I've been coming to this lab 5 days a week, 2 hours/day for more than a month until now. There is currently no undergrad working in the lab (3 undergrads from last year had gone to med school/grad school and dental school). There are just a couple of PhD students and I was told to "work" with them. What I did was to follow them around, the grad student showed me how to do western blot, run gels, PCR, prepare petri dish for bacteria transformation... but he doesn't allow me to do actually do the work. He did not say it explicitly, but I believe that he doesn't want me to screw up his data/experiments or something. Even after a month, I still had no idea what they are working on. This is mostly because of my limited knowledge of biology (I just had 1 semester of freshman Bio). The PhD student did not take time to explain the project to me at all, he just gave a stack of published papers and tell me to read it. How the heck am I supposed to understand it? I wish there were other undergrads around to help me, that might be easier for me 🙁
In my school there is an undergrad research program called UROP, and my goal is to do project in the Spring semester. With this program, we need to come up with a proposal on our own and submit to the committee. Since no undergrads can come up with proposals on their own, I understand that it means the professor would assign a project/idea to the student to write up and submit. I already discussed this with the PI, and he agreed to help me on it, but the problem is that he is never in the lab. He goes to conferences and seminars everyday, and the whole lab is left for the grad students to run and decide things.
Is there a way to get more involved with lab work? How to get the PhD students to actually assign tasks for me? What was your experience like when you first started in a lab? Did you just follow the grad students around like me, or did you get to do the work?
In my school there is an undergrad research program called UROP, and my goal is to do project in the Spring semester. With this program, we need to come up with a proposal on our own and submit to the committee. Since no undergrads can come up with proposals on their own, I understand that it means the professor would assign a project/idea to the student to write up and submit. I already discussed this with the PI, and he agreed to help me on it, but the problem is that he is never in the lab. He goes to conferences and seminars everyday, and the whole lab is left for the grad students to run and decide things.
Is there a way to get more involved with lab work? How to get the PhD students to actually assign tasks for me? What was your experience like when you first started in a lab? Did you just follow the grad students around like me, or did you get to do the work?
