Welcome to the team! 🎉 Whether you're a student, an intern or a colleague, joining a new work environment can be a bit stressful. In order to ease your first days and set you up for the future, we compiled this guide and hope you will find it useful.
The goal of this document is first and foremost to help you acquire the same frame of reference, so you can then understand what we are talking about, the issues we face and the solutions we find. However, it is possible that some of the advice or things here might at first seem weird or useless. Trust us though, it will probably become handy someday 😉
This guide has been crafted by all past and current members of the team. It's our collective legacy, and it will be yours too. As such, by the end of your journey here, we hope that you will leave your mark on this document, by updating / improving / revising some of its content. Don't worry, you will see how to do that later.
We rely on a lot on internal communication (about stuff more or less related to work 😁), on our ability to keep on learning and improving, on a cool and collaborative working environment, and try to strive for the highest standards in terms of scientific quality and honesty. We are strongly committed to open science by sharing our code, documentation, data and expertise. After all, science is a collective enterprise.
On a more abstract level, I believe in what we call the three-fold neuropsychology skillset. In short, a neuropsychologist (and, by extension, people working on related topics - which is what we do in the lab) should aim (when applicable) at developing 3 types of expertise: theoretical knowledge (a diversified knowledge and understanding of the psychological and neuroscientific theories, frameworks and their history), technical skills (statistics, programming, neuroimaging, signal processing, ...), and practical/clinical abilities (assessment of both patients and healthy participants, handling of participants in experiments, therapy & rehabilitation, knowledge about neuro/psychopathology, ...). Of course, some of it (e.g., working with patients, or acquiring some software development skills) might not be feasible given the project/grade you're in. Don't worry, in any case, we will do the best we can to help you get as close as possible to your objectives.
We believe in individuality. Everybody has their own preferred organization and other life prerogatives. Some are night owlers and others are early birds, some have day hobbies and others night passions; some have other people to take care of (children, parents, ...) and some have themselves (which can be a lot). We should not expect each other to work regularly from 9-5 every day, or to be available at all times. I will sometimes send emails in the evening or on the weekends, because that's how I work. That does not mean you should check or reply immediately: do work when you decide to and aim for a varied lifestyle. If something is super urgent, I'll make it explicit by pre-empting the message with [URGENT] (but it never happened so far).
I'm not sure what I should do and what my tasks are / I feel kinda lost
Send us a message and let us know, we're likely unaware of that!
There's too much work for me or There's not enough work for me
Send us a message and let us know, we're likely unaware of that!
In summary, for any reason, do not hesitate to drop us a message! Communication is key. Otherwise, any unaddressed issue can build up and create unnecessary stress or problems.
I sent a message but nobody answered...
Don't hesitate to send us a reminder (after a reasonable delay). There's usually a lot going on so it happens that we miss or skip things... it's not against you. And we'll be thankful that you reminded us.
I don't agree with someone else
Good, that means you're breaking out of the echo chamber. We all have a tendency to surround ourselves with people and information that validates us and our beliefs. But that's no way to improve, grow, and become a better person. University was created to challenge our current viewpoints, and expose ourselves to a realm of new possibilities. Challenge can sometimes make us feel uncomfortable, but it's okay: we are all endowed with emotion regulation abilities, communication skills, and a supporting team to rely on :)
Here's a list of things to do during your first days. It is expected that you do them (unless specified otherwise). If you're not sure, do not hesitate to ask.
We recommend reading a few posts to better understand the lab's scope and history:
- Create a profile with all of the following social networks
It might not be good news if you're an introvert who prefers to stay anonymous on the internet, but doing research at our lab will require you to build a public persona and engage openly with the world of research. In general, academia is very social, and a lot of the good stuff happens on social media. Better to start little by little as soon as you can than trying to build an online presence overnight once you need to apply for jobs (and yes, recruiters do Google you).
We use Discord as an internal communication channel. Do ask for the invite link if you don't receive one.
Believe it or not, but Twitter is super popular among academics. Many researchers use it to share and summarize their new studies and projects, recruit participants or advertise positions. So you can easily keep up with the latest scientific news here. There is even a book about Twitter for researchers.
After creating an account, you can start with your colleagues:
We have compiled a list of interesting accounts, covering all sorts of different topics (but always somewhat relevant to what we do). You can follow this list and pin it to quickly access it from your timeline (don't forget to make suggestions to update this list). You can then start following yourself the people that you like.
- Reality Bending Twitter List: https://twitter.com/i/lists/1509796111724134401
At first, you'll likely have to force yourself a bit to open and check Twitter from time to time (to make it easier, set it as a "favourite" tab and download the app). It's normal. But don't worry, once their machine learning algorithm gets a grip of what you like, it will start to be filled with interesting content.
ResearchGate is a professional networking site for scientists and researchers to share, discover and discuss research. (It's like a researchers' version of LinkedIn). You can see what kinds of projects others are currently working on, and their past manuscripts and publications. You can also access articles, post and answer questions, as well as recommend certain works! So do create an account and start following us and the researchers you like. I will add you to the Lab page.
GitHubThe last app that we use, and probably the most important, is GitHub. Whether you're a beginner to programming or an expert, integrating into this community means you'll be constantly learning. GitHub is a place where projects are shared openly and transparently, and where you can follow any repository you're interested in to receive notifications of relevant updates.
- You can start by reading this post: Why psychologists should join GitHub
We are using GitHub for a lot of stuff (like pretty much for everything, storing data, writing papers, projects, ...), and therefore you'll need to become familiar with it. First off, let's start with:
- Creating an account for you (strong advice: use a simple login name like FirstnameSurname rather than something you might regret later 😬)
- Watch this repo (by selecting Watching on the watch button in the top-right corner) (it's like "following" on Instagram)
- Star it 🌟 (it's like giving it a thumbs up, but it also serves as a bookmark for you, you can easily return to it)
Once you're done, let's start to interact with it by creating an issue:
- Create a new issue in this repo
- Select the Introduce myself template
- Answer the questions
- Post it (we'll close it afterwards)
Finally, Follow us (hit the follow button on the top right corner):
Small funny reads that nicely introduce important philosophical ideas. My personal favourites (don't forget to read the little explanation at the bottom of each comic):
- Descartes' Demon
- Sorry! And the Nature of Suffering
- What is the Sublime
- The Sublime and Sandwiches
- Mad Marx
- Utility Monster
- Fallacy Man
- Fallacy Man II
Our lab hero, Captain Metaphysics, who solves every philosophical question with one simple trick:
- Captain Metaphysics and the Ghost in the Machine
- Captain Metaphysics and the Mereological Monster
- Captain Metaphysics and the Wizard of Elea
- Captain Metaphysics and the Ship of Theseus
- Captain Metaphysics and the Extreme Skeptic
- Captain Metaphysics and the Postmodern Peril
- Captain Metaphysics and the Problem of Language
- Captain Metaphysics and the Swampman
- Captain Metaphysics and the Philosophical Zombie
Here are some of our key papers that you can read.
- Phenomenal, bodily and brain correlates of fictional reappraisal as an implicit emotion regulation strategy
- "Being there" and remembering it: Presence improves memory encoding
- Heart Rate Variability in Psychology: A Review of HRV Indices and an Analysis Tutorial
- The heart of cognitive control: Cardiac phase modulates processing speed and inhibition
- You aren't at the mercy of your emotions -- your brain creates them | Lisa Feldman Barrett
- Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality | Anil Seth
Here is a list of tutorials for you to start improving your technical skills. The first one, GitHub, is critical and you should go through it as soon as possible. The other ones' priority typically would depend on your project. But if you have a bit of free time, consider doing them.
GitHub is hands down the tool we use the most, and it is a priority that you get familiar with it. Start by doing the following tutorials:
Note that the things you need to do in the tutorial are a way for us to monitor your progress and to make sure you are not stuck.
JsPsych is the tool we use to create most of our experiments. A must-have skill for a researcher in psychology.
We use Python as much as R, albeit for different things, such as signal processing (EEG and Physio analysis), data preprocessing, etc. If you want to master all the aspects of a research project, it's important that you get familiar with the tool. Following are a few resources that we suggest to get you started:
Python is notoriously hard to set up in a way that is convenient for scientists.
- Download VS Code
- Download the latest version of Python
- Important: one Windows, tick the box that says "Do you want to add this version of Python to the path"
- Start VS Code, and go to the "extensions" tab on the left
- Install the following extensions: Python and Jupyter (by Microsoft)
- Click on the "View" tab (top), then Command Palette, then type "Settings" and select Open Settings (UI)
- In the settings, search "interactive jupyter" and tick Execute Selection ("when pressing shift+enter, send selected code...)
- To start running some code, click New File and
Ctrl+Sto save the file into whichever directory in your computer you want, naming the file with a.pyextension (so that VSCode knows that it's a Python file)- Type
1+1in the script, select the code and pressShift+Enter. It should open the interactive window.
- Type
The bulk of our statistical analyses and manuscript preparation is done on R.
At this point, you might ask why can't we just stick to one programming language? What is the point of learning both R and Python? The simple answer is that the two programming languages are basically different, and one can be better depending on the task. Read this blog post (R or Python for Psychologists) for a more in-depth discussion.
We highly recommend the PsyTeachR tutorials to get you started with R:
- PsyTeachR: Intro to R
- PsyTeachR: Tests and ANOVAs
- PsyTeachR: Regression Models
- PsyTeachR: Mixed Models
We encourage you to explore and be integrated within the online scientific community along with us, as this will help you expand your knowledge and skillset as well as become better informed! It may be a steep learning curve initially, but we're here to help you along the way (we've been there ourselves!) and never hesitate to ask questions 😉