When I was in grad school, for one or two semesters, our entire lab would set aside an hour each week to play bridge. There were just four of us at the time, and I suspect my advisor organized this just because he wanted folks to play bridge with. None of us knew how to play, so he gave us the file to play Bridge with Omar Sharif on our Macs so maybe we’d be better competition. The level of play was usually below him, but it was still fun. Two of the other grad students were not as geographically or personally connected to the lab (living one or two towns away, and also married to spouses who did other things elsewhere), so this was a way of making sure that we had a bit of sociality together. It was good times.
We run research labs very differently now than we did back then, and I think most of these changes have been for better. For example: The concept of “mentoring” wasn’t really something people thought about. It’s possible for many postdocs to work remotely. We have professionalized what it means to be a grad student, which means that many more grad students are unionized and have more leverage to expect a reasonable workload. More people are recognizing that volunteer labor powering research projects results in inequitably distributed opportunities and makes the playing field even more uneven. The pandemic brought new attention towards how our personal lives affect our professional lives, and vice versa, resulting in a healthy new set of boundaries.
In the midst of throwing out some harmful norms, some helpful ones got tossed out at the same time. A lot of departments recently lost of culture of students (and faculty) showing up for weekly seminars. Being at seminar - and the conversations that happen at the pre- and after-gatherings, is a huge part of social glue. Beyond this, based on a lot of conversations I’ve had with friends all over the place, a lot of us have had a harder time building and maintaining a sense of community in research labs. I think it’s always been true that the greatest resource in a lab isn’t necessarily the person with the name on the door, but the people with just a couple years more seniority than you. There’s a lot that we’ve learned from these folks, and there’s a lot that we can share with others who were in our place a couple years ago. For example, one friend told me that his new PhD students are struggling because they don’t have effective models of students to work with, like they have in the past before the pandemic, because social interactions in the lab aren’t happening like they used to. And we know there’s a big difference between your advisor telling you something is important, and you realizing that it’s important, and experienced peers make the difference.
I think in many places, the pandemic broke the cultural transmission of how to be a graduate student, and it’s a lot more common for students to show up and not have a strong community. It’s a good thing that we have healthier boundaries between expectations and graduate programs and how we conduct our lives outside the program. But, and I think this is a big but, this means we’ve also lost the social glue that comes with grad students dedicating themselves 24/7 to their academic training. While I imagine some exploitative PIs might yearn for that kind of druidism from their trainees, I hope those days are on their way out and not coming back. Being a grad student is a lot of work, and it’s not a normal job by any means, and unless you have students who are thriving showing junior students how to thrive, then you’ve got to build that into your program.
So how can we create a tighter social glue? We can’t return to the norm of having students dedicate their entire lives and then some to their graduate program, nor should we. I do think it is important to recognize that a graduate program is a workplace but also it’s a training environment that involves a level of personal engagement that one wouldn’t expect from a 9-5 M-F job. I think it’s perfectly reasonable, and maybe even important, to spend some of your private time tinkering around with ideas, reading adjacent material, interacting with others working on similar problems, and hanging out with people in the program. How can this happen for people with caregiver duties, chronic health challenges, and healthy outside-the-lab lives? I think the answer to this is complex, and I’m not ready to write a how-to on this.
But I am ready to tell you in this blog post about a simple thing you can do to narrow this gap: hold fun meetings for people in the lab. Yes, you can hold lab meetings with journal club, talking about new data, planning new experiments, and so on. But can you also make time to play games? Sit around, drink some tea or coffee, have a snack, and talk about the fun thing you did this weekend?
What does a fun meeting look like? In one lab I had the privilege to visit, a few lab groups get together for a ‘bug of the week’ presentation. Though it doesn’t have to be a bug per se (?), it just needs to be a very lighthearted introduction to a weird/cool/curious thing that a critter does. A brief presentation as an excuse to learn out and learn a little something new, and then a chance to chat. Another friend of mine makes out time during the week for board games with folks in the lab. Another lab group has people geographically distributed far apart from one another, so they schedule a brief biweekly (that is, every two weeks) zoom just to chat about non-science. It’s not 100% prescriptive to be there every time, but it’s valuable for them and so they keep it up.
I don’t think we should require lab members to socialize with one another, but should we create environments to foster social interactions among labmates and peers can happen inside the bounds of regular working hours? Absolutely. What does this look like in your lab or department? Any suggestions, please add to the comments!
