There are six extra people in our lab this summer, plus a temp who is finishing up a 5-month gig. There will also be a visiting post doc for a few weeks in July (staying at my place) and a post doc who has a joint appointment with another lab who will be with us more than usual. For reference, there are only eight of us there full-time year-round.
I enjoy having interns and visiting faculty around. The work that has become hum-drum to us is fresh to new people; their enthusiasm can enliven the mostly repetitive and often boring work we do. Also, it is exciting to see so much get done so quickly.
It takes good organization and communication to train and manage all those people, many of whom do not have much lab experience. Even the ones who have spent some time in labs don’t know how our lab operates (obviously), so they need a lot of help. If we don’t keep up with their needs, things can get royally f’d up. Regular readers may recall that our lab has occasional organizational shortcomings; I always get tense at the start of the summer before we know what the interns are like. Good ones make the summers rock out, but so-so ones can wreak havoc without even knowing it (if we were more organized or better mentors, we could probably circumvent problems).
Today was good though. I knew others would be working in the same area as me, so I got started in the lab straight away to could claim some space and supplies. One by one, people joined me and managed to squeeze in so everybody could work. An interesting if tedious highlight was sitting quietly while three different interns got trained by three different people at different points in the day to do almost the same thing. But the best part was with the temp: housekeeping is a perennial problem for us so yesterday I had asked her to clean up a big mess she had neglected for days and days and today she did it! I was the first to leave this afternoon, so we’ll see how the space looks tomorrow morning.
I hope today signals the start of a fun and productive summer.
6 comments:
Me, too. Good luck!
I don't do too well in crowded work spaces - I think I'd be coming in at 4 am and escaping early in that situation! I like a little bit of chatter and interaction, but my personal space is of above average size and I just can't cope if there's more than one conversation going on at the same time. More power to you if you're still able to get your work done!!
I'm writing this while being blasted by Mozart piano concertos from behind my boss's closed door, which has a big sign on it saying "GO AWAY" in red ink. He obviously feels the same way, especially when a paper is due.
I'll be digging my MP3 player out of my bag any minute now. I like Mozart, but only when it's voluntary!
Yeah, good luck with that! I always needed summers to be hyper-productive, so when I knew that there would be lots of people around I would swing my hours more towards early mornings and/or later evenings. Good luck!!
Nooooo...it can't possibly be time for summer chaos yet! We usually get a huge influx in the summer too, and it is almost always a disaster. Most of that is because our influx consists entirely of summer undergrads and rotation students. In other words, inexperienced people who have zero familiarity with our lab, our area of research, and our methods (particularly biohazard protocol). I'm all for new blood, but I dread, dread, dread the yearly chaos.
It seems like PI's can really go overboard with the summer students without considering how it will affect the grad students... I talked to someone the other day whose lab doubles in size each summer! File away as another thing to watch out for as a PI: not listening to your grad students' opinions...
We had a big lab meeting yesterday to discuss lab safety, etiquette, and project priorities. We very rarely have meetings, so I'm glad that this one happened.
The PIs usually get students because we need help with particular projects, i.e. they typically don't end up trying to find work for people who have already arrived. So the extra hands are well placed, it's just that there are so many of them.
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