On Being an Undergrad...

The annoying thing about being a wee-little undergraduate student is that at my current lab, for safety regulation reasons, I’m not allowed to do labwork “unsupervised”. This means that someone has to be in the wing I’m working in while I’m working. This is understandable because I don’t have a degree and I might fuck shit up I guess, but on the other hand it’s really annoying. When I’m in lab, I’m rarely “supervised” in that it’s very unusual that someone is sitting with me looking over my shoulder telling me what to do. Usually a PhD student teaches me how to do a technique once and then expects me to do it on my own the next time, which is exactly how I like to work. If I’m doing something new or tricky, I might be supervised, but generally I’m off doing my thing and my supervising PhD student is off doing their thing and if something goes wrong or I need help or whatever I might find them but otherwise we’re both on our own, doing our things.

The project I’m working on now involves feeding bioengineered bacteria shit and hoping that they make interesting secondary metabolites with it. Feeding bacteria cultures 5 mg of some strange chemical is not difficult and takes about 15 minutes to do, but since bacteria are living things, the experiment is time sensitive and not always on my schedule. This means that I often have to go in on the weekend. This means that I need to coordinate my schedule with my supervising PhD student on the weekend while she has her life shit going on and I have mine. Which is ANNOYING.

I’m also used to going to a small liberal arts school that is undergrad only, so I’m used to having an exceptional amount of autonomy in lab. When I’m doing lab work I either have a key or swipe card access to the lab, and unless I’m doing something really dangerous or using expensive, tricky equipment that is easy to fuck up, no one gives a fuck whether I’m doing it during the day or at 2 am. I’ve come in hungover on Saturday morning to work up a reaction. I’ve come in at midnight on Saturday to run a PCR. I’ve wandered in at one in the morning to follow a reaction by TLC. In fact, I can think of two things that I’m not allowed to do by myself in lab: use the catalytic hydrogenator (in case it explodes) or use n-butyl lithium (in case I light shit on fire). A couple of my friends procrastinated their lab work so much that they pulled an all-nighter to run a bunch of Western blots and one of their girlfriends called them up panicked because it was six in the morning and they still hadn’t gone home.

So, sigh. I suppose soon enough I’ll have my degree and my own lab space and it will be the time when no one gives a fuck when I’m in lab. But for now I’m a young’un hopelessly reliant on everyone else.