GAIN Journal Club

In the Spring 2007 semester, I was the organizer of the Gravitational Astrophysics, Instrumentation and Numerics (GAIN) Journal Club, in the Gravitational Astrophysics Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The journal club met on Mondays at 3pm.

My responsibilities as journal club organizer included:

• Scheduling the meeting room.
• Sending out email reminders about the journal club to all the group members. Two reminders were sent for each Monday afternoon meeting -- one on Thursday afternoon and another on Monday morning.
• Ask for volunteers or appoint people to lead a discussion for any specific date.
• Make sure the discussion leader had picked one or two papers to talk about, and make those papers available to all group members.
• Participate as discussion leader on one or more occasions.
• Keep members up-to-date on any scheduling or discussion changes.

In my old research website, I used to have a page dedicated to the GAIN Journal Club, listing the meeting dates, name of the person leading the discussion, and papers to be discussed. Since my old research website is no longer online, I've provided a screenshot here of what the page looked like when it was last updated. Please click on the small thumbnail to the right to see the screenshot at full size.

In the process of this service work, I learned about organizational skills when dealing with a moderately-sized group of very busy people. As the journal club coordinator, I couldn't just pick a day and time to meet that would be convenient just for me -- I had to pick a day and time that was convenient for everyone who wanted to participate, a day and time when they would all be available. I also had to interact with administrative personnel to make sure an appropriately sized and equipped meeting room was available, and schedule it in advance of every meeting. Additionally, even though I personally led the discussion on only two occasions, I always needed to read the featured papers in advance, so that I could help the discussion leader in encouraging debate.

After a couple of months of weekly meetings, scheduling conflicts led to the journal club going on hiatus. Eventually the journal club was disbanded, and replaced with a Tuesday Lunch Talk series.