Welcome to our new cohort of participants in DSC-WAV! We are excited to have you with us and look forward to getting started on projects.

Before the first day of class, we need each student to complete the following pre-onboarding tasks.

Getting Set Up

  1. Read the DSC-WAV Code of Conduct.

  2. Join Slack, and appropriate channels.

    • Post a greeting to your teammates and introduce yourself.
    • Post your GitHub username (when you get one).
    • Check out the #questions channel. You can post any questions here. They will be visible to the whole program and anyone can reply.
    • Browse the #general and #random channels. The #general channel is where you will find announcements related to the whole program. Feel free to post an event or article of interest, etc. in the #random channel. Share a good resource you came across or an excellent visualization. If it’s really helpful or interesting to you, consider sharing it.
    • Add a picture to your profile.
    • Click on your picture (upper right corner of the Slack window), choose “Preferences”, and then “Advanced” and note that you can modify the setting so that when writing a message, pressing “Enter” doesn’t send it; it just begins a new line.

  3. Install R and RStudio or update it. See Ch 5 of Jenny Bryan’s book, Happy Git with R.

  4. Create a GitHub account if you don’t have one already, and

    1. send your username to Andrea Dustin
    2. post your GitHub username in your Slack team channel (see below).

  5. Install git on laptop, using Ch 6 of Happy Git with R to guide you.

  6. Connect your DSC-WAV repository to RStudio, so that you can move information between them. (You have to have communicated your GitHub username a day or so before you will be able to do this. Andrea will try to get to them as they come in.) Watch the GitHub videos in the next section. The first one will help with this task.

Survey for Evaluation purposes

DSC-WAV wants to understand what you learn through this experience. To that end, we have a few questions about your experience before you begin. Please complete this survey.

Mandatory CITI training

Complete the appropriate CITI training recommended by your institution. If you have any questions, please ask your faculty mentor or Andrea Dustin (via Slack). The course you will take is called Basic Conduct of Research, and it is the version for Social Sciences. Modules included will vary by institution. This training is required by the National Science Foundation for all participants in the DSC-WAV project.

Once you complete the training, please send both the certificate and the completion report to Andrea Dustin. It is helpful if you can rename the documents to have your last name in the title. (DustinA-citi-certificate, for example).

Finding times to meet

You agreed to commit 8–10 hours/week to this project throughout the term when you accepted this position. Gathering whole teams together is challenging. We ask you to be responsible and flexible in order to create the best conditions for effective collaboration.
You will need to connect routinely with your teammates no fewer than three times per week.
The most productive teams have regular access to one another, communicate often and set up group work sessions, even if they are virtual. (They also find ways to have fun together.)

Before your onboarding meeting with your faculty mentor, prepare so that you will be able to schedule 3 regular meeting times per week with your teammates. If you have concerns about being able to meet this commitment, please talk to your faculty mentor now.

Also, before you get together as a group, take a few minutes to think about the kind of teammate you love to have!! What are the qualities that person brings to the table? What’s helpful? What do you value? Consider also your own strengths and what you will bring to the team to help it thrive. You might take some time when you meet to talk together about these questions, so you can get to know one another. It’s fantastic when you can bring your best self, your ideal team member, to team meetings.

Moving on…

Have you completed all of these pre-onboarding tasks? Great! Please continue to the onboarding workshop.

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