Before you arrive

See this and this page for lots of resources for international staff at the university. This beginner’s guide to Dutch academia is helpful to better understand the broader national context.

Getting started

University-level

  • When your contract starts, you will get a LU account (email address, card for printing/library etc) through Eva Potters.
  • See these resources for connecting with other PhD students and postdocs in the university.

Unit (aka department)-level

  • Ask secretary Eva Potters to be added to the FSW - Cogpsy mailing list.
  • The Working in Cognitive Psychology Teams channel is important to connect with the department, and has a good wiki with a lot of department-related information, including a manual for newcomers and information on who is who.
  • Eva can also help you with desks, keys, computer hardware, etc.
    • Note: Once you get a university laptop (talk to Anne before ordering it, to make sure we get you something useful) request it to switch to ‘semi-managed’. Without doing this, you won’t be able to install much software. Ask Anne how to best do this.

Lab-level

  • Anne will add you to the Google lab calendar (where you can see lab events, talks etc).
  • Anne will add you to the CoCoSys lab teams. This is the main communication channel for the lab, where we also store shared files: posters, templates, forms.
  • We will schedule an onboarding session, specifically to together write our Mentoring agreement together, ideally in the first weeks of you joining the lab.
  • Geting organised: my setup is Zotero for papers, Obsidian for notes/planning, GitHub projects for project tracking, MS Teams for quick communication.
  • Familiarize yourself with the contents of this wiki, and tell me how it can be improved!

Useful mailing lists, groups etc

  • Many Teams channels have useful information. I regularly check the Open Science Community Leiden, Sustainability network, and Psychology Living Room MS teams groups.
  • Community email lists:
  • IBL Slack for internal IBL things (ask Anne about onboarding if you’ll work with internal IBL data).

Language

The lab language is English. Any professional conversation, oral and written, during work activities must be in English: these include presentations and discussion at lab meetings, scientific output, and email exchanges. The institutional language at Leiden University and in the Cognitive Psychology Unit is English; nonetheless, many administrative exchanges and Dutch bureaucracy are still in Dutch.

Project logs and management

As SAFE labs astutely notes:

Commonly reported frustrations of the 1-on-1 meeting process in labs are:

  1. Lab members feel that their group leader forgets the content of their previous meeting and so appears disengaged, or time is wasted rehashing the previous meeting.
  2. Group leaders feel that a previously agreed course of action has not been followed (or even attempted) and the lab member has instead pursued an unrelated tangent.

My solution is to always aim for clear communication, and to impose some organisation.

In general, every lab member/project will keep track in two ways:

  1. Inspired by the Voytek lab, make a core GitHub repository (pick a useful, descriptive name) for your project and add anne-urai as a collaborator (feel free to keep it private). Then, add a GitHub project where we can start to list all ideas and plans as issues. At each meeting, we’ll review the project status and make plans. This really helps me keep the overview of all ongoing projects, and to avoid repeating myself. It is also a great too to help prioritize items and to be on the same page about planned next steps.
  2. A running ‘meeting notes’ document, or project log, in which we keep notes during our regular (weekly) meetings. See a template for suggested structure; you can send this to me by email, on Teams, or keep a running document.

Practicalities

  • Where / how to print posters
  • Setting up hybrid meetings in the Olthoff room
    • Option 1: Borrow the OWL camera from SOLO
      • Borrow the OWL device from SOLO.
      • Connect the OWL to your laptop via USB.
    • Option 2: Use the built-in camera system in the room
      • Turn on the screen and select HDMI 2 as the input source.
      • Connect your laptop using both the USB-C and HDMI cables.
      • In Microsoft Teams → Settings → Devices:
        • Select ‘SONY TV’ as the speaker.
        • Select ‘Huddly IQ’ as the camera.
        • Disable Noise suppression for the microphone.

Booking a room at Leiden Uni

  • common room in PdlC building: in Outlook web calendar, simply create an event and select ‘Psychology Common Room’ as the location.
  • Olthoff room (CogPsy) for up to 8 ppl: in Outlook web calendar, create an event and select ‘Olthoff room’ as the location.
  • lecture hall somewhere in the university: email the ServiceDesk of every faculty separately (there is no uni-wide system).
  • nice workshop space: Lorentz Center. When there are no workshops, Leiden Uni staff can make use of the space.