For about the past 6 years, I’ve done a State-of-the-Lab presentation with my lab group every January. This is not my original idea, but one I stole from my former colleague Carolyn Coyne. Its a fantastic way to summarize the year that just ended and plan for the next. I’m able to pull up last year’s presentation and see - did we accomplish what we set out to last year? If not, why or why not? Now that I’ve been in my career for 15 years now, I can reflect on a yearly basis. I alway know what I want to accomplish in the upcoming year, but in some years, goals get changed in ways that are out of my control (the SOTL that I gave in January 2020 quickly got thrown out the window lol!). I make a point to communicate to my lab that there are goals that I have for all of us (i.e. progress/grants/papers on certain projects) but that there are also goals that I have for MYSELF so that they can understand the process that I go through and how we are all learning/changing all the time (even the PI). Some goals are small and some are big. Its important to have a range. What I’ve realized is that some years are focused more on grants and others are focused more on publications (its very hard to focus on BOTH at the same time - that’s just reality). We’ve collectively worked on a lot of papers the past 6-8 months. While most of them are not quite ready to submit, they are all getting close, so 2024 should be a banner publication year! Feedback from my lab folks over the years is that they really like the SOTL. So I better get working on it :-)
January 17 is our SOTL date for this year!