Tuesdays 13:15-14:00
• Wednesdays 11:00-noon
• Thursdays 13:30-15:00

For group members and collaborators (especially those in different time zones), if these times don’t work for you, please let me know.

For others (i.e., not group members, collaborators or UHH students), please contact Francisca Terrassa to schedule a meeting.

Other meeting notes

Meeting preparation

Please arrive prepared for all meetings.

• You should typically prepare a few slides in advance of the meeting, starting with an agenda/goal of meeting slide, the relevant scientific content, and a what’s next/to-do slide to close. The agenda slide should list all distinct points that you would like to cover during the meeting, so that we don’t spend too much time on one point and fail to get to all points.

• Plan to take notes during the meeting, in whatever format you prefer. One way to do this would be to add notes onto the slides themselves, or at the end of the slide deck, so that the slides become a running record of meetings, feedback and plans for next steps.

• For students, please keep a running list of upcoming deadlines on the agenda slide (e.g., reports or talks due as part of the thesis process).

• After the meeting, please share a PDF version of your slides to a shared OwnCloud folder. The slides should have the meeting date in the filename, e.g. ‘‘20240108_Lastname.pdf’’.

Calendar invites

For non-Calendly meetings, please use a digital calendar to schedule meetings (e.g., outlook or google calendar). The calendar invite should include a short and useful event name. For instance, if you have a panel meeting coming up, please don’t simply call it ‘Panel meeting’, but something like ‘Kate Panel Meeting’. The meeting invite should include a zoom link (if applicable) in the location field, and an agenda or bullet points for discussion in the ’notes’ section of the invite.

• All UHH members should have access to outlook calendars. You can find yours via this Outlook on the Web link.

• To send an outlook invite using Outlook on the Web, see Schedule with outlook on the web (external). Add my e-mail address in the ‘invite people’ section (eleanor.frajka@uni-hamburg.de).

• To send an outlook invite using the desktop application for Outlook, follow these instructions Create a meeting in Outlook (external).

• If you use a google calendar, you can send the invite following these instructions Invite people to your calendar event (external). Again, use my e-mail address (eleanor.frajka@uni-hamburg.de) in the ‘guests’ field.

If you need to cancel a meeting, you should be able to delete it from your calendar and select “send update” or “update invitees” when you delete it, so that it is also deleted from my calendar. If you don’t see this option, then please e-mail me when you cancel a meeting so that I know not to expect you.

Online meetings

For online meetings, I prefer Zoom. I am able to use Teams meetings, but only through a web browser, which has limited functionality.

For zoom meetings, please add me as a contact in zoom. See ‘Adding and managing Zoom contacts’ (external). This is straightforward with the desktop client for zoom. Once added (and once I have confirmed), I should show up in your “External” list of contacts. With contacts, it is possible to start a video call by clicking the small video camera icon next to the name (i.e., it is not necessary to create zoom links for each meeting).

Panel meetings

Especially for student panel meetings, but may be applicable to other multi-person meetings. Note that PhD panel meetings should typically be scheduled 1-2 months in advance.

Scheduling a multi-person meeting via e-mail rarely works. Two options to schedule:

1. Contact Francisca Terrassa for my availability.

2. Use a doodle (external) or when2meet (external) poll (or other), to identify times of overlap. When you send the request, please also include a (relatively short) deadline by which time you’ll close the poll (1-2 weeks), request input from folks who haven’t responded, and lock down the meeting time. If I have filled out availability on multiple doodle polls, and it takes a long time to confirm, my availability may have changed by the time you pick a date/time.