Every Sunday at 6 p.m. is my deadline for students to submit their weekly reports. I spend Sunday evenings reading each one carefully, then offer feedback through written comments, phone calls, Tencent meetings, or in-person conversations scheduled on Monday. Yet, without fail, my inbox and WeChat flood with messages around that time — "Professor, I had too many experiments this week; I couldn't get it together," "I didn't get any meaningful results — can I combine this week with next week's?" "I'm not feeling well…" Some students simply stay silent, pretending to have forgotten, quietly hoping that I, too, might "forget" to follow up.
To be honest, I fully understand how they feel. Keeping a weekly report is genuinely painful. After a full day of exhausting lab work, the last thing anyone wants to do on the weekend is sit down and document every detail of the week, let alone confront their own failures and inefficiencies. No one enjoys this process intrinsically. Yet I persist, week after week, with reminders, nudges, and at times what may seem like unreasonable strictness. Today, I want to lay out, once again and in earnest, why I am so committed to this practice.
1. Distilling patterns from experiments: success and failure are both assets
On their first day in the lab, every graduate student arrives with rosy visions of research. Reality soon teaches them that experiments are not step-by-step manuals but explorations riddled with uncertainty. By week's end, some have generated beautiful data; others face a scatterplot of noise. Regardless, I ask every student to document these experiences in their reports.
Summarising weekly experimental results may seem simple, but it is fundamental training in scientific thinking. A successful experiment is certainly worth celebrating, but what matters more is extracting robust data and discerning the underlying patterns. Why did this batch of synthesised material perform so well? Was it a temperature shift due to the changing seasons, or a subtle variation in the precursor or reaction conditions? Without recording these details, "success" remains a stroke of luck — irreproducible and unaccumulable.
Failed experiments, by contrast, often hold even greater value. Many students' first reaction to failure is frustration, even a desire to turn the page and pretend it never happened. But the essence of science is learning from failure. When results are anomalous or data unusable, I require students to ask themselves in their reports: What might have caused the failure? Was it an operational error, a reagent problem, or a flaw in the experimental design itself? They must then consult the literature, discuss with peers, seek advice from senior lab members, and propose improvements. This process transforms a single "failure" into multiple stepping stones toward eventual success.
Even valid data, if not organised and re-examined in a timely manner, can easily be shelved or forgotten. Dense columns of numbers sitting on a computer, untouched, might as well not exist. The weekly report forces students, before each week ends, to thread those scattered data points into a coherent narrative and ask themselves: Do this week's data support my initial hypothesis? Where do they point? What should I do next? This distillation from data to principles is the most overlooked yet indispensable part of bench work.
2. Sustained thinking in fragmented time, to counter the inertia of procrastination
Research is not a nine-to-five job. A truly committed graduate student should think about their research system day and night. This is not an exaggerated demand; it is the lived reality of countless outstanding scientists. The problem is that routine tasks — experiments, instrument bookings, reagent orders — consume enormous amounts of time, leaving deep thinking as a luxury.
The weekly report provides a framework for deep thinking in and around fragmented time. Many students assume that thinking means sitting down to ponder. In reality, valuable insights often arise while walking, eating, showering, or lying awake at night. These flashes are fleeting; if not captured, organised, and developed, they vanish like dreams upon waking. The habit of reporting weekly allows students to collect these scattered thoughts and, over a relatively uninterrupted stretch on the weekend, systematise and structure them.
More importantly, sustained documentation is itself a strategy against procrastination. Procrastination is rarely rooted in laziness; it stems from the intimidation of a monumental task. A paper, a thesis project, a complex experimental design — they all appear too heavy, triggering an instinct to flee. But the weekly report breaks the large task into small, weekly goals. If you don't write today, or tomorrow, by the weekend you must still confront the blank page. Once students grow accustomed to weekly summaries and plans, the illusion of "I'll do it properly when I have time" shatters, replaced by the practical sense of "what I must accomplish this week." Finishing today's work today is not about sheer willpower; it is about an executable system.
3. From reading input to writing output: truly digesting the literature
I often hear students say, "I read over twenty papers this week." When I ask what they were about, many can only offer vague impressions or repeat a few sentences from the abstracts. This kind of reading is essentially browsing — passive reception of information, not active construction of knowledge.
Reading is input; writing is output. The Chinese educator Ye Shengtao put it plainly: "Reading is absorption, like eating and absorbing nutrients; reading absorbs spiritual nourishment. Writing is expression — bringing what is in your mind out for others to know... Reading and writing are the relationship between absorption and expression; the more fully you absorb, the more precise and thorough your expression." Many students spend vast amounts of time downloading papers, highlighting text, and copy-pasting excerpts, believing that this counts as "reading." But true digestion occurs only after you close the paper — can you articulate, in your own words, its core question, experimental design, key findings, and limitations?
The weekly report requires students to systematically summarise the literature they have read each week. Not simply listing titles and conclusions, but engaging deeply: How does this paper relate to my own work? Can I adopt its methods? Do I agree with its approach and conclusions? If not, what is my evidence? This process shifts students from the passive perspective of a reader to the active stance of an author. Over time, they find that their reading efficiency actually improves — because you know what you need to write, you know what to read and what to focus on.
4. Writing as a whetstone for thinking: the more you write, the sharper and deeper you become
Many people mistakenly believe that writing is simple — just put down what is in your head. But the real experience is often quite different: you think you have it all clear in your mind, yet when your fingers touch the keyboard, ready to turn those thoughts into words, you find your mind blank and cannot produce a single sentence. Those ideas that came to you while walking or eating vanish the moment you try to pin them down. Writing is never about thinking clearly first and then writing; it is about forcing yourself, through the very act of writing, to clarify things little by little.
This is precisely the core value of writing in scientific training. As Henrik Ibsen said, "To write is to sit in judgment on oneself." The science writer He Senbao put it more bluntly: "Putting words on paper is a way to free up working memory." Our working memory is limited; a few ideas rattling around in the head are manageable, but a dozen variables, dozens of literature threads, and complex experimental workflows cannot be sorted out by brainpower alone. Writing down thoughts releases that cognitive load onto the page, making thinking visible, manipulable, and correctable.
Many students find their initial weekly reports painfully difficult — they feel they have nothing to say, or what they produce reads like a mundane log. I tell them to remember another of He Senbao's observations: "An effective way to let ideas grow and develop is to write them down. Don't overthink it — just write, stubbornly, relentlessly. Gradually, you will walk out of stagnation and difficulty." Scientific writing is different from literary creation; it does not require flashes of inspiration. It requires a sustained working state. You sit down, force yourself to write, and even if the first paragraph is terrible, as you continue, the thread of thought gradually becomes clear and the logic slowly emerges.
That is why I insist that students write every week, not only when a manuscript is due. Writing is itself a mode of thinking — thinking with words. Scientific writing is important for sharpening scientific thinking, advancing career, obtaining funding and growing the prestige of an institution. These grand values ultimately come down to those few pages of weekly reports. Outstanding research is not the result of a sudden stroke of genius. He Senbao's third observation hits the mark: "Excellent work is the sum of inspiration and diligent labour. Brilliant ideas sometimes fall from the sky, but they also need painstaking work on paper to truly take root." Without being written down, inspiration is just a passing breeze — gone in an instant.
5. A bridge between supervisor and student: the irreplaceable value of the weekly report
Finally, there is a very practical reason: I need the reports to understand each student's progress. A supervisor typically mentors multiple graduate students, each with a different topic, pace, and set of challenges. Group meetings are important, but they are public forums; some students are reluctant to voice their confusions openly, and some issues cannot be fully explored in a brief presentation. Moreover, what is presented at group meetings is often a polished "interim achievement," not the raw, unfiltered state of the work.
The weekly report fills this gap. By spending time each week reading the reports, I can think through the trajectory of each project at my own pace, anticipate problems, and prepare advice in advance. By the time we meet in group sessions or one-on-one, I am not confronting a "foreign" piece of work from scratch; I can engage in deeper discussion with students, drawing on prior thought. This efficiency gain is a win-win for both supervisor and student.
More importantly, the report cannot be replaced by group meeting presentations. Group meetings are synchronous, group-oriented communication; reports are individual, in-depth records. One favours real-time feedback; the other favours cumulative documentation. The two complement each other; neither is dispensable. Years after graduation, when students look back at the reports they wrote, they will find that they are not merely experimental data and literature notes, but a chronicle of their growth from novice to mature researcher. And for me, every carefully written report is a mark of a student's respect for themselves and for science.