More importantly when I have many people on my end (e.g. When I’m the only person my end of a call, I will use a headset ( I use this one but there are many for around $25). The multiparty skype call seems to be tailor made for maintaining momentum and group dynamics after everybody goes home ( as I’ve noted a major challenge in working groups).Ī few things I’ve learned the hard way along the way: But email falls apart when you have 5 or 10 people still trying to coordinate things. Go home, and one or two people did specific tasks, emailing each other. But the big change I’ve noticed is that the working groups I participate in now have a new modality – they continue to function as a large group after the face-to-face meeting is over. And it lets me to continue to mentor students that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to interact with (although that could happen over the phone too, although I think the video is beneficial). It certainly reduces my carbon footprint to be smaller than it would be otherwise (even if it is already too big). But as technology has gotten better (and cheaper), skype/google seems to be an ever growing presence in science. Basically travel to meet in person once a year, and then email. Then as a graduate student and early career professor, somehow I seemed to get by with just email Word track changes for all my collaborations. Back a couple of decades ago when I was in business, I spent a lot of time on the phone (usually one-on-one but a fair number of speakerphone and conference calls too). spouses that can’t get jobs in my university town) but want to maintain a mentoring relationship, there is really no choice these days.
If you like collaborations and believe in students having lives outside the lab (e.g. My lab meeting is on skype every week as well. And I have two postdocs and a graduate student who live in other states for personal reasons and who I meet with weekly on Skype. I am part of three collaborations that have weekly one hour calls. I now average more than five hours a week on Skype (or Google Hangouts – I’m using skype as a generic verb here). I am not seriously suggesting that skyping is a central feature of being a scientist. Although even I recognize some limits to that argument, I was quite serious in suggesting that measurement and numeration is a central feature of being a scientist. A few weeks ago I suggested that I am a scientist because I put numbers on things.
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