UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH
Welcome to the Silvaggi Lab! As with anything worthwhile, participating in the research going on in this lab comes with additional responsibilities above and beyond your regular coursework. These responsibilities are the same whether you are participating for credit or pay. The purpose of this document is to clearly define what is expected of you and what you should expect from me.
My expectations of you:
- That you will show up. Yogi Berra once asked, "If people don't want to come out to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?" While it is true that I cannot stop you from not coming to lab, it is also true that you cannot stop me from not giving you an 'A.' Clear? Yogi did have a way with words. The bare minimum effort is 10 hours in the lab per week. I don't require formal time sheets, but if I never see you and nothing gets done on your project, you will get the "come-to-lab-or-else" lecture. I will ask you for your schedule at the beginning of the semester, and we will identify blocks of time when you are expected to be in the lab, and hopefully some other blocks where you can be when experiments require it. You are required to attend periodic group meetings where we get together to share the results of our hard work.
Of course, once you do get to lab, it is expected that you will dress appropriately (see "Safety" below) and treat your lab-mates with common courtesy and respect. In this laboratory, courtesy and respect extends beyond the obvious to picking up after yourself, promptly washing your glassware, and using/following the various equipment schedules.
- That you will be Safe. Please see the lab web site (http://www.silvaggi.com/chp.html) for detailed, lab-specific safety information. I will provide some of the most important points here:
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- Proper attire for lab includes closed-toe shoes and long pants.
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- Formal lab safety training is required at least annually for all graduate and undergraduate researchers. See the University Safety and Assurances web site (http://www4.uwm.edu/usa/) for the safety seminar schedule.
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- There are a number of very dangerous chemicals in the lab (strong acids, toxins, and mutagens, for example). Please check the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) for any unfamiliar chemicals that you use. MSDS are stored in .pdf format on the lab shared drive, accessible on any Windows computer in the lab at:
U:/Research Groups/Silvaggi/Protocols/Chemical Inventory.
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- Other hazards include use of a vacuum pump for filtration (glass bottles can implode without warning), gas cylinders, UV light, and cryogens (liquid N2 and "dry ice").
- That you will take Notes! You are expected to take detailed notes of everything that you do in the lab. I have prepared a Data Management SOP (available here) to help you figure out what is important to note down. If in doubt, though, write it down! Also, do not plan to re-write your notes. Later never comes. Either keep your notebook on paper, or in a Word document on your laptop/tablet, but do it in real time—as the experiments are being planned and/or executed. DO NOT write notes on scraps here and there and think you will enter it all into your notebook at once later on. I can tell you from experience that it doesn't work this way. Your "product" at the end of the semester will be your lab notebook. I should be able to see exactly what you did during the semester and be able to repeat your experiments.
- That you will be diligent and careful with the equipment. You will notice that we have a lot of fancy-looking equipment. It is all still new at this point, and I would like to keep it functional as long as possible—I don't have a big enough budget to fix most of the equipment in the event of an accident. This is where you come in: All of the really sensitive/expensive equipment has standard operating procedures posted on or near it. You are expected to read and follow these SOPs! If something is not clear, then ask someone. Also, almost all of the equipment has some kind of care and maintenance that needs to happen after each use in order to keep it working properly. If no one tells you how to care for a piece of equipment, you are expected to ask—"I didn't know" is not a valid excuse.
- That you will communicate. Finally, we arrive at one of the most important parts of working in the lab. You must communicate effectively with me and/or your grad student mentor if you have questions, safety concerns, to plan and schedule experiments, or to notify us if you will be absent. If you can't get to lab and you had experiments planned for that day, let me or your mentor know as soon as possible. Nothing ticks a mentor off more than taking time to prepare an experiment for an undergrad and then getting stood up.
What you should expect from me:
- Patient mentoring in terms of experimental design and technical aspects of laboratory research, academic issues (e.g. advice about classes, how to study, etc), career advice.
- Additional instruction in the related areas of (1) searching databases for relevant research articles, (2) reading and understanding research articles, and (3) communicating research findings (preparing good posters and presentations). Expect me to ask you to present a poster at some point, either at an internal UWM poster session, or at one of the regional scientific or undergraduate research meetings.
- Communication. I will do my best to give you regular feed-back about how you are performing in the lab, so that you know where you stand. You should feel free to contact me with any questions you have—I will do my best to answer even questions that are unrelated to lab.
