The PI meeting, rehearsed before the real one
Lesson 5 of 7 · The working week
By the end you can rehearse a hard meeting with your PI against a realistic stand-in and get scored on candor, not on persuasion.
1 · Learn the move · Role-play
The meeting where you bring a result that did not replicate, or ask for a decision the PI keeps deferring, is one most people walk into cold. Role-play gives you the rehearsal: a stand-in PI who is busy, fair and sharp, who asks the question you are hoping to skip. You say the result as it is, with the n and the thing you cannot assess, you get pressed once, and then you are scored on whether you stated what the data show and nothing more. The stand-in never supplies a result and never tells you what your PI thinks.
Role-play my PI, busy and fair, so I can rehearse telling them the knockdown result did not replicate and asking for a decision on the repeat. Push back once, then stop, and stay in character until I say 'coach me'; then score me on candor. Never invent data, a cause or a number, and never tell me what my real PI thinks. Anything beyond the data is [NEEDS: evidence]. [the result, with n]
2 · Your turn. You write the prompt
Your second run of the knockdown did not reproduce the first, n of three each, and the paper's figure 2 rests on it. Your PI has deferred the 'do we repeat or cut it' decision twice. You have twenty minutes on Thursday. Write a prompt that makes Claude the stand-in PI, lets you run the meeting, and scores you on stating the data plainly, naming what you cannot assess, and asking for the decision in one sentence.
Write the prompt for this scenario as given, or swap in a real one from your own work. The score works the same either way.
Remember: the AI sees only your prompt, not this page. If the situation isn't in your prompt, it doesn't exist.
Optional. These shape the output when you run your prompt below, not your score.