Bad group meetings

In my brief time as a chemistry student, I've seen two types of group meetings. In one, many people in the group describe what they've been working on for the past couple of weeks on a chalkboard. Most groups in the Berkeley chemistry department are large enough that they do the more formal style of group meeting: a different person in the group will give a hour-long talk with slides every week. Probably the most awkward situation I've been in in graduate school has been the bad formal group meeting.

Many people in graduate school worry about not getting enough done on their projects. Even though people in the "synthetic" groups (at Berkeley, this term doesn't mean solely natural products or inorganic synthesis, but rather is a catch-all for the non-physical half of the department) work a fair amount--60 hours is probably typical in an average week--there's always this worry about not having enough done. I think the graduate students would be happier if they could turn this thought process off--it just drives them to work harder and harder and to never be satisfied. Everyone goes through unproductive periods, but most students tend to make reasonable progress despite their worrying otherwise. Occasionally, though, people really haven't been putting in the time--or have been using their time poorly--and it shows. If a group meeting normally runs sixty minutes and you only have enough results to talk for thirty, it's kind of obvious. So to lengthen their talks, people in such a situation generally pad it--usually with a combination of excessive background information and planned experiments. These things are good to include in a talk to a reasonable extent, but when you spend three quarters of your time talking about things you haven't done, everyone realizes what's going on.

Another thing that can ruin a group meeting is a lack of peripheral knowledge. Some students work on their projects passionately and devotedly, but myopically. This is especially true when the goal of a project is very specific--for example, "synthesize molecule X." In such cases, I've seen students (this described me as an undergraduate, as well) map out a plan of how to accomplish their goal and then follow it stubbornly. But they don't spend enough time reading the relevant literature to be able to contextualize their project well: what larger questions do they want to answer? How will the knowledge gained from this project complement the body of knowledge in the field? Most importantly in terms of accomplishing well-defined goals, what recent discoveries support, refute, or complicate the evidence that the plan sketched out at the outset is an appropriate way to pursue the goals of the project? In a total synthesis project, this might involve another group publishing a method to perform a key transformation that would normally take several steps to complete. In a biochemical context, it might involve the discovery of a new enzyme in the pathway under study. Questions related to these types of discoveries naturally come up at a group meeting, and it shakes my confidence in what someone is telling me if I ask a pretty basic question and I get an "I don't know" or, worse, if their response has to be corrected by someone else in the audience.

From what I've seen and heard, most advisers are polite enough not to call someone out on a poor group meeting. In the bad group meetings I've been to (I've seen one that was awful and another that was kind of bad), the adviser tends not to ask many questions and sort of plows through the group meeting in an attempt to get it over with. Of course, I have no idea what happens in private later on.