Middle daughter needed a bio experience for her HS biotech course. (I had a lot of connections via work and neighbors.) My friend, a veterinarian, had a large practice and put my daughter to work learning basic lab procedures and universal precautions. She learned how to dress for a lab, how to wash/clean, wrap and autoclave instruments. She used the centrifuge, filled fluid medication for injection and learned how to work with the public. What neither we, nor our daughter knew at the time, was that this ātrainingā gained her enough experience to gain her a lab job at her UC. Later, according to her PI, the team chose our daughter because of her experience working in a vetās office. In the lab there, our daughter was very excited because she got to examine āfrozen roadkillā animals. IIRC The researchers were checking to see if illness affected the animals condition going into oncoming traffic?
Our eldest also took the HS biotech course and was placed in a lab, putting tiny BP cuffs on mice, learning to do so without getting bitten. She was required to be an adult (18) for that experience. It was also unpaid work with tedious documentation. She learned how to document timely changes in behaviors of diabetic mice. She also learned how to dress in a lab and everything about universal lab procedures. One of the main reasons they really liked her, was because she was able to translate for international visitors. Although she didnāt speak, Mandarin, she had friends, in her high school, who did, and she quickly picked up the language throughout her time in high school.
Both girls spent a couple hours each day doing this. It wasnāt a full day of work. They got a lot of social breaks.
These experiences all sound fantastic. But ālab workā is also logging in supplies and checking them against the purchase orders; going through the weekly payroll report to make sure that the āclocked inā hours for the lab techs matches whatās going to accounting to get them paid accurately; running endless statistical reports (and then verifying the results) to make sure that nobody misplaced a decimal point.
Executing rats is positively glamourous compared to some of the stuff my kids did as āresearch assistantsā.
Yet those are the vary basics of lab and field research. While PIs generally have a budget which allows them to pay a tech or an intern to do those things, grad students are generally required to do these things on their own. Because these tasks are critical for research, the PI is required to actually know them all, and any PI who has not actually done them on their own at one point will have have problems making in identifying errors and artifacts in their own results.
Also, running multiple statistical analyses can be rewarding. Or so Iāve heard. From a āfriendā.
Of course essential. But parents who assume that their kid is going to be finding a cure for pancreatic cancer donāt always understand the hundreds of mundane activities that are required to run a labā¦. And one of my kids discovered that the most valuable skill he had was programming in R. Nobody would let him near an actual specimen or even bothered to teach lab techniques once they learned the kid had statistical trainingā¦.