Advice for Starting Out in Reserach

[Violagirl]

Starting this next week, I will be involved with volunteering as an undergraduate student in a biomedical research facility. I will be helping out the postdoc around the lab on a project that he is currently working on and I will be primarily involved with helping out with basic tasks around the lab (making reagents, taking care of the mice in the lab, etc.) I have not done research before outside of the classroom and am nervous about what to expect, especially with making reagents. I don't have much confidence when it comes working in the lab as I have had a few not so great moments in taking Biology and O Chem lab last year.

 

For anyone that's done research, I had a questions that are mostly about starting out and making reagents. If the lab knows you have not done research before, do they generally start out in showing you how to do different protocols? Second, for making reagents, do you generally follow a specific protocol on what is needed for that particular solution? Also for making reagents, if you need to adjust the procedure to make a specific amount that's different from what is given in the procedure, how do you best determine how much less of each solution to use to make that particular reagent? Will someone in the lab give you an idea?

Thanks to anyone that reads through this, it's very much appreciated as I'm really nervous about starting.<br style="font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, Calibri, Geneva; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(227, 227, 227); ">

Edited September 16, 2012 by Violagirl

[ecoli]

It depends on the lab, but everyone starts from nothing and that should be recognized by your post-doc. Just make sure you're looking out for yourself. If your not sure of something, of the calculation of a dilution, etc, just ask. I'm sure the post-doc would rather be bothered with questions than a communal reagent gets made incorrectly.

[CharonY]

Precisely. Your job is essentially to listen and learn and ask questions if something is not clear to you. Communicate clearly and you should be fine. We generally do not have any expectations in terms experience from undergrads. And even if we had, it would be fairly unreasonable, as each lab has its own workflow.

What they are going to do is to familiarize you with the inner workings of the lab and show you your responsibilities. What you should bring with you is very simple calculation abilities (for basic stuff like calculating molarities, for example) and if you are uncomfortable with it, let them double-check.

In fact, at the beginning try to verify everything just to make sure that you got it (usually they will do some control, but if they are busy or overworked, they may neglect that). It is always better to ask than to ruin someone's experiments, as ecoli mentioned.