Culture is the hardest thing to reproduce, adapt, or change for an institution. Thus, it is best to get it right in the very beginning.
As I am building my very first internal research group, the culture I want to instill is “have fun and be awesome“. I realized, through interviewing hundreds of students (within just one year) and working with my first batch of internal students so far, that it is the human nature to get attracted to the “fun” part much more easily than the “awesome” part.
Thus, I have to be rigorous in enforcing the culture, especially on “awesomeness”.
If I can affect my initial batch of students, they can in turn propagate the culture both spatially and temporally, such as other labs/schools and future students.
If I cannot, none of these will happen, and I might as well find something else worthier my time.
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