Someone who has more readers should have a poll: Do you work in your science lab/let your students work in the lab alone? Do you actively enforce university safety requirements like "no open-toed shoes" or" no drinking" (tea/coffee) in the lab?
I just got my first lab visit from the new safety officer, and although in general our lab is exceedingly tidy/well organized/an awesome place to work, the shortcomings he identified were ones that I don't agree with personally so therefore I don't enforce. In particular, a student who's boss is my supervisor (and who works in an adjacent room), was in the process of pouring liquid nitrogen from a 5 L container to a 1 L container - in her flip flops- when the safety guy did his walk through. Now even I think this is stupid, and if I caught her doing it myself, I would have told her as much (I was in a meeting for this part of his walk-through). He told her to go home and change her shoes. Insisted.
This guy is conscientious and generally a very friendly guy. He is about my age and was a Masters student before taking up his new university position, filling a vacancy left when the same man who's done the job for the last few decades retired. NewGuy realizes that things were stagnant, and is looking to reinforce a "culture of safety" now that he is a position of responsibility. Obviously looking for allies, but...I couldn't help but retort his suggestions.
Basically it came down to this: Me No Babysitter.
I've trained the students (including said perpetrator), and have made it a point to tell them that handling liquid nitrogen while wearing inappropriate lab wear is dumb. They should get someone else to do it OR make an effort to keep appropriate footwear (at least) available in the lab. But I would never insist a student go home to change before completing their experiment. Never. But NewGuy would. And did.
And so I pressed him: Would you tell a post-doc who was wearing inappropriate shoes while doing an experiment to go home and change? A: yes. A faculty member? A: yes, the university is liable if anyone gets hurt, regardless of hierarchy and job position.
See for me, I say: You are a goddamn adult, start acting like it. If you want to risk your toes, as a 20-year-old, you can. But it's dumb, and I'll say that out loud to your face if given the chance. I'm not even in the same room as many of the students I'm supposed to be babysitting, which makes the idea of monitoring their practices closely kinda laughable. NewGuy says, "we need to create a culture here" and I say "I'll train them right, and then let them be". Which would you choose?
Figure 1: Don't be stupid. If you are, don't blame me.
Nominally related was NewGuy's question: Do you let students work after hours alone? This is a loaded question around here because as a primarily undergraduate school we have lots of young researchers doing lab experiments around a hectic class schedule. There are relatively few post-docs or other "round-the-clock" researchers in the building, so they often work alone. Yet because undergrads are who do most of our work, the expectation of output are pretty high. Last year one of the honours students in my lab cloned, overexpressed and purified a protein of interest from a rarely-studied picocyanbacterial species, then ran RTPCR on the transcipts in question over multiple time points and multiple environmental set-ups. This while she was studying for MCATS and excelling at class work, over a 12 month period. She'll probably get at least two papers out of her high-quality research, and everyone was fawning over her productivity.
NewGuy wants to implement a "buddy system", citing that no lab environment is safe enough to guarantee safety for students at all times. Basically rebuking my statements that unlike a chemistry lab, we handle relatively low-danger stuff. He wasn't having it. But the trade-off is: if we require our students to work in pairs, it will severely affect the amount of time they spend in the lab. The research quality will suffer, and so will the number of publications we put out every year. So the faculty have to be okay with that, and we need to change the culture there too. Anyway, I'm not opposed to restricting research hours for undergrads, but I can't do it unilaterally. Do other institutions have a "no lab work when you are alone" policy? Would this ever really work??
The garlic patch and chamomile plants:
The front porch perennial beds, which replaced a few very sad looking cedar bushes last summer:
