A Lab Techs Guide: Taking Care Of Your Graduate Student

This quick list will help lab technicians from all fields to take proper care of their graduate student.

1. Feeding your Grad student

Remember that most graduate students are alcoholics by nature, so many of their daily calories come purely from alcoholic beverages. Be sure to carry around their favorite snacks to keep them going, such as: crackers, nuts, nutrigrain bars, and fruit snacks if they do well that day.

2. Walking your Grad Student

After hours and hours of sitting at a desk or sitting in operant rooms, grad students bodies start to shut down. It's important to take your grad student for a walk regularly to prevent this, and show them the outside world. If they are highly sensitive to light it might mean you need to walk them more.

3. Anticipating Needs

As their laboratory technician, part of your job is to anticipate their needs. If they're doing surgery that day, be sure to prepare a sterile environment for them prior to their arrival. If they were out drinking last night (its okay to assume this is the case most days) be sure to make a pot of coffee for them. Whatever their needs, know them without being told or you're fired.

4. Adjust Expectations

Graduate students are very busy, so they are often late. When making an appointment or meeting with them, be sure to tell them it's 10-15 before the actual meeting, so they will be on time. If they tell you they are "on my way" or "be there momentarily," know they really mean that it'll be somewhere between half an hour and 2 hours.

5. Be a Shoulder to Cry On

Graduate students have to take a lot of punishment from the principal investigator. If something happens with an experiment then it's the graduate students fault first (unless you dun goofed). So be there for them in case they need a good cry.

6. Learn the Tricks of the Trade

The best way to help a graduate student is to understand the minutia of their daily work. For each process you learn to do independently, they have one less thing to do. This helps you by increasing your skill set, and them by lightening their burden.

7. Compliment your Graduate Student

Due to the nature of academia and graduate school, grad students often have low self esteem. Be sure to lift their spirits with a sincere but ultimately meaningless compliment. This can be about their hair or outfit that day, or even how well they're doing at life.