Typical agendas for meetings among PhD candidates

Question

The graduate students of my institute want to establish a regular meeting (two hours, once a month) just for themselves.

All of us are happy to have this regular opportunity of sharing ideas & joys & sorrows with regards to research life. However, we are still uncertain about how to ensure that we will have a good agenda for each meeting.

Are there any "best practices", any recommendations on how to best organize such regular meetings? Is it possible to generalize whether there are some agenda structures that usually go well, and others that usually go badly?

For example, would it make sense to have two (voluntary) research-related presentations per meeting, and to leave the rest of the time for feedback & and informal discussions?

Answer 1

In my institute (for context: western Europe, with both experimental and theoretical labs), PhD students would elect one or two delegates or representatives, generally for a one-year term. Their role was to represent PhD students during meetings with PIs and administrative staff, but also to organize monthly PhD meetings. Here is an example of what the agenda of such meetings looked like:

1. Opening
2. Announcements a. Staff changes b. Events c. Others
3. Agree on today’s agenda
4. Comments on minutes previous meeting
5. Election of New PhD representative of the institute.
6. Reparation of the cooling system in the library.
7. Problem with the postdoc email list.
8. Discussion on installation of a vending machine in the institute.
9. Organisation of the PhD and Postdoc retreat
10. Questions and comments
11. Set date for the next PhD meeting
12. End

It is worth noting that our "PhD meetings" were actually for both PhD students and postdocs. Their point was to discuss daily-life problems, and not to do scientific presentations (as most of them were already organized within the institute). The atmosphere was pretty relax, often finishing with a beer on the campus.

Answer 2

The doctoral program where I formerly worked had something not quite like this, though it included both faculty and students. Once a month the students involved in their research (that is, later, not earlier stages) could present their work to the group and get feedback. There wasn't a real agenda, other than that anyone could present and mention any blocks they might have and get some advice from those present.

But an alternative might be to have one (or maybe two) students do something like that with only other students present. This assumes that the meeting focus is on the research and also that people can easily grasp one another's work.

When I was a doctoral student (long ago) my advisor had one other student at the time, a friend of mine. We only grasped the coarse details of one another's work, so this wouldn't have been very valuable without the advisor (and maybe another faculty member) present to comment.

But if the main thing is to share "joys and sorrows", why not just schedule a lunch every month and people can just shoot the breeze, complain about the profs and the job prospects and such like. No agenda necessary except the choice of venue.

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One other thing we did back then that was good for networking was a weekly softball game for grad students and their spouses. That was, of course, cross disciplinary, though within the (large) math department.