Happy times! Collaborations have my lab bursting at the seams. We literally have hundreds of samples waiting to be processed, and with the projects we're already neck deep in taking up all of our time, I've realized that I need to do something to break the sample processing bottleneck. DNA does not extract itself.

So to reduce the bottleneck I've hired a student worker. This will be my third. So far I'm 1 for 2 in the category of "productive student worker". The first was a disaster. They were handed over to me from a coworker who "couldn't use them". Hindsight being 20:20 and all, the reason my coworker couldn't was because the student was a bum ... ok, maybe not so much a bum as entitled. As in "this is beneath me." I could sit down with them, outline experiments, have my support scientist hover over them ... in essence, do everything short of running the whole thing myself and it still resulted in a mess. We did get a couple of figures for a proceedings paper (hopefully a manuscript in the near future), but it was an opportunity lost. I shoulder the blame for the lack of productivity out of this student. I was new, it was my first student, and I was still trying to work out of my supervisory style and there are things that I know I could have done better.

Fortuna . . . More