It is really intimidating being new in a lab. Honestly, even if you’ve been in a lab for a while it’s still regular-level intimidating.
You’re surrounded by incredibly smart scientists who seem to all know exactly what they’re talking about, although it’s in kind of a quasi-foreign language with all kinds of seemingly made-up terms. You’re hyper focused on very particular details of one very specific and minute part of the scientific universe, and sometimes it’s hard to see the bigger picture or to step back and think about how you’re approaching your lab work.
If you’re new in the lab, or even if you’re not so new, this is the article for you. We’ve crowdsourced 11 top tips for working in the lab from GoldBio readers and have put our own personal take on each of them – enjoy!
In this article:
Plan ahead and organize before starting experiments
Keep everything until the task is complete
Depersonalize experimental outcomes
This lab advice falls into two broad categories:
- Approach
- Perspective
Approach
These tips came from researchers like you, and deal with how you approach your day-to-day in the lab. Some are philosophical and some are practical, but they are all helpful in making the most out of your lab work.
Plan ahead and organize before starting experiments
“Take your time, get organized before starting any experiment.”
Write out what you’re going to do in the experiment, step by step.
- Do you have all the reagents and supplies that you need for the experiment?
- Do you have enough time to finish the experiment?
- Alternatively, at which steps can you pause and leave the experiment for the night or weekend?
- Do you have all the proper controls that you need to clearly interpret your experiment?
Honestly, there is a bit of a learning curve to this, and if you’re just starting out in the lab you likely need to try out doing sloppy and rushed experiments first as a form of scientific capacity building. Once you get tired of the hecticness and inconclusive results that approach brings, then take your time and think through the entire experiment from start to finish. Spending 30 minutes doing this upfront can save you weeks, months, or even years from chasing down the wrong rabbit holes.
Slow and steady wins the race
“Don’t try to finish everything in one day or a month, take it slow and steady – step by step.”
When you’re in the thick of a research project there can be so many different experiments to do that, it often feels overwhelming and can feel like you need to get everything done now to make any progress at all. However, this frantic mindset frequently leads to rushed experiments and efforts wasted heading down avenues that didn’t really need exploring.
Research projects usually take years to finish. You will actually be much more productive in the long run by slowing down in the short term, thoroughly planning everything that needs to be done, and then knocking out each step piece by piece.
Label everything
“Over-label everything, you never know when you might need to know a seemingly useless piece of information!”
Have you ever had to redo an experiment because you didn’t label everything correctly, resulting in indecipherable results? I have … multiple times (cue the sad trombone). It sucks, and it is a complete waste of time. I may as well have just taken the morning off, slept in, and enjoyed an extended coffee break!
When you’re doing an experiment – label everything. If you’re storing reagents, research samples, etc. – label everything. Sometimes it’s tough to know what you, or somebody else that you are working with or who will later inherit the project, will need to know in the future, but if you over-label, chances are you and your coworkers will have all the information you need.
Relatedly, when you’re documenting your experiment in your lab notebook – over-document! Include everything that you or someone else would need to be able to reproduce your experiment 2 months, 2 years, or even 2 decades down the road.
We have a helpful video with 10 tips on keeping a lab notebook so that anyone in your lab who needs to, can pick it up and make sense and use of the information within.
Keep everything until the task is complete
“Don’t throw away anything until the task is complete. It will come back to bite you.”
As we mentioned above, research projects are really long. But now you’ve spent the years doing experiments, you’ve written your results in a manuscript and submitted it for publication, and all you have to do now is wait to get the reviewers’ glowing comments back. Now is the right time to clean up your research space and get rid of all those old samples, right?
No! Chances are you will receive requests for more experiments or requests to better explain certain results. Keeping any reagents, samples, etc., that you’ve used on the project could save you money and time on any additional efforts that are needed. Additionally, there might be new research avenues that become apparent, and again keeping your hard-won samples will give you a massive head start and save you tons of time down the road.
The caveat to this piece of advice is when you’re leaving a lab, please check and see what research materials you should keep, where you should keep them, and make sure someone knows how to access them. But undoubtedly now would be the right time to get rid of that napkin note that you already transcribed into your official notebook or that protein gel that’s been de-staining for the last two and a half years.
If unsure, ask questions
“If you are unsure, ALWAYS ask questions.”You don’t know what you don’t know! Especially when you’re new in the lab, it feels like everyone around you knows so much more than you do. Well, guess how you can catch up? By asking those smart people more questions!
Now, for sure you want to work hard, study independently, and try to get the basics down on your own. But no one knows everything, and most people are happy to share some of their hard-won knowledge with you, particularly if they’re passionate about the subject. So, identify the best people to ask questions and spread your questions around the lab so no single person is overwhelmed. Before you know it, you’ll be the expert getting peppered with questions from the
newbies!
Bring Your Best Self to Work
“Make friends and win over opponents”To be clear, this advice is intended for any normal work situation. If you’re experiencing abuse of any kind please do not try to win over opponents – rather, reach out to a trusted supervisor or professor, a university ombudsmen, or for legal advice from a lawyer.
Working in the lab can be very intense! Everyone is working really hard, yet progress often comes slowly, if at all. Collectively you’re trying to make inroads into the unknown, and until a few reliable trail markers have been established, you’re essentially lost. In these early discovery stages conflicting advice flies through the lab, and it is sometimes tough to know which direction to take.
In the best of situations this dynamic brings groups together to collectively and selflessly make progress on the imposing tasks at hand. In the worst of situations, it leads to silos, unnecessary competitiveness, and cold shoulders.
Most lab environments fall somewhere between these two extremes. Whatever situation you find yourself in - remember that you’re primarily responsible for you. You can do your best to contribute to a healthy lab environment, but ultimately that will also depend on the people you work with.
So regardless of the situation around you, bring your best self to work each day. Be friendly with your coworkers and be patient with people you perceive to be your opponents. The scientific world is very niche and very small, and letters of recommendation and word of mouth from a personal connection go a long way.
And remember – you always have the choice of staying in the lab, or not. If the situation is becoming untenable, talk with a trusted and knowledgeable advisor about what potential alternatives might be out there.
Trust & verify
“Always sequence plasmids that people give you – trust, but first verify, that it is what they say it is.”Ok, so the generic version of this advice is to verify everything that you reasonably can! Especially when taking over a project or building on someone else’s previous findings, make sure to analyze the data and reproduce key findings for yourself.
One specific example of this advice is to sequence every plasmid that is given to you. Is it the right gene? Are there any unexpected and unreported mutations that are in the plasmid? You can spend a lot of time going down a dead-end route simply because you failed to sequence your plasmid and verify its contents up front.
If you’re interested in learning more about the extent of mistakes in plasmids, check out this somewhat depressing article and you’ll be convinced to sequence everything you’re working with up front!
Prioritize
“Keep getting funding!”
Ok, so the explicit advice here is to keep getting funding as everything else in academic labs – science, scientists, salaries, papers, conferences, etc. – is dependent on funding to pay for them.
But if you think about it, the more general form of this advice is to prioritize what is most important and to allocate quality time and resources to those priorities before moving on to less pressing items.
So, for example, if you have an important grant application or renewal coming up, maybe focus on that instead of spending a whole week organizing your freezer? If you get the grant, you’ll have plenty of time to organize the freezer to your exact liking. And if you don’t? Well, then it turns out you don’t have to organize the freezer after all!
Perspective
Sometimes the issue isn’t even how you’re doing lab work but rather how you view the work that you’re doing. From time to time, we all need to step back from the daily grind and reorient ourselves to get a better sense of the big picture, and these tips will help you do just that.
Maintain work-life balance
“Make sure you maintain a work-life balance.”
We all know and have heard about the scientists that work around the clock grinding away to get their studies done. Perhaps less emphasized, but no less true, is that discovery science is an intensely creative endeavor.
Think about it – you’re trying to discover something new that no one else has ever figured out before. You’re unlikely to have the perspective needed to find the keen insight in your data if you’re burnt out. Creativity and exhaustion simply don’t coexist. Don’t blame me, I’m just the messenger - take it up with the scientists that study this kind of stuff (Beaty et al, 2014; Weiss et al, 2022).
So, work hard in the lab and do all the things outside of the lab that you need to do to take care of yourself and keep you at your creative best.
Depersonalize experimental outcomes
“Do not take it personally when experiments don’t work.”It sucks when your hypothesis is incorrect! You spent a bunch of time analyzing previous literature and data, and you convinced yourself that you know just how this thing works. You design the perfect experiment to support your pet hypothesis. And then, don’t you know it, you’re clearly wrong. Shoot!
After all this time and effort, it’s natural to take such negative outcomes personally. For me, a big breakthrough in my scientific training came when I learned not to take these apparent failures to heart. Let me explain what I mean.
Any experiment with a clear result is a successful experiment! If your controls worked and the experiment tells you something definitive – you succeeded. Now it still sucks if it’s not what you predicted it would be. But instead of letting your experiments offend you, ask “what do I need to learn from this experiment?”
In fact, failure is something critically undervalued in science because so much can be learned from in, including not to repeat unpublished missteps of other researchers. We have an article all about the importance of “failure” (or unexpected results) in research.
The point is that science isn’t just one big never-ending exercise in figuring out how many different ways you can be wrong – though it often feels that way! Rather, you’re accumulating clues with each experiment, and it’s your job to piece together those clues to figure out what you need to do next, and eventually to transform all of these clues into a model that is faithful to your data.
Keep the big picture in mind
“Good research is important, but it isn’t the end all. Very few scientists make the trek to Stockholm on December 10th.”
Why are you a scientist? What do you love about what you do? What gets you out of bed in the morning?
The fact is, there are many fewer prestigious prizes and awards than there are scientists. But if you can keep in mind what internally motivates you and organize your schedule to include some of those small motivators on a regular basis, then you will be succeeding even if you don’t win the Nobel Prize!
Ok, so there you have the top advice from GoldBio readers with our added interpretation. Thanks to all readers who took the time to fill out the summer survey and provide these tips. If you’re interested in giving such feedback, sign up to receive GoldBio emails, and we’ll email you the next survey when it comes out.
References
Beaty, R. E., Benedek, M., Wilkins, R. W., Jauk, E., Fink, A., Silvia, P. J., Hodges, D. A., Koschutnig, K., & Neubauer, A. C. (2014). Creativity and the default network: A functional connectivity analysis of the creative brain at rest. Neuropsychologia, 64, 92–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.09...
Weiss, E. M., Canazei, M., Perchtold-Stefan, C. M., Rominger, C., Papousek, I., & Fink, A. (2022). Different Facets of Creativity in Employees Covering Non-Clinical to Clinical Manifestations of Burnout. Journal of Intelligence, 10(4), 105. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence10040105
