What have I taught someone to do?

National Blog Posting Month – December 2012 – Work

Prompt – Do you enjoy teaching others? Talk about a time you taught someone how to do something.

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It should be obvious from some of my blog posts (here and here) that I truly adore teaching. I love any form of teaching, from the formal class room, to putting up a table at a career fair, to preparing talks for senior citizens at retirement communities. I love it all.

For all the teaching that I’ve done, it’s tough to narrow down this topic to just one time I taught someone how to do something. The specific phrase “how to do something” means that there was some actual step-by-step training involved. It’s not just teaching someone to distinguish between igneous and metamorphic rocks, for example, as you might in a traditional lecture-style class. The prompt is asking about something that was perhaps a bit more involved.

One of the things I get to teach (though I use the term ‘train’ in this case) regularly is how to run analyses on the mass spectrometer. Every graduate student who’s going to run more than a couple dozen samples in our lab goes through this training, so they can run their own samples (on evenings and weekends) and I can focus on contract work (to keep the lab running).

This is not without great trials and tribulations. It’s nice to have students run their own samples. It saves me a lot of time. But running a mass spectrometer is complex. A good student will be able to gain the skills they need to independently run the mass spectrometer in about four days (or four sets of analyses). The first day, they watch me and take copious notes. The second and third days, they do everything, with me observing directly. On the fourth day, I let them do everything when I’m not in the room, but I come in and check things in between steps. If they’ve gotten most of everything right (and haven’t done anything wrong that would compromise the mass spectrometer), then I give them permission to run analyses whenever they want.

This process can be insanely time consuming. I need about four hours to get a set of analyses going. When I have to train someone, there goes the whole day. And it’s terrifying too. One wrong push of a button and BAMMO! I’ve got to replace $1000 worth of parts. Usually, the training period goes through the “Day 4” step for several analysis days. “Day 1” is also often repeated.

Occasionally, I have students that really struggle with all of it. There really is a ton to remember. It’s a bit like patting your head and rubbing your belly. And hopping on one foot. Even more rarely, I have a student who just ‘gets’ it immediately. That’s always a little disconcerting, because it makes me wonder what I left out.

And it doesn’t matter whether the trainee is a undergraduate student, a graduate student, or a post-doctoral researcher. That has nothing to do with who’s going to have the most success. I do find that most undergraduates are general so afraid to break anything that they follow my instructions to a T (which is good). Postdocs also tend to follow my instructions carefully, I think that’s because they have enough experience with breaking things by then that they also take my word as law. Grad students tend to be a mixed bag. The mix of low (or no) experience and high confidence (having survived an undergraduate degree) can result in them ‘trying’ things that they shouldn’t do. Or hesitating when they don’t need to.

By now, I’ve gone through this process so many times, they’ve all blurred together. There is a certain satisfaction in knowing I’ve trained so many students. By providing them this skill, they have something to market as they’re moving forward with their lives. And though it’s highly unlikely that whatever future job they have will entail using the exact same instrument for the exact same purpose, just knowing what is involved with such analyses and that they can do it should give them some confidence and a step up above students that might not have been provided the same opportunity.

For 12-5-12