My world revolving around rotation students

Not all graduate programs encourage or permit first years to rotate through different labs, but many, including the one here, do. During the course of the first year, students spend several weeks in each of a few different labs they are interested in.

Advantages:
--Everyone gets a chance to smell each other out. It's hard to evaluate students based on an interview alone, as FSP has noted. Advisors and students alike get to evaluate each other's styles, thought processes, and experimental approach. Ms PhD has listed some of more important attributes to see in the prospective lab member-to-be.
--First years get a flavor of the different types of science in their subfield, which will help inform their research and develop some breadth in their knowledge base.
--Fresh youthful faces remind the rest of us that we once thought our grad career would be a series of stunning successes, too. (This could weigh as a disadvantage, depending on how much you like being reminded of your younger, foolisher self.)

Disadvantages:
--Every few weeks or months, depending on the length of rotation, you may have yet another first-year to train on your expensive equipment, using your way-more-than-expensive time.
--While the process of training someone is valuable, the returns are quite low, since few first years can accomplish any experiment, no matter how small, during a short time span (broken up by classes, too), and some of the people you train will never return to the lab. So that time spent answering questions about where the pipette tips are is really wasted.

Overall I think it's a good setup, mainly because the opportunity to spend a couple of months working with a potential labmate/advisor probably saves a lot of heartbreak and disgruntlement down the road.

Today, however, was partly spent training our brand-new rotation student. She took a class our advisor taught, and on the strength of her performance in that class he took her on as a rotation student. He mentioned the only possible issue was that her English needed some improvement.

Anyhow, Roton does seem reasonably together, but it is true that she is often difficult to understand (and I consider myself pretty good at interpreting accents of all kinds, scientists being a culturally diverse kind of workforce). The dominant question right now, however, is whether she understands us well enough to function.

Today, I noticed she was using some lab materials that didn't look fresh. I asked her about them, and she said they dated from two days ago. I explained that she should make new ones; told her the reason that old ones, while appearing just fine, would actually malfunction; and returned to my experiments.

Twenty minutes later, I pass by her area to find ONP telling her the exact same thing. She had not made any new materials, and was continuing to try to use the old ones.

Important points: it does not take long to make these items. Four minutes, tops, to have a whole new stash of them. She already knows how to make them, since she had done it two days ago. Also, she didn't say to ONP anything along the lines of, "Oh yeah, Dr Jekyll already told me that, I just hadn't gotten around to it yet and/or wanted to use up the old ones since I'm just learning this technique anyhow."

The options: (a) she understood me, but chose to ignore my advice; (b) she didn't understand me. Either one is not a good sign.

Now, it's definitely possible that she was thinking something like, "I'll just keep practicing with these old ones, then make new ones soon," and she didn't explain that to ONP because her English was too halting, or because she was shy, or whatever. So I'm not super annoyed at her, just a little perplexed.

But this does get to one of the disadvantages--you spend a lot of time training these people, and if they don't in the end join your lab, especially if they don't join because you don't think they're good enough, then boy it's hard to feel like your time was well spent.

We'll see how this develops....