The devil is in the details

Minionses

(Yes, I stole that word from Landru. Oh well.)

My undergrad minion started working fulltime for the summer yesterday. It should be an interesting week. Our boss is very adamant that any graduate student or postdoc who gets any sort of minion (tech or undergrad or whatever) needs to KEEP THEIR MINION BUSY AT ALL TIMES. This is in reaction to a recent incident where a he found a technician in the hallway on her cell phone all the time when she didn't have that much to do. Frankly it was somewhat understandable since a) we work in a lab which means that we have downtime interspersed with experiments, b) her experiments often involve her setting things up and then putting them in a machine for four hours and c) her direct supervisor was on maternity leave. Anyway, the result is that the rest of us get CONSTANT lectures (or perhaps discussions that are more severe than lectures) about keeping people who work for us BUSY.

This, of course, could quickly become a problem with my undergrad. I am spending the next couple of weeks teaching him how to do some experiments. I have pretty much stopped everything that I am doing to teach him these experiments (I was going to have to do them anyway, so it isn't a huge deal to stop things for them). These experiments (which he will eventually hopefully be able to do on his own) all have large blocks of free time (1-2 hours). I was really apprehensive about how we would spend the time yesterday, but he immediately walked over to my desk (on his own without being told), took a textbook and started reading and taking notes. He brought his laptop today since he has his own desk.

I gave him a paper to read this morning and am getting a little annoyed that he keeps stopping and playing on the internet, but really, how can I complain when he can look over and see my desk and what I'm doing? Anyway, it should be a long and busy few weeks as I try to get him up to speed and also try to get my work to happen. I feel like he's never going to be able to do these experiments independantly. Let's hope I'm wrong.

posted by Immunegirl @ 1:52 PM