Lab Rotations
Setting up your research rotations
First year students generally rotate through three labs (one during each quarter). Students are expected to set these up by approaching faculty members they may be interested in working with, either during the fall department retreat or during the quarter prior to the desired rotation.
Please do not feel pressured to set up your lab rotations before you arrive. You are of course welcome to contact faculty ahead of time to discuss your mutual research interests and possible lab rotations, but autumn quarter rotations will not be confirmed until after the department retreat.
Please follow this link for a complete list of GS training faculty. Faculty members who are not on this list are not eligible to serve as thesis advisors for GS grads. You may, however, have outside faculty as members of your supervisory committee. Note that not all training faculty will attend the fall retreat, so if you know prior to the retreat that you are interested in a particular lab, you may want to email the PI prior to the retreat and determine whether you’ll need to schedule a separate meeting with them.
Rotation availability is posted here and will be updated every couple of weeks. This list is simply intended to provide a rough estimate of faculty rotation availability. Please use this as an estimate, rather than set-in-stone availability. This document will be updated as responses are received.
Advice for contacting and interviewing potential rotation PIs
Although all PIs have different expectations and preferences, the best way to email a potential advisor is to be direct and say that you might be interested in rotating with them during X or Y quarters. Your introductory email should briefly summarize your interests and background, mention any GS labs you’ve previously rotated in, include an attached CV, and state why you’re interested in this particular lab, perhaps citing recent papers or research topics listed on the lab website that you find particularly interesting.
When you meet with a prospective PI, they’ll likely ask you questions to help them decide whether you might be a good candidate for their lab. It’s also important for you to interview the PI and consider whether you would really want to spend 4+ years working with them. Below are some topics to consider bringing up–you don’t need to ask all of these questions, but do address the ones that seem like they could impact whether you’ll want to join the lab:
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What are your expectations of your grad students? (You might ask this as an open ended question before asking about specific topics such as the ones listed below.)
- How many hours per week do you expect your students to work? How much flexibility do they have to set their own work hours and work remotely? How do you handle vacation and sick time?
- How often do your students meet with you and their other mentors? How do you feel about students knocking on your office door and sending you messages outside of formal scheduled meeting times?
- What kinds of hands-on training do students get and what kinds of things are they expected to figure out on their own?
- How many papers have your last few students published and how long did it take them to graduate?
- Do you think I have enough experience to be successful in your lab? (If you are considering a computational rotation with little computational experience, or considering a wet lab rotation with little wet lab experience, it’s wise to bring that up and ask the PI how they’d advise you to build the skills you’ll need)
- How many rotation students are you expecting to take this year? How many of those could you take on as dissertation students? (you shouldn’t expect the PI to firmly commit to taking a certain number of students, but this will make you aware whether you might be competing with others to join this lab)
- What are your expectations of rotation students? If I’m interested in joining the lab, how will you decide whether to take me on?
- How do you expect your students to balance their time between their main thesis project and other commitments like side projects, course work, and TA work?
- How much time do you encourage your students to spend on outreach work, professional development, and conferences?
- How do you train your students to write grants and papers?
- Do your students generally work on big team projects or smaller independent projects? How do project topics and aims get chosen?
- What are some things that help students be successful in your lab?
Although this is a long list of questions, it is also not exhaustive. After reading through these ideas, you might realize that your most pressing questions are not on the list, and if so, you should make sure to ask them before deciding which lab to rotate in.
During your rotation
By the time you decide which lab to join, you should already have discussed expectations with your PI, but before the rotation begins, it’s a good idea to meet with them again and review their expectations for the 10-week rotation period. The only formal department-level expectation for your rotation is that you must give a 10-minute talk that will be scheduled as part of the Research Reports series during the last two weeks of the quarter. Please check the Research Reports schedule for your presentation date.
Aside from this talk, all other expectations will be negotiated with your specific PI. These will vary among PIs but will generally include attending a lab meeting every week, perhaps attending other lab events such as journal clubs, and spending a significant amount of time working on the research problem that you have been given to work on. In addition to making progress on your research, it is important to spend time in your assigned lab space getting to know your potential lab mates and getting a feel for the lab culture. Although your course work is important, spending time on your research rotation is at least as important and should not be neglected when you have assignments due.
A few weeks into your rotation, it is a good idea to ask your PI how they think you’re doing and whether they have advice on better balancing your time among your competing first-year obligations. At the same time, you can bring up any needs of your own that are not being met.
Choosing a permanent lab
Dissertation lab decisions may not be formally made until after May 15. That said, at the end of each rotation, it’s a good idea to ask your PI for feedback on how your rotation went. If you still think you might be interested in joining this lab, you’re welcome to ask whether the PI would be likely to take you as a student. Many PIs will not give a firm answer to this after a fall or winter rotation (and in fact cannot until after May 15), depending on their funding situation and how many other students might be rotating in their labs, but they might roughly indicate the likelihood that they will take you on. If you get the sense that many students might be competing for a lab you’re interested in (which is usually not the case for most labs), you might want to pick a less oversubscribed lab for one of your subsequent rotations.
During the last month of spring quarter, you can ask any of your three rotation advisors for a meeting to discuss the possibility of joining their lab. Feel free to do this with any or all of your advisors if you’re still interested in them–asking for this meeting does not imply a commitment on your part.At this time, most PIs should be able to give you a firm answer about whether or not they can accept you. If one or more PIs agree to accept you, you should decide which lab to join before your final rotation talk and notify all advisors as well as the graduate program director of your decision. However, if none of your three rotation labs has room for you or if you decide that none of them is what you’re looking for, you still have the option to choose a 4th lab for a summer research rotation.
Doing a 4th rotation
Although most students will join their permanent lab in the summer of their first year, a few students will spend the summer doing a 4th rotation. Generally, you will not schedule a 4th rotation unless you have decided not to pursue thesis work in any of your first three rotation labs. If you do need to set up a 4th rotation, you should contact faculty in the same way you did with your first three rotations, and the expectation is that you should join this lab at the end of the summer unless either you or your advisor is unsatisfied with the match. This means that when a PI agrees to take you on for a 4th rotation, they should not be saying that they might be able to take you if a certain grant comes through–they should tell you that they expect to take you on unless your summer research progress is not satisfactory.
Since a summer rotation is more of a commitment than a regular school-year rotation, you should expect PIs to take a bit longer to get back to you regarding whether they’ll be able to host you, as they are more likely to want to contact your references and run projections on their financial situations. For this reason, if you expect to do a summer rotation, you should start contacting potential PIs as soon as possible–don’t wait until the very end of the spring quarter.