Daily guide for projects
Contents
Daily guide for projects#
Summary#
The project component of Climatematch Academy is designed to guide you through the entire research process, providing a comprehensive journey from project ideation to outcome presentation, all within a condensed time frame of just two weeks. Within a dedicated three-hour time slot each day, you will collaborate with a group of 4-6 fellow students from your pod to collectively develop a single research project.
On Day 1, you will learn about good research practices by working on a ‘mock’ project through the lens of equity. You will then spend eight days applying those skills to a scientific question and a geographical region that interests you and your teammates. To familiarize yourselves with the datasets at hand, you will examine the spatial and temporal distribution of one climate variable on global and local scales, as well as its social and economic impact. After performing a brief literature review, you will develop a sense of interesting open questions in the field and will devise a specific testable hypothesis accordingly. On Day 4, your group will submit a project proposal that you will swap with other groups to practice giving and receiving feedback through a peer review process. For the rest of the course, you will focus on acquiring evidence for or against your hypothesis. Throughout this time, you will be supported by your pod’s Teaching Assistant and a dedicated Project Teaching Assistant. Finally, on the last two days of the course, you will prepare a short presentation showcasing the story of your project and meet with other groups in your megapod to discuss your findings with them.
Project materials#
You have been assigned one of seven research projects based on the preferences listed in your application. Each project comes with an introductory video, a template, and a data loading jupyter notebook.
Student groups will define their own research question. Project templates are maps of research ideas developed by the Climatematch Academy team. They are composed of GREEN, YELLOW, and RED questions in accordance with their difficulty. Each difficulty level is further divided into questions relating to a physical climate phenomenon (borderless) and those relating to socio-economic issues (dashed border).
The templates should be used in several ways:
All teams must work through the GREEN questions on Day 2. This will let you familiarize yourselves with the relevant datasets and appreciate the global variability of your selected climate phenomenon before defining your research question.
All teams must work on a research question related to a physical climate phenomenon, such as those found in borderless-boxes.
In addition, all teams are highly encouraged to consider the socio-economic impact of their climate phenomenon of interest (dashed border). We advise you to support your conclusions with data if it is possible to find open-source socio-economic data, reports, or case studies from a trustworthy source relevant to your country or continent of interest.
If you are new to climate science or do not have a lot of research experience, we strongly recommend that you use the research questions provided in the template extensively. The templates have been designed to give you enough structure to get started and enough options to keep going if you stick with the template. Comprehensively answering just one YELLOW or RED question from the template would be an achievement! You can pick the question that interests you the most right away without following the flow suggested by the template.
If you are an experienced climate researcher, you are more than welcome to branch out beyond the template and define your own research questions! However, we do ask you to stick to the climate datasets.
Project Teaching Assistants#
Project Teaching Assistants are your friendly project experts to consult with on all issues related to your project topics and datasets. They can help with brainstorming project ideas, literature searches, and coding. You will meet with them on a regular basis.
They will visit your group on Day 1 to make introductions and will subsequently meet with you, on average, for 45-60 minutes every day or 1.5-2 hours every other day. As projects progress, Project Teaching Assistants might need to prioritize junior groups, but they can also be summoned to senior groups for meetings when needed. Since they can arrive unannounced at any time (busy schedules!), please stop what you were doing to have the meeting, and then resume your work when the Project Teaching Assistant leaves. Please also post questions on discord in the project-specific channels. All project Teaching Assistants have time set aside specifically to answer discord questions and to provide additional meetings when necessary.
Project Time#
You will have 2.5-3 hours each day to work on projects. The goal during the first week is to learn about the research process and develop a project idea. To simplify logistics, we have already broken you into project groups. Among other reasons, you were (climate)matched with your pod and research group, because you share an interest in similar climate phenomena. We understand that specific interests and motivations will vary even within project groups and becoming part of the Climatematch community is as much about finding your role in the team as it is about pursuing a specific personal research interest. During the second week, which includes the Project Day (W2D2), you will implement the analyses, interpret your findings, and present them to your megapod peers on the last day of Climatematch Academy.
Embedded in the project time will also be a set of professional development activities: a series of Impact Talks, meetings with mentors, and career panels.
POD INTRODUCTIONS W1D1#
Monday, 17th July (PM) for everyone
On W1D1, you will meet your pod 30 minutes before the regular start of the tutorial time for introductory activities. Your pod’s Teaching Assistant will also tell you the project group you have been assigned to and its project topic. In some pods, the two groups will work on the same topic while others might be assigned two different topics depending on student interests. If you wish to work in the other group, discuss it with your Teaching Assistant.
During the pod introduction on W1D1, your Teaching Assistant will also inform you about your project group’s schedule for watching and discussing the Impact Talks. One group will do this activity during the first 30 minutes of a project block, while the other will dedicate to it the last 30 minutes of a project block. The discussions following the Impact Talks will be facilitated by you - the students. Each discussion should have one student leading from the front and one student leading from behind, with every student in your project group taking on one of these leadership roles at least once. Your Teaching Assistant will help you appoint yourselves to these roles during the pod introductions. You can read more about the associated responsibilities here.
SESSION 1#
Monday, 17th July (PM) for groups in timezone slots 2 and 5
Tuesday, 18th July (AM) for groups in timezone slots 1, 3, and 4
Work through the tutorial on good research practices in your project groups. Your Project Teaching Assistant will come by at some point during this period to introduce themselves and facilitate your progression through the tutorial for 30-45 minutes.
SESSION 2#
Tuesday, 18th July (PM) for groups in timezone slots 2 and 5
Wednesday, 19th July (AM) for groups in timezone slots 1, 3, and 4
Professional Development: Watch the interview about Climate Justice and use the provided prompts to discuss the topic within your project group for 15 minutes As agreed during introductions on W1D1, one project group in the pod should do this during the first 30 minutes of the project block, while the other should leave this for the last 30 minutes of the block. Also as decided on W1D1, two students should practice their leadership skills by leading the discussion from the front and from behind.
The remaining 2.5 hours are time to get your hands dirty! Explore one of the provided climate datasets by working through the GREEN questions of your project template. Use the data loading notebook to get started and try to understand what is being done and why. Parts of this code might be reusable or adaptable later. Be on the lookout for interesting hypotheses and remember to work as a team! Ask for help, assist others, and discuss your findings throughout the day.
Apply the data wrangling skills you have acquired in tutorials thus far to generate the global maps suggested in Q1. Examine your plots. Do you notice any interesting patterns across the globe or over time?
Plot the global mean of the variable(s) over the time period suggested in Q2. Do you observe any trends? Does the result align with your expectations? Why? Why not?
As a group, agree on a geographical region to focus on and answer Q3. Depending on the variable you explore, choosing a continent, subcontinent, or country might be appropriate choices. How does the result compare with your answer to Q2? Does this result align with your expectations? Why? Why not?
Consider the socio-economic impact of your climate phenomenon by addressing Q4. Depending on your project topic, you may or may not have additional numerical data provided specifically for this question. Feel free to seek information from reliable sources online to support your arguments.
SESSION 3#
Wednesday, 19th July (PM) for groups in timezone slots 2 and 5
Thursday, 20th July (AM) for groups in timezone slots 1, 3, and 4
Professional Development: Watch the interview about, Equity in Climate and Climate Science and use the provided prompts to discuss the topic within your project group for 15 minutes. As agreed during introductions on W1D1, one project group in the pod should do this during the first 30 minutes of the project block, while the other should leave this for the last 30 minutes of the block. Also as decided on W1D1, two students should practice their leadership skills by leading the discussion from the front and from behind.
Professional Development: On any two days between now and the end of the course, your project group will be visited by mentors. In 1-hour meetings, they will share their professional path in a climate-related field, offer personalized career advice, and provide a networking opportunity. Your pod’s Teaching Assistant can tell you the exact times of these meetings. Make sure to familiarize yourself with the suggested meeting structure and tips for getting the most out of these meetings here.
The remaining time will be dedicated to brainstorming and reviewing the literature! The goal of this literature review is to find out what is known or has been hypothesized about your climate phenomenon, to determine what aspects are currently the most debated, and to help you define some keywords that you will use in your project proposal tomorrow. You do not need to come up with a completely original question! Do, however, situate your research within the relevant literature, and try to get hints/suggestions from other papers. Revisit Step 2 of the tutorial on good research practices to review the literature more efficiently!
(15 min) Start by discussing your initial project ideas! As a group, try to come up with one or a few questions of interest, either by yourselves or directly from the project template. Was there anything weird or intriguing you noticed in the data yesterday? Are there any questions in the template you find particularly exciting?
(30 min) On your own, start doing a literature review using search engines like Google or Baidu. Look only at abstracts to select 2-3 promising ones.
(15 min) Report to the whole group what papers you found and pool them together. Assign one paper per person to read/skim in the next 1h.
(1 h) On your own, read the paper that was assigned to you. Make notes in a common google doc shared with your group, and especially write down important keywords or concepts which you might use in your project proposal. If you are interested in a closed-access paper and are not connected to an .edu domain or a VPN, try to find full versions of papers on preprint servers like arXiv or bioRxiv. You could also ask your Teaching Assistants to get it for you (and they might in turn ask someone who has access to a university VPN). There might be other options too…
(30 min) Report back to the group. In ~5 minutes, try to tell them as much as you understand about the paper. Get into details, but do not just read whole sections from the paper out loud. Ask the other students questions about the papers they are presenting to understand them better.
SESSION 4#
Thursday, 20th July (PM) for groups in timezone slots 2 and 5
Friday, 21st July (AM) for groups in timezone slots 1, 3, and 4
By the end of this project session, you should submit your project proposal via Airtable link.
(30 min) Based on your observations on Day 2 and the literature review yesterday, try to converge on a research question and devise a hypothesis. Try to come up with one or a few questions of interest, either by yourselves or directly from the project template. We encourage you to consider not only the physical science aspects of a climate phenomenon, but also its socio-economic impact. Use the question boxes with dashed outlines for inspiration. We understand that specific interests and motivations will vary even within project groups and becoming part of the Climatematch community is as much about finding your role in the team as it is about pursuing a specific personal research interest. Please consider your teammates interests and ideas with as much respect as your own.
(30 min) By yourself, read the Ten simple rules for structuring papers. Pay close attention to figure 1, and how it specifies the same overall structure for the abstract, for each paragraph in the paper, and for the paper as a whole.
(1 h) As a group, try to write a proposal for this project based on the way you understand it now, following the C-C-C scheme described in the Ten simple rules paper.
Context: scientific background and the knowledge gap your project will aim to fill. Include keywords and concepts that you identified in your literature review.
Content: your hypothesis and a description of the analyses and the results (positive or negative) you would need to answer your question.
Conclusion: the potential significance and societal impact of the work.
The proposal can be a list of bullet points or a coherent paragraph; don’t worry about the structure too much. The goal is to structure your thoughts and ideas so that a person unfamiliar with the topic can understand the importance of your research question and approach..
(30 min) It is always revealing to present your research to someone who has never heard about it. Share your proposal with the other team in your pod and receive their proposal in return. In your group, read and discuss the other team’s abstract and write down some feedback. What do you understand about their project? What do you not understand about it? When giving your feedback, keep in mind that the other research group has put a lot of effort into generating the proposal and may not have had time to polish the language or presentation of their ideas. We always aim to be direct and specific, but also polite, respectful, and kind in our communication with each other.
(30 min) Work to address the feedback received from the other team. When done, submit the project proposal here. Your proposal will not be graded, but its submission is required to receive a project badge on your Climatematch Academy certificate.
SESSION 5#
Friday, 21st July (PM) for groups in timezone slots 2 and 5
Monday, 24th July (AM) for groups in timezone slots 1, 3, and 4
You should now have a sense of the data, and you have probably refined your hypothesis a little. Writing a proposal will have helped you get a rough idea of what tools you might use to tackle your research question, and what the answer could look like. You will use the remaining project time to implement the analyses you have planned and make progress towards an answer. Your group might not be able to complete their research plan, but don’t get discouraged: answering a research question usually takes months if not years of work and you should consider making meaningful progress towards that goal a great success!
A few pieces of general advice:
See if you can allocate tasks efficiently within the team!
TAs are here to help you, if you know what analysis you need, but don’t know how to do it. They can point you to useful toolkits that may be difficult to find otherwise.
Try not to implement complicated analyses from scratch. Use existing toolkits, and learn how to use them well. This kind of knowledge is very helpful long-term.
SESSION 6#
Monday, 24th July (PM) for groups in timezone slots 2 and 5
Tuesday, 25th July (AM) for groups in timezone slots 1, 3, and 4
Professional Development: Watch the interview about Open Climate Science and use the provided prompts to discuss the topic within your project group for 15 minutes. As agreed during introductions on W1D1, one project group in the pod should do this during the first 30 minutes of the project block, while the other should leave this for the last 30 minutes of the block. Also as decided on W1D1, two students should practice their leadership skills by leading the discussion from the front and from behind.
Continue working on your project!
If you find a negative answer to your question, that is absolutely ok! Please do report that. Then go back and think about how this affects your initial hypothesis. Does it rule it out, or could there be limitations in this particular data that lead to the negative result? What other data could you seek out that would be more well-suited for answering this question? Try to design a new experiment in specific details and tell us about it. Who knows, somebody might run that experiment someday!
If you find a positive result (i.e. the data matches your hypothesis), you should spend the rest of your time validating it to make absolutely sure it is a real effect. For example, if you created a proxy-based paleoclimate reconstruction of precipitation hydrogen isotopes (δD) to assess past changes in rainfall amount, there are a few factors you could consider to ensure that the climate signal in your data is real and reliable. Are the δD values in the part of your record closest to present similar to modern measurements of rainfall δD at your study site? Are there other factors in addition to your variable of interest (rainfall amount) that may be contributing to the δD signal in your data? Can you remove the effect of these other factors so that the dominant signal in your δD record is recording changes in rainfall amount?
PROJECT DAY (W2D2)#
Tuesday, 25th July (AM) for groups in timezone slots 2 and 5
Tuesday, 25th July (PM) for groups in timezone slots 1, 3, and 4
Watch the keynote talk “Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science” by Dr Paul Behrens.
Continue working on your project for the rest of the day! Your pod’s Teaching Assistant will be around during the tutorial time block and your Project Teaching Assistant will be available during the project time block as usual.
During the last hour of the tutorial block, there will be a live career panel with an opportunity to ask questions to the panelists:
8:00 - 9:00 UTC for groups in timezone slots 1 and 2
14:30 - 15:30 UTC for groups in timezone slot 3
20:30 - 21:30 UTC for groups in timezone slots 4 and 5
SESSION 7#
Tuesday, 25th July (PM) for groups in timezone slots 2 and 5
Wednesday, 26th July (AM) for groups in timezone slots 1, 3, and 4
Continue working on your project! Make sure to reconvene with your teammates every 1-1.5 hours to discuss your progress. If you are struggling with something, ask others for help right away! Use your Project Teaching Assistant and your pod’s Teaching Assistant as a resource when your group gets stuck.
On Day 7, the curriculum of the course will start shifting from topics surrounding physical climate phenomena to issues of socio-economic impact as well as mitigation and adaptation strategies. This is a good point to start thinking about the impact the research topic you are studying as part of your project has on ecosystems and communities.
SESSION 8#
Wednesday, 26th July (PM) for groups in timezone slots 2 and 5
Thursday, 27th July (AM) for groups in timezone slots 1, 3, and 4
Professional Development: Watch the interview about Psychology of the climate crisis and climate science communication and use the provided prompts to discuss the topic within your project group for 15 minutes. As agreed during introductions on W1D1, one project group in the pod should do this during the first 30 minutes of the project block, while the other should leave this for the last 30 minutes of the block. Also as decided on W1D1, two students should practice their leadership skills by leading the discussion from the front and from behind.
Continue working on your project and start thinking about your conclusions.
The project submission form you will complete tomorrow also includes a question about your interest in potentially continuing your project after the course as a Climatematch Impact Scholar. Please take a moment to read about this opportunity and discuss it with your teammates and Teaching Assistants.
SESSION 9#
Thursday, 27th July (PM) for groups in timezone slots 2 and 5
Friday, 28th July (AM) for groups in timezone slots 1, 3, and 4
Tie up loose ends and prepare a short slideshow about your project!
At the end of this project block, you should submit your slides via this Airtable link.
Keep in mind that you will be giving a live presentation of your project to your megapod peers after the final tutorial block on 28th July.
Use this presentation template. Make a copy for your team to edit!
You can add your group name and project title to the bottom panel of non-title slides through Slide -> Edit theme.
Content#
The 1 minute - 1 slide rule might seem like an impossible limit. However, it is one of the most useful formats you can learn, often referred to as a “one minute elevator pitch”. If you can become an expert at giving short pitches about your work, it will help you get the interest of a lot of people, for example when presenting posters at scientific conferences or when advocating for policy changes with your local government. Or when you accidentally find yourself in an elevator with a potential investor: this could be your chance to secure a million dollars in research funds!
The key to a good presentation is to practice it by yourself many times. It is no different from other performing arts (acting, playing a musical instrument etc), where rehearsals are crucial to a good performance.
If something in your presentation does not sound good or does not make sense, you WILL get annoyed by it when you say it the tenth time, and that will make you want to change it. (Secret: this how professors prepare all of their presentations and it is why they always sound like they know what they are talking about)
Always have an introduction slide and a conclusion slide. If your group is relatively large (>=5 people), then someone should be assigned to each of the intro and conclusion slides. If your group is small, then the same person can present the intro + next slide, or conclusion slide + previous slide.
Short anecdotes can work like magic for engaging your audience. As a rule, most listeners are passive, bored, not paying attention. You can grab their attention with that smart elevator pitch, or with a short anecdote about something that happened to your group while working on projects.
Most groups will not have a result and this is absolutely normal. If this is true for your group, the main goal will be to communicate the logic of your project proposal. For example, did you design an innovative comparison of climate datasets to assess the impact of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on global temperature, but then did not find the appropriate data to get answers (e.g., the spatial and temporal resolution of the data available was not sufficient to answer your question)? That can also be very interesting for others to hear about! Furthermore it will make it clear that research never stops. It continues as a series of questions and answers, not just within your own project, but at the level of the entire research field. In the case of this example, the takeaways from your project could potentially highlight the need for more temperature data from specific regions or time periods in order to assess ENSO variability. Tell us what got you excited about this particular project, and try to dream big. What could your project evolve into if given more time and resources?
W2D5: FINAL PRESENTATIONS#
Friday, 28th July (PM) for everyone!
This is the day you present your project to other groups in your megapod. You can invite your Project Teaching Assistant too, but they might not make it if they are busy. Groups will take turns to share their screens. You can use figures and other graphics to highlight specific aspects of your research, but your presentation is meant to be told as a story, and everyone from your group should take their turn in telling a part of that story. Tell us about the different hypotheses you have had at different points and how you refined them using some of the tools you learned during the course.
Schedule#
10 minutes of meet & greet. Do a round of introductions (one Teaching Assistant calls out names from the zoom list). Everyone says their name, pod name, position, institution or other area of work, and subject of study, as well as one interesting fact about themselves. “Hi, I’m Jonny from the wiggly caterpillars and I am a PhD student at University of Notre Dame in Paris. I study the relationship between moisture and storms, and in my free time I like to go on long bike rides”.
30-40 minutes of presentations, including questions. Each group should speak for approximately 5 minutes (depending on group size), and then take questions for 1-2 minutes. The Lead Teaching Assistant of your megapod will determine the order of presentations.
10-20 minutes of general discussion. Use the following questions to guide the group discussion. Spend a few minutes on each question. It’s ok not to use all these questions, especially if you have your own questions to ask!
What was missing in the dataset that you would have really liked to have?
Does anyone plan to continue working on this project in the future? Climatematch Academy will be able to support selected groups with the computing resources required to take projects to the next level. Read more about the opportunity to become a Climatematch Impact Scholar here.
Which one of the 8 steps of good research practices was hardest and why?
Based on your experience with the project, what project would you most like to do next? Make up your own, or pick from the other projects available in the course.
What surprised you the most about the process of working on a project? In what way was this project most different from other projects you have worked on in the past?
What technique did you learn in the course that you think you can immediately apply to your own project (if you are currently doing research)?
Logistics#
Presentations will take place 1.5 hours after the end of your W2D5 tutorials. For groups in timezone slots 1, 3, 4, this will fall outside of their regular course hours.
You will present to other groups (3-5 groups per room). An email will be sent with the zoom room of one of the pods and all groups will meet there for one hour. There is a hard cutoff at the one hour mark, and it will be the Teaching Assistants’ responsibility to ensure everyone gets a turn to present.
One minute per person and one slide per person only! This is primarily to ensure that everyone in your megapod gets to present before the hard cutoff at the one hour mark.
Do not introduce yourselves again, just present the material directly.
When you are done presenting, leave the last slide up (with conclusions), and open the floor for questions.
Questions#
If your presentation was short enough, there is time for questions from the audience. These are a great way to get feedback on your project!
Before you ask a question, consider whether others might be interested in that topic too. This usually means asking big picture questions, as opposed to detailed, technical questions, but there are exceptions.
If you are answering the question, try to be short and concise. Your audience will notice if you start rambling, and it can seem as if you are avoiding the question. Answering concisely is another very useful skill in “real life”. It also means that you can take more questions given our time constraints.