Guidelines for Belinda Thom's 2004/2005 Clinic Team

Guidelines for Belinda Thom's 2004/2005 Clinic Team

Purpose of this document

Clinic is a difficult but rewarding course. To help you enjoy and structure this experience, this document identifies what I expect from you as your clinic faculty advisor and how you will be graded. Many of the ideas presented here were motivated by Kuenning's Clinic Grading Guidelines. Since his rubrics influence my views on grading, you should familiarize yourself with that document.

Clinic Project:Applied BioSystems PCRnet
Team Members:Paul Scott (PM), Timothy Chew, Krislin Lee, Jacob Seene
Mailing List:appliedbio04@cs.hmc.edu
Project Web-site:Twiki

My participation as faculty advisor

My purpose is to monitor the team's progress, direct the team in important decisions, sign off on the final deliverable given to the client, and assign grades.

Getting a hold of me

Please feel free to contact me any time you need to discuss something clinic related, be it technical, administrative, or interpersonal. My weekly schedule is posted on the Web. Feel free to drop by anytime (and knock, I am often in my office when the door is closed).

Email is a great way to get a hold of me, but for technical content, use the clinic group mailing list to ensure that each member remains "in the loop." Also, feel free to call me (607-9662; 982-9247; no calls after 10pm please).

My grading policy

I will assign each member a grade individually. Your grade will be based on four relatively equal-weighted considerations:

Within the A to D range, my grading scheme is a relatively linear function of your performance. Maximizing your grade can be accomplished by performing well on each of the items listed above. However, if you do not meet a minimum time threshold, you risk not passing clinic.

Time commitments

In the CS Department's clinic handbook, clinic is described as a 10 to 15 hour a week commitment. In order for you to pass clinic under my guidance, you must demonstrate that you have spent no less than 9 hours per week on clinic (including meetings). Note that this is strictly a lower bound---there will likely be weeks where you'll have to spend more than 9---but by working consistently, my hope is that you'll never have to spend more than 15 :-). Your weekly ability to meet the 9-hour minimum will be assessed via: Should an emergency arise, exceptions can be made from time to time, but it is your responsibility to ensure that exceptions don't negatively impact the group---work out necessary make-up schedules in advance.

Group work block

The safest way to ensure that you meet this minimum 9-hour a week commitment is to set up a regular 6-hour block of time in which all team members work in concert. Time: TBD.

Mandatory administration

The other 3 hours can then be easily met with the following mandatory requirements: I will monitor your status reports and attendance at general clinic meetings. For other meetings and the 6-hour work block, the group should keep logs on the Twiki. I recommend that for you rotate who logs each meeting. Be sure to include attendance as well as tardiness.

Status reports

You must submit your own status report weekly. These will be due every Sunday at midnight (exceptions when vacation is involved will be made as needed). You should maintain a wiki topic that contains your own logs (most recent entered first). Index these topics via 
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/clinic/twiki/bin/view/Appliedbiosystems04/MeetingScheduleAndLogs
By using the 
%TOC%
command, along with appropriate headings, a high-level table-of-contents of your logs will be automatically generated (use the date for each log's heading). This report is extremely important because it allows me to independently assess your performance. Please provide a comprehensive and compelling description of your efforts on clinic that week. You should shoot for several bulleted lists or paragraphs per week outlining things like: tasks you've completed that were explicitly assigned to you, tasks that you did that were not explicitly assigned, tasks that were assigned that are not yet complete (along with current progress), issues that have arisen, concerns that you have, etc. It is very important that these reports (as well as your attendance to meetings) be on-time because they directly measure your constancy as a team member. Repeatedly neglecting to turn in status reports (or having to be reminded/nagged to do so) will definitely lower your grade.

Twiki

Keeping the group's meeting logs and your weekly status reports up to date should receive very high priority.

Sign-off policies

I must sign off on the team's oral presentations and written documents before their final due dates. I will not be very flexible regarding deadlines, especially draft due dates. These dates are outlined in your clinic handbook; be intimately familiar with them.

Although all members are not required to speak at all presentations, each member's active participation should be evident in the presentation's content. Per presentation, I expect to attend one (or more) practice talks, the first at least two days before the actual presentation is scheduled. All members should attend all practice talks, even if they are not speaking.

Regarding written reports, each team member should significantly contribute (e.g. one reasonable model would be every member writes at least one chapter).

Regarding the final clinic deliverables, note that, although meeting the sponsor's reasonable expectations is a key concern, clinic is an educational experience. Ultimately, I am the one that will need to approve of and sign off on your team's final deliverables.

Your input

Periodically, I will schedule individual meetings with team members so that we can chat about your clinic experience. These meetings will help me address issues or concerns you might have and will also provide me with an idea of how well your team is functioning as a group. Expect one interview per semester.

Towards the end of each semester, I will also have each of you assess your own personal contributions and the contributions of each of your colleagues. This information will be considered when I assign grades.

Project manager (PM)

The PM's key duties include: To ensure that these goals can be met, I will meet once a week with the PM for about 1/2 hour. Ideally, I'd like this meeting to be on Monday, from 6:45 to 7:15. There, we'll review the PM's log book, and the online status reports and meeting minutes. We will also agree upon that up-coming week's work-plan. The PM will then distill the results of this meeting into a weekly task-plan, outlining each member's anticipated contributions for that week. The PM will need to maintain a task lisk log; this log should be updated weekly on Monday by midnight.

As a result of the additional work-load that these management duties will have, the PM may not contribute as much technical content. At the same time, the PM should directly contribute to some aspect of the project's technical development. Towards this end, I recommend early on that the PM identify some well-contained piece of code to take ownership of.

Team Members

Whatever each member's relative strengths, every team member should be involved in: communicating effectively with the group, time management, technical contributions, written reports, and oral presentations. One of your most important contributions as a team member will be to provide feedback early and often: What technical aspects of the project do you most want to "own"? Do any procedures feel like "time wasting" and if so, how can these be addressed? Is there anything the PM or I should be doing be doing differently? etc. One of clinic's most difficult (and yet rewarding aspects) is working as a team. This becomes much easier and more fun to do if everyone as open, honest, and has their heart in the right place.

And with no more ado, lets Have Fun!