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Scheduling Thesis Advisory Committee Meetings

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Scheduling Thesis Advisory Committee Meetings

Thesis Advisory Committee Meetings should be scheduled once per semester, twice a year, and ideally scheduled far in advance to keep on track. Scheduling the meeting can be challenging for a few reasons:

  1. You feel like you don’t have enough to share. Maybe things haven’t gone completely as you expected or hoped and you’re afraid to disappoint.
  2. You don’t feel like you have time. You’d rather work on experiments and/or you have something else going on that is consuming your attention.
  3. It’s hard to schedule a meeting with 5-6 people.

Here’s why it’s a good idea to proactively set the committee times and hold to them.

  1. The accountability is good - it’s okay if you haven’t achieved everything you hoped for - you can address the growth at the meeting - what got in the way of the progress and what could be done to improve things? Is the hypothesis not what you expected? Do you need to pivot? Would you benefit from external guidance?
  2. You’ll find that the investment of organizing your progress into a presentation can take time but also be a valuable investment in optimizing your strategy and progress moving forward. Spending time working on a flawed model system, approach, or hypothesis without stopping to get input can lead to a much longer time investment than frequent check ins.
  3. The scheduling piece is hard - but there are ways to make it easier. Check out the top 10 tips for scheduling your Thesis Advisory Committee Meetings.

Top 10 tips for scheduling your Thesis Advisory Committee Meetings
Start this 1 month before the anticipated meeting

  1. Draft your email to the committee. It should be brief, to the point, and convey the goal: Dear XXX, I am writing to ask for your availability to set up a meeting of my Thesis Advisory Committee. Please take a moment to share your availability at this link: <> by <<3 days from now>>. I will send a reminder and hope to finalize the date on <<3 days from now>>.
  2. Share the draft with your advisor, get feedback, and ask for a list of times that work for your advisor (aim for ~10 blocks of time over a two week period). Try to avoid weeks if you know will be busy, i.e. big conferences in your field, big interview blocks, or big grant deadlines.
  3. Create a bunch of times using the scheduling tool of your choice (i.e. Doodle, when2meet, whenisgood). Try not to give too many options, as this can be easily overwhelming.
  4. Set a deadline. Ask everyone to complete the scheduling by X date - and make that date not too far in the future, as you’ll ask everyone to hold the dates until you finalize the schedule.
  5. Set a reminder for yourself to send a reminder to the group the day before the deadline.
  6. Set a reminder for yourself to send a final time to the group at the deadline so they can release the other times.
  7. Sending an email to finalize the meeting, thank everyone for participating, and send a calendar invite with the location of the meeting and/or virtual link.
  8. Send a reminder the week before the meeting and attach any relevant materials.
  9. Send a reminder the day before the meeting and again attach any relevant materials.
  10. After the meeting, thank everyone for attending and attach any follow-up discussion and tell them when you agreed that the next meeting would be so that you will reach out the month before to set this up again.
  11. Repeat.