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When I was a PhD student, I would sign up for 15 minute slots with my advisor, power through the meeting and be out quickly. Sometimes they ran 5-10 minutes over but generally they were highly efficient. Now I'm a new jr faculty member with undergrads and PhD students. So far I rarely finish talking with a student in less than 45 minutes. How the heck can I make these meetings more efficient?

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    Perhaps mention your field, and how often you meet with your advisor. I am in math, and my meetings with my advisor usually ran a full hour, one every couple of weeks. A fifteen-minute slot seems really short from my prespective.
    – Terry Loring
    Commented Mar 1, 2022 at 20:24
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    It sounds like you are combining two categories of office hours, namely those with graduate student advisees and those with undergrads taking a course you are teaching. There might be positive ways to make meetings with your graduate students more "efficient", but I feel somewhat strongly that attempts to do so with undergrads may have negative impacts on their learning and comfort. This is a matter of taste (and possibly field dependent), but in my field (math), it is already difficult to get students to attend office hours, and yet more difficult to get them to feel comfortable asking for..
    – Alex Wertheim
    Commented Mar 3, 2022 at 1:17
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    ...help. Attempts to make these meetings more (time?) efficient for you might give students the (unintended?) impression that you do not view helping them as a worthy use of your time. I'm not saying it's not worth trying to optimize meetings with your students, but I do think it's important to consider the message these efforts may send to people who are struggling, vulnerable, and looking for your help.
    – Alex Wertheim
    Commented Mar 3, 2022 at 1:23
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    What is inefficient about these meetings? Time spent in a meeting alone is not really a measure of efficiency. If 45 minute meetings are very productive, then great! Don't cut down on time just for the sake of it. If you want more detailed advice, it would help to understand what takes up time in these meetings.
    – Michael Mior
    Commented Mar 3, 2022 at 18:15
  • @AlexWertheim: I agree. A graduate student and undergrad meetings are/should be very different. As an undergrad, I didn't know what I didn't know, and I didn't necessarily know how to ask for what I needed help with. Often I'd take several minutes to simply formulate/talk around/explain what I needed to ask about. Also, if you want efficiency with undergrad students, why not block off an hour or two, and have multiple students at once. It was helpful for me as an undergrad to hear the questions of my peers, and those questions answers as well, which would at times spark new questions for me.
    – sharur
    Commented Mar 3, 2022 at 18:17

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Some years ago, when I often had several PhD students at the same time (though at different stages of their projects), I would run a seminar meeting at least one day a week, and in the summertime five days a week, for perhaps two hours. This was aimed at addressing common issues my people would have.

It would also help them refine their own specific questions, for our weekly one-hour one-on-one meetings.

(I've found that in many cases there is an inescapable "human inefficiency" in PhD-student meetings, insofar as there is "life interfering with mathematics", and, in my opinion, it is important for an advisor to lend a sympathetic ear... before talking about the mostly-more-solvable problems of mathematics.)

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Three principles I found useful:

  1. Always have an agenda (including outcomes) beforehand. What does the student need help with? What needs to be decided for the project to move forward etc.?
  2. Ask the student to submit something in writing before the meeting, even as short as a paragraph or bullet point list. Use this to define the agenda (and outcomes).
  3. Stick to the agenda if possible. If new points come up that can't be resolved impromptu, schedule a new meeting and possibly ask for some preparation by the student beforehand (and of course do your own preparation).

15 minutes seems short though.

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I wonder whether a lot of very short meetings is "more efficient" than fewer, longer, ones. You have to keep changing focus.

What a lot of us did was schedule office hours for (non doctoral) students and let them come during those slots. Some number of hours per week was required. I didn't plan on being "productive" in research during those hours. If only one or two show up you can let them fill the time. If a lot show up you can have a group discussion. I've had a group of five or so sitting at my feet in a general exchange. You probably have to reserve some of the time available for more personal issues (grades, health, ...) that can't be done as a group but those sorts of things can be short in any case.

This may not work for doctoral students, however, and you may need to use an individual plan. I'm surprised that you say that 10-15 minutes was ok for doctoral students. Somehow the scale seems wrong. And the scale is very different in any case. It actually feels like the advisor was micromanaging, though you don't say it was a large lab in which that might occur.

For someone who has a lot of doctoral students at the same time (never my bad luck) it might be worth organizing them so that they can collectively answer their own question. Perhaps the more senior students can mentor the newer ones. That isn't a bad thing in any case.

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    If the prof wants weekly 15-min 1:1 meetings, that's very likely a bad case of micromanagement. If the student initiates that, with one or two well prepared questions, it's probably far more efficient than (bi)monthly meetings that take half a day. To begin with, it's no problem to cancel such a meeting, or postpone for two days, if prof or student is sick/unprepared/on a spontaneous holiday/has a bad-hair-day etc.
    – Karl
    Commented Mar 2, 2022 at 23:45
  • On the other hand, daily standups are used quite frequently to check on people's statuses in the software world, the idea of a quick ~5 minute daily check-in to resolve any blockers would probably be helpful and not micromanagey.
    – Robin Clower
    Commented Mar 4, 2022 at 15:06

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