Rotation projects

Scripps graduate students usually spend 8–12 weeks rotating in a lab before choosing where to do their thesis. This page explains how rotations work in the Su and Wu labs.

Finding a project

• Start with a conversation. Email Andrew or Chunlei. Have a look at our research first to see what interests you.
• Projects build on work already underway. That way you have people to learn from and code to start from.
• Projects are sized to fit the rotation. We aim for a question that can produce a result in 8–12 weeks, such as a working prototype, an analysis or a benchmark, even if the result is preliminary.

When you start

• You get mentors and a home channel. You’ll have one or two day-to-day mentors, plus a Slack channel for the project where you ask questions and post progress.
• You get access. We’ll add you to the lab Slack, the SuLab GitHub organization, the lab calendar and our group meetings. If you need compute, ask Andrew or Chunlei about the lab servers.
• The lab pays for your project’s costs. Most projects can use your institutional Claude subscription. If yours needs more, we’ll set up an API key for it.
• Your code goes on GitHub from day one. Use a fork or branch of an existing lab repository, or a new repository in your own account. See our coding standards.
• We schedule your end-of-rotation talk in your first week, for a science meeting near the end of your rotation.
• Lab policies apply to rotation students too, including the holiday and vacation policy.

At the end

• Present a recap of your project at your science meeting, then add a link to your slides in the schedule. See how to give a great talk.
• Write a 2-page report that summarizes the work: what you set out to do, what you did, what worked, what didn’t, and what you’d do next.
• Leave your code so someone else can pick it up. Push everything, and write a README that says how to run it.
• If you join the lab, you keep your access and we finish your onboarding.
• If you don’t, including if you go on to another rotation, we remove your lab access: GitHub, the calendar and the meeting invites. If you choose the lab later, we’ll onboard you then.