The minion
(or should this be in the previous post?)I have an undergrad working with me in the lab now. I think this is his third week. He is a freshman, which means that he knows very little biology. He has never worked in a lab before. He works 4 hours a week-2 hours on Wednesday afternoon and 2 hours on Friday afternoon.
I have started to refer to this situation as "my babysitting job." I know that it is mean and I know that I was a freshman who didn't know anything once too, but it is a little frustrating. Two hours isn't really long enough to accomplish anything lab wise, so I have to teach him how to do small pieces of what I'm doing each time he comes and I have to coordinate my time so that there is some 2 hour-ish piece going on while he is here. He is a really nice guy but we are having a little trouble...I keep trying to boil things down and explain them enough and he keeps asking questions that show that he doesn't really get it. One day he asked a silly question about an experiment (that is only funny in a science dork kind of way), one day he asked my what types of experiments our boss does (our boss, who sits in an office all day and writes grants and papers and manages us...) etc. I feel like I really need to teach him more so that he understands the big picture of what is going on and can then understand what is actually going on day to day, but when I tried to boil it down more recently, I kept having to backtrack my explanation more and more to cover basic biology that he hadn't learned yet.
So....what should we do today in my ever-so non-motivated day??
posted by Immunegirl @ 1:48 PM
8 Comments:
i'm sorry. i know how it is to work in a lab with the morbidly incompetent.
talk kid into switching to one day for a straight 4-hour shot. tell him he will learn more.
also, give him reading assignments. give him articles published by your lab/people related to what you are doing. give him a friggin bio text and tell him 'chapter 7 has a lot of information you need to know.'
chances are good he's doing this for credit, and i've never heard of a for-credit opportunity where they aren't expected to do homework of some sort.
and if he finds it's too much work, maybe he'll leave. so it's really a win-win. :)
That was me?
Tell him all the beakers are dirty and today he will spend the day mixing chemicals in his mouth. *SWISHHHHHHHHHHH*
We need to have another coffee meet once the weather warms.
I'm just here to *smooch* Iggy.
*smooch*
Pennies are useless.
My minion vanished for a month, but has now resurfaced. Same as yours. She is quite smart, but is also a first year with almost no lab experience. I got her to make a 0.5 M sulphuric acid solution. She thought the magnetic stir bar was the coolest thing ever.
BTW, I think I was a little hasty ins aying my minion has resurfaced. She emailed and promised to return and work extra, extra hard, but I haven't actually seen her.
Ugh. Inexperienced grad students are one thing, but a freshman? I think it's actually pretty inconsiderate to ask you to supervise this person. When I was in college, most of the biology profs. wouldn't hire undergrads unless they had at least taken the introductory lab class.
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