Horses and Water

My PI meets with us each weekly, and we give her a printed research report and discuss what we have done, any results, and our plans for the coming weeks. She does not micromanage by any means, rather does this to keep up with what people are doing. I also use this time to tell her how I am approaching my supervisees.

I told her about my issues with the undergrad (in a general manner) and how he and I were going to use online document sharing to allow him more flexibility in his schedule. She said that sounded like a great idea. I also said I think I need to give him harder deadlines because when I give him two papers and say, "read these and cite them in your presentation in two weeks," he does not. (I think that is a relatively hard deadline, but maybe I am mistaken.) In comparison, when I leave for vacation, I ell him he must read those papers, write down any questions about the methods, results or discussion, but otherwise be able to state what the take-home message(s) was and how that relates to his research project. This he did.

I did a LOT of hand-holding and over-shoulder watching with him, but he does not seem to have the confidence to go out on his own or the ability to schedule non-lab but important things. I told my PI that this fall I will start off giving him a paper every week or two to discuss and then transition into him giving me a paper to discuss by the end of the semester. She liked this idea too.

"My" grad student has a fair amount of research experience, including being a full-time tech for the past six months. He is used to doing hands-on stuff full time. This is how I was when I started graduate school after being a tech for two years. So I did nearly full-time lab work on top of my classes because I needed to feel productive. (And hey, I have three papers published from my dissertation work, so maybe it paid off?) Anyway, I told my PI that I am pretty confident about his ability and knowledge, and that I gave him a fairly detailed protocol for Western blots up to a particular point. I told him (two weeks ago) that he needed to fill in the protocol with recipes and details before we got started and gave him three specific resources and his former post-doc supervisor did protein work and he was going to email said post-doc. I also forwarded him the information on the reagents I had ordered.

Up to this week, when we(/he) needed to do the protein extraction, he had not done completed the protocol. I told him that I would "recommend" doing the protein extraction, protein concentration assay, then STOP and write up the rest of the protocol and we would go through it at the end of the week before he continued. He has been sorta working on this, but started making buffers today rather than finish planning out the set-up. I did put a wrench in his initial plan when I told him a particular supply is too expensive to just run a gel for all these different conditions - I am all about efficient use of resources thanks to a mostly under-funded grad school experience. Anyway. I have to keep directing him to finish certain planning aspects before jumping in. And today he said to me that this is a different experience because he was so used to being hands-on busy all the time and not used to planning a whole experiment first and then doing it. Aha! The difference between being a competent and likely independent technician and transitioning into a graduate student. I told him that I totally agree and went through a similar transition when I became a post-doc.

My PI has agreed with the methods I have told her I am implementing. That said, I realized today that I also confirm these ideas with the lab manager in regular conversation. I explained to her today that I was not sure when we would actually run the Western blot because I keep having to reign in the grad student and get him to plan ahead in order to be able to run the experiment appropriately and have to keep stopping him to point out methodological details. She confirmed to me that historically, she usually shows grad students established techniques and explains methods, my PI teaches grad students how to think and plan scientifically, further into school the grad students figure new things out on their own, and she just shows post-docs where reagents are and they are generally able to just work on their own (although she has had to show me a bunch of microscopy stuff).

Take home message: Shove the undergrads right INTO the water or they will not drink; nudge the grad students towards the water when they get distracted; show the post-docs the "Water this way" arrow and leave them alone.