New Lab Members To Do List

New Sketch Recognition Lab Members To Do List

Overview
So you have joined the lab, what now? How to get integrated?

Come to the lab meetings
This is crucial. Lab meetings are weekly. The time and place changes each semester. Check on the main SRL website for where they are currently.

Fill out your weekly lab accomplishment slide
Everyone presents for 1-5 minutes about what they are working on (past and future). These are presented through a google drive slideshow. Ask someone for access, then make a slide. Your first slide should introduce yourself and state your interests.

Get a key to the lab
To get a key to the lab, you should email Bruce Veals bveals@tamu.edu and request a key. You need to cc hammond@tamu.edu. Dr. Hammond will then approve the request over email.

Get a desk
Walk around the lab and ask the students which desk are free. Find one that suits you. Many people choose to use their personal laptop to work. There are some machines in the lab for use. There are also some machines that may be able to be borrowed from helpdesk.

Get on the SRL website
Email Anna a picture of yourself, as well as information about your major, name, status, year, and where you came from.

Join the SRL email list
Email srl at tamu dot edu and ask to be added to the srl email list. Please make sure to include detailed information about who you are so that it is not mistaken for spam.

Complete the CITI Training

This takes about two hours. See: http://hammondacademics.blogspot.com/2016/05/citi-lab-training-info.html

Create a Weekly Reading Blog

You should be reading at least one paper weekly about your research and outlining what you learned about it. This serves as an excellent resource for when you create your thesis. 

http://hammondacademics.blogspot.com/2016/05/srl-blog-post-instructions.html

Create a Weekly Writing Blog

Every week you should be writing about your research progress and your new ideas.

Start a BibTex file to List your papers

You should add every paper you read to a bibtex file that you can later use in your thesis.

Start Your Thesis

Yup, I said that. You should get the template for your undergraduate or graduate thesis or dissertation (or final REU paper) and get it working in latex this week. This way you can slowly add information to your thesis all along the way, and slowly learn latex in the process.

Start Your Related Work Section

Every time you read a paper put a sentence or two in your thesis related work section detailing how you think it is relevant to your work. This is a one sentence version of your blog. Pretty soon, you will have many papers, and a bunch of content for your related work section.

SRL Blog Post Instructions

SRL Blog Posts

Blog Creation

Overview
You are asked to create a research blog where you will post your reviews and reference information for the papers you will read.  This blog may also be used to submit other assignments throughout the semester.  It will be shared with other members of the class, and you should leave comments open so that your classmates can make remarks on your posts.

Instructions
Go to Blogger and create a new blog.  If you are already logged in with a Google Account (either your TAMU or personal), you should be taken to your Blogger dashboard.  From there, click "New Blog" to start your research blog.

As mentioned before, make sure that comments are enabled, although they may be moderated if you wish.  You may name the blog whatever you like.

Obtaining Credit
You are not required to create any posts or make any comments on other blogs at the moment.  Just create it.  In order to get credit for creating it, and also to share the link with your classmates so that they may find your blog, please email your name and provide a link to your blog to Dr. Hammond.

Writing Your Blog Post

One blog post should be made for every paper assigned in the course.  Because this is done with every paper, it is not meant to be very burdensome.  You are asked to take a small amount of time to skim over the paper quickly, just enough to get the key points so that you know what the paper is about.  From this information, make a blog post according to the following format:

Citation

Include author list, paper name, publication information, and link to the paper (either a PDF or publication page).  This should be some standard, readable citation.  Google scholar can generate these for you if you search the paper name.

Summary

Your high-level description of the paper.  This does not need to be very long.  Just write a few sentences or a paragraph explaining enough about the paper that you will be able to remember it for later reference.  This paragraph should help you decide if you want to include the paper in your final report.

Discussion

Your impression of the paper.  This can include your thoughts on the method, what ideas it gave you, or anything else related to the paper.  This should be useful for you to peruse later as it may help give you ideas for your own project or remind you of some other, similar work you wanted to explore.

These posts will be mostly graded on completion, but you must put in sufficient effort to make it apparent that you have quickly read through the paper and would be able to talk intelligently about it.

Presentations

Everybody will need to present on at least one paper in this course.  Presentations are given at the beginning of class from the front of the room.  You should have some slides to augment your talk.

Presentations will be no more than 7 minutes in length, saving 3 minutes at the end for questions.  This allows for a maximum of 10 minutes per speaker.

This is primarily a completion grade since this is not a public speaking course.  However, it will be useful practice for you since you will undoubtedly (and may have already) present many research-related talks.  So please prepare appropriately so that you feel you can comfortably deliver a description of the paper and answer reasonable questions.

CITI Lab Training Info

Overview

As a member of the Sketch Recognition Lab or a student in Dr. Hammond's course, you are required to finish two training modules provided online by the CITI Program:

• Social and Behavioral Responsible Conduct of Research
• Group 2.Social and Behavioral Research Investigators and Key Personnel

By completing this training, you will be able to submit an IRB form that will allow you to collect data for your course project.  It should also be helpful to your general research work outside of this class.

Instructions

To do the training, please follow the instructions in the link below:

TAMU Human Subjects Training

Everything you need to know should be provided on that page, but the gist is that you should register with CITI Program under Texas A&M University.  From there, select the modules you need to complete (RCR and Group 2) and go to your courses to begin.  There will be several sections and quizzes after each section.  More details will be provided on the CITI page, and the training should take a couple hours on average.

Obtaining Credit

Once you have completed both modules, download a PDF certificate by going to "Print Report".  Send this certificate 

• if in a class: to the course TA, whose email address is given on the course syllabus
• to the person specified in REU guidelines
• or to Anna, if for research in the lab.

Common Problems

About a third of people don't complete the Group 2 training as well. Make sure you complete Group 2.

"What if I have already done this?"

If you have already completed CITI training, just log in and print out your certificate. It is good for 4 years. The print out will list when it expires. If it has expired, then you only need to do the "Refresher Course" which is much shorter and only takes about a half hour.