So if you’ve not done any kind of research project before, I suspect you’re going to be completely blown away by how long everything takes and how much you have to do before you can actually get anywhere with getting your hands dirty. When you walk into a lab for a practical, equipment and consumables have been ordered, paperwork has been photocopied, solutions and stocks have been prepared for you to work with, and the administration for ensuring your health and safety has all been done for you. When you’re doing your own data collection, all of those parts, normally carried out by your administrators, finance managers, technicians and academics, all becomes your responsibility. This is known as ‘research governance’.
On the first day, I will be teaching you how to make up stock solutions and agars and how to keep the lab clean and tidy – the technicians will not sweep in and dispose of your dirty tips and wash out your glass bottles this summer. You may be surprised by how much effort it takes to keep on top of this.
Also during that first day, while the solutions are autoclaving (it takes three hours, so we have some time to kill), I’ll be talking to you all individually, or in small groups, helping you plan the project you are going to carry out and what you will need to put in place to ensure it happens safely and ethically. This means carrying out ethics approval and risk assessment to ensure you will be safe while working, and planning your methodology to make sure we have all the equipment and consumables you need already available to us, (otherwise we will have to do some ordering).
By the end of the first day, you should have a clear plan in your lab books for the summer (don’t forget to bring a hard backed note book specifically for this work!). That means on the Tuesday, (when I can’t be in the lab, which means you can’t because you haven’t carried out the risk assessment!), you can spend the day filling out the paperwork to make sure that from Wednesday we are properly covered in the context of research governance.
This is the experience that I want you to get this summer. Being blunt, the data collection bit is the easy part, and won’t really teach you much at all – the techniques you will be using have all been taught to you in the past through practicals. I will have succeeded in making your summer experience a useful one if you walk away thinking ‘wow, if only I knew then what I know now’. It is these experiences that will make you a good scientist, and will put you in the best position for your future studies.