Today we had a demo day at our lab. We invited students and faculty from collaborating Labs at NYU and “virtually” invited via Zoom some collaborators from other academic institutions. Each of the students in our lab got up and gave a 5 minute talk and possibly a demo of what they are working on.
Our plan is for each lab to do this in turn, so that the students can all get to know each other and hopefully find interesting ways to collaborate. The “getting to know each other” is probably the more important part, because there cannot be good collaboration without good trust.
We served pizza. We didn’t ask the powers that be whether it was okay to serve pizza, because we didn’t want to know the answer beforehand. People were wearing masks while not literally eating a slice of pizza, and were very respectful of interpersonal distance.
But still, there was pizza. I think there is something iconic about offering that to students if you want to ask them to gather together and put in the extra effort.
I respect that.