Some of you may have been wondering how Blog Fodder, our haplessly ignorant tech, has been doing. Last I spoke of him, this Ivy graduate was learning how to use a pipetman, revealing remarkable deficits in conversion factors and even arithmetic of the simplest sort, unwieldy with his hands, and dismissive of animal welfare.
I am happy to report that he has cleaned up his act a great deal. His fine-motor skills are somewhat improved, but more importantly he has figured out how to compensate for his shakiness. I still wring my hands when I watch him do anything delicate, and he's slower than I would like (on some tasks where speed is important), but he doesn't biff everything he touches any longer.
I haven't dared to watch him do conversions again, so I don't know how well he's learned the necessary arithmetic. The jobs I give him either don't entail making calculations, or rely on protocols with the calculations pre-done, and if he's screwing up other people's experiments, I don't know about it.
He appears to have figured out pipetting.
He has become the go-to tech for the animal colony, and it became clear that his initial stupid comments were due more to awkwardness, or mild idiocy, than actual disregard for animal welfare. Recently he wrote an email to the animal facility director pointing out some problems with the animal care in our room, and requesting specific improvements.
He is still slow to understand what I consider straightforward instructions, but those of us who supervise him have taken to making sure he writes down what is said--and then reads it back to us--so that we know we are on the same page.
What has caused his improvement? I would like to think he was afraid of my wrath, but in reality I think there are several causes.
1) He became more at home in the lab. We all know the experience of joining a new lab and feeling ignorant and out of place. Some of us perhaps learn sooner than BF did, but he did eventually adapt.
2) As we got to know him better, we made more use of some of his previously unappreciated skills. He is extremely neat, and he keeps various benches and cabinets about 1000% cleaner and better organized than they had been before. Once we saw this, we started asking him to do more organizational tasks.
3) He has many friends who went to work in the financial industry. I suspect that in the last six months, he has come to value having a steady job more than he did at first.
4) This is his first serious job, as far as I can tell. He may have simply needed to learn what having a job is all about.
He still shows little to no interest in the intellectual life of the lab, but while it is nice to have techs who care about the science, they can be time-consuming in their own way (since they always have questions about what's going on), so this is only moderately disappointing. I wouldn't recommend him to another lab, particularly, but I no longer dread dealing with him. I'm hopeful that he will someday figure out what he is truly excited about, because science is not for him, but at least he's reached a sufficient competence level for us.
What have I learned? That pampered undergrads in their first tussle with the workplace can actually learn to be decent citizens, I suppose. That's useful to know, even if I never again wish to watch this process in action.
15 years ago
6 comments:
I had a student doing his Honours with me and he was a real shaker with the Pipetman too. The shakes intensified whenever I stood next to him. I was never sure whether the aliquotes went into the micro-tubes or landed on his lab coat. But he was a real good student. He graduated and never entered the lab again - he's a medical writer now!
I often struggle with this question of whether it would be better to have techs who are at least somewhat interested in science, vs. the ones who insist on having their own projects (and the PIs who acquiesce, even when what we really need is a tech).
I'm quite impressed, actually. I hope the improvement lasts. At my uni there is a 6-month probation, after which you cannot fire a tech, you have to make them miserable enough to quit. Many people can keep up appearances for the short-term, maybe even start out low to demonstrate improvement, but then they completely stop working once the union clause kicks in.
Good luck, I hope that's not the case with this one.
Does your lab have the book At the Bench, by Kathy Barker (CSH Press)? It's a great introduction to practical lab work and I ask every new person to read it.
(She also wrote At the Helm, about how to run a lab. It's mostly about managing the people side of things because, as you're discovering, that's where most of the problems arise.
Rosie--no, but I've had that book recommended to me (especially for handing to junior people...) by several people now, so I think I'll get them both. Thanks!
Ms PhD, yes, it's tough that the good smart people are also usually too smart to be interested in a job washing glassware, or cleaning the fume hood, etc. And yet, who wants a stupid tech? I have my fingers crossed that the economy's ugliness will keep BF working at a tolerable level as long as I'm there!
Reading the older blog-fodder posts. He wouldn't have learned molarity in biology or chem labs at university. The solutions are already made for the students, especially at ivy-league schools.
At my U our students arrive from high school knowing molarity but quickly lose the ability to, for example, explain how to make 100ml of a 0.1M solution of NaCl (my standard test). By senior year they refuse to even try.
Rosie--Perhaps that is true at some universities, but I attended an ivy league school and I can assure you that anyone who didn't know how to calculate molarity would not have passed intro chemistry. There is coursework, not just labs.
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