Work ethic

So now that the summer is here I’m able to shift from teaching classes to teaching students how to do the research I want done in my lab. After a couple of weeks I’m not sure yet which is the worse situation. Teaching the classes sucked in a lot of ways, but trying to get undergrads to do research is turning out to be much more challenging than I had hoped.

Part of it is my fault. I have four students working for me, yet for two of them the instruments needed for their projects are not complete, which means I have to find some kind of busy work for them to do until things get here. So far things seem to be working, but I need to get them doing real work soon.

The part that isn’t my fault...well it’s still my fault but that’s because I’m too nice. You see I don’t like the idea of watching over people for hours on end to make sure that they put in the agreed upon amount of work. Well at least that’s what I thought, up until this week. It seems that as I was busy working on a grant my students weren’t really doing much. I had left them up to their own devices to try and do the separations of some mixtures I made for them, the goal being to figure out how to work the instrument. As best I can tell they might know how to work the instrument, but I don’t think that they really learned much about how to alter an electrophoretic separation.

The worst part of this is that one of the two students who hasn’t been doing much on his own is being paid, by me. We set up a salary for the summer whereby he gets paid abut $300 a week for the set number of hours he’s supposed to work. So far this week it’s looking like that is coming out to be $200 an hour! Oh, in the hour and a half that he was working yesterday he made a pair of buffers, poorly. I could save money by just buying buffers and having them flown in daily, by a Pegasus.

Seeing as I sent him an email yesterday explaining that I expected more form him I’m kind of surprised that I did not see him today. I’m even more surprised that I have yet to get a response to my email. If I don’t see him Friday I am going to fire his sorry ass. Which has me wondering if I should email him the dialogue from an old Simpson’s episode:

Marge- Homer, that was the plant calling. They said that if you don’t show up tomorrow don’t bother coming in on Monday.

Homer - Woohoo! Four day weekend!