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Weekly Reflection Report

Anybody doing lab research should submit a reflection report ONCE a week. There is no separate submission system. Instead, it is one Google Docs document that you maintain on your own. The idea of a standup meeting (or scrum/agile development) comes from the software engineering industry. You get together and talk about what you did the day before and what you will do on the particular day. For us, because we don't get together in the same place at the same time (maybe we should?), we do this virtually, submitting a brief report in Google Docs every week.

The goals of submitting weekly reflection reports are as follows.

  1. self-reflection
  2. practicing planning of tasks
  3. practicing estimating how long it will take to complete a task
  4. public communication of your work with your peers

You can use it to recall what you have done in the last few days and to plan what you are going to do for the next few days. If you have done nothing, and if you are not going to do anything at all, still submit it with empty parts. We value transparency and accountability; even not being able to make any progress should be something that you planned or something that you can positively reflect upon.

Here is Emily Altland's (M.S. 2024) example is my favorite! https://docs.google.com/document/d/170PYIIH5NotZxWtVvJBOmBCSJKPpd04te-xEcTdDO3A/edit?tab=t.0 Here's mine for an example. (*I am a human too; sometimes I miss it) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N-ZmQmT8xEsg505AimIq-J7GCQ3U4YikXkNrF3saGZs/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.vt1c8rlsal9h mine for 2019-2023: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EO2XXR6bZZyXOKme2mdsm88cS127w5XA_Rot2PvszxE/edit#heading=h.48f1tl4mn89e

Guildline

  • The report will be shared within the lab. You can learn what other folks are doing by reading this.
  • (Optional) On the top of the document, maintain a long-term to-do list with an associated due date or useful links.
  • The weekly reports should appear in reverse chronological order (the most recent one at the top).
    • Each report starts with the date of submission
    • It should contain the following four sections
      • (completed) the tasks that were completed since the this week
      • (plan/in-progress) the tasks that you will work on until the end of next week standup
      • (agenda) things that you want to discuss with Sang in the next meeting
      • (on-the-horizon) the tasks that you do not want to forget although you will not work on it this week
      • (blockers) anything that kept (or keeps) you from making progress (e.g., illness, too much course workload, mid-term exam, interviews, collaborators, emotional challenges). Note that this report is open to your colleagues, so you should not write anything that you cannot open to peers for any reason.
      • (Reflection) Write down something that you felt during a particular week.
    • Anything that is written in the report should be a verifiable fact. A fact is a statement that can be verified. It can be proven to be true or false through objective evidence. Any task should produce an artifact (typically digital artifacts - file, document, file, annotated pdfs, pictures of whiteboard)
    • Example 1 ) "Some ideas through brainstorming" is true only if there is a document that has a list of ideas
    • Example 2 ) "Read one paper" is true only if they wrote a summary and reflection (evidence).
    • Example 3 ) "Spent some time to explore ideas" can never be a fact because you cannot prove it with evidence.
    • Example 4 ) "Looking into Matlab" can never be a task - it does not produce an artifact.
    • You may say there are certain types of works that are not visible even after you complete it. For example, reading someone else's code can be it. If so, change the way you work so that your putting effort into something will ALWAYS generate some sort of artifact. (e.g., if you read someone else's code, document the code with comments, come up with some test cases that you ran, or even capture your screen). This is obviously better for collaboration and also better for yourself because you collaborate with yourself (from the past or in the future).
  • if a task appears in the (plan/in-progress), your goal is to make the item appear in the (completed) section by the next time that you submit the report.

    • Try your best to avoid having any task items that you are not going to do.

    • The purpose of the "plan" part of the weekly reflection report is to practice planning and estimating. Eventually, getting an independent researcher. (or becoming a competent professional) is being an "independent researcher (or independent problem-solver)." "independence* is the essential component here. You need to be able to identify what to do, plan ahead, estimate the completion time, and execute the plan.

    • This part of the report is for you to practice identifying/planning/estimating and improving your capability to estimate a doable unit of work that can be done by a certain time. I advise you to avoid over-promising (write the whole paper vs. write one paragraph of the paper) or vague plans ( e.g., read more papers/work on programming / start working on vs. reading CHI 2019 by Guo et al. paper/writing code for prototyping). Rather, I would rather like an honest plan - for example, "not planning to work until next Friday due to the blocker."

    • This is not a "promise" but a "plan." Things work differently than planned. If you cannot do a particular task by within a week, decompose the task into subtasks that can be done by then. I would like you to be good at planning, estimating how long it will take to complete a task, and decomposing a task into subtasks.

  • If you have done nothing for a particular period, submit an empty report. Missing reports completely occasionally is fine as long as it is not regular. Unexpected things happen. However, if it becomes a habit, you want to keep track of this behavior and reflect on it, too.
  • I will review the document and leave comments on the report from time to time, but typically, I don't check them. This is a self-paced/self-regulated activity. However, I read this whenever I must evaluate a student (undergraduate research credits, student annual report, recommendation letter).