Leaving the Lab

Administrative matters

The nature of a research career inevitably means that at some point, sadly though, you’ll leave the lab to take on another endeavor. While it means that you won’t be at the lab regularly anymore but only for visits, at the same, time we hope that you’ll stay in contact with us. Yet, before you leave, we also need you to follow a smaller protocol, and this section serves as guidance for you and lists items necessary for you to do when you leave the lab.

Stay in contact with us

Of course we would like to stay in contact with you after you leave the lab (beyond our WhatsApp group :-) ). We have an alumni list for the biogeography lab, through which we stay in contact with all alumni (at last by inviting them to our yearly Christmas party). Camille Dammann is managing this list, so please make sure to provide her with a permanent email address through which we can reach you, also when your HU-address expires.

Coordinate your accounts

With your departure from our lab and the University, your cms-account (i.e., your HU-berlin email address) as well as your biogeo-berlin account (your Office 365 and MS Teams profile) will expire after a few months. Yet, for several reasons you may want to keep one of the two accounts (or both), for example when you plan to continue working on our servers, or working within a Team in MS Teams. For your cms-account, please consult with Klaus Neitzel and/or Camille Dammann on how to proceed here. For your biogeo-berlin account, please talk to Benjamin Bleyhl or Matthias Baumann.

Register as "arbeitssuchend" (optional)

In case your next job is not starting right away, and if you worked on a regular working contract (i.e., contrary to a fellowship), you have paid over the years for a personal unemployment insurance. This may now come in handy, when your next job is not lining up perfectly to your lab departure and you need to bridge a few months during which you are not formally employed by the University.

Already three months prior to the end of your contract, you have to register as job searching (arbeitssuchend) with your local Arbeitsagentur. This will ensure that you receive unemployment money once your contract officially ends - for up to 12 months you may receive financial support by the Arbeitsagentur. Of course, several restrictions apply and the application process can be rather bureaucratic. Florian Pötzschner is a good person to talk to, as he already guided previous alumni through this process.

Leave your office key and chip card

The last, and probably saddest part is to leave your office key (and any other key you might have borrowed) and the chip card for accessing the building. You can leave both with Camille Dammann - she will take care of the rest (but do not forget to sign that you returned them).

Data of accepted papers

Most of the time during your stay with us, you have been working on your specific paper(s), and now you are off to new papers, projects and positions. Yet, you have probably created new datasets and/or painfully collected data from other collaborators. In many cases, these data will be used by other people in the lab or our collaborators. We have provided a detailed description in the writing section, but here are the most important points to consider in telegram form.

PDF of the manuscript
Excel file containing the predictors used to run the models, statistical tests…
Final script(s) with the necessary comments to understand it
Raw data that is not reproducible (e.g., field data)
Final map(s) and figure(s) (high resolution, i.e., 600 dpi)
README file explaining the files in the folder

Data clean-up

During your time with us, you have created and processed large amounts of data - and in many cases there is a substantial chance that you will continue working with parts of the data (e.g., when a paper is still under review while you are moving towards your new job). Yet, at the same time, we will need you to properly clean up the shared drives on the SAN and also indicate - beyond the data of your accepted papers - which of your data are primary data and/or which of the data you have received from external collaborators. As this is individual to everyone's way of storing data and the nature of the project this person has worked on, there is only limited meaning in deriving a specific guide. For that reason, please consult with Matthias Baumann and Ana Buchadas and arrange a meeting with one of the two (or both) so that you can screen your files and folders on the SAN. Together, you will develop a data cleaning strategy.

Important though: please also make sure you make a physical copy (i.e., on an external hard drive or in a cloud storage) of all your data that you want to take with you.