Posts tagged with hierarchy.
Lab life: It's not all love triangles
The powers that be have requested an expose of life at the lab - the hierarchy, the office politics, the day-to-day minutiae, the Christmas party - so the next few weeks of Nerd Girl shall be devoted to the lab.
I fear, however, that the reality will be much, much less titillating than the perception. Shows like Grey's Anatomy and The Big Bang Theory would lead you to believe that when a number of intelligent young people congregate under one roof, relationship drama and comedic fodder will ensue. Love triangles turn into love polygons, relationships end over differing views of quantum gravity and poorly thought-out plans go sideways and end up with our heroes pursued by biker gangs and spending a hilarious gag-filled night in a Tijuana jail cell with a cellmate called Paco.
This is not the case. Consider yourself warned.
Disclaimer in place, it's time for a look at the hierarchy of the lab.
At the top of the proverbial heap you've got your principal investigator, or PI, also known as "supervisor," "boss" and "person that signs your cheques." The non-scientific public is often surprised to find out that the only time PIs touch lab equipment is when they're being photographed for "Particle Accelerator Monthly" or "What Stem Cells!" It is quite impossible to describe the scope of their activities in a single column, yet alone a sentence, but the best I can do is to say that is involves filling out forms, money and telling people what to do. And throwing the Christmas party.
PIs are best classified on two intersecting scales: from Nice to Ordinary on one axis, and from Hands-off to Pest on the other. The four resulting quadrants represent the four main PI archetypes, which have their equivalents in the family tree. You've got the cool uncle: friendly and laid-back, frequently plies you with liquor. There's the nagging granny: always on your case about something, persnickety, often hits you with her cane. There's little cousin Mikey: well-intentioned and generally agreeable; refuses, however, to leave you alone. And don't forget your older, cooler sister: looks upon you with a mix of disgust and revulsion, but mercifully cuts you a wide berth. Only go to the cool uncle's parties, unless you like being belittled, strong-armed into a Trivial Pursuit tournament, or locked in a closet.
There's also a fifth archetype, the PI that, by virtue of never being in the lab, doesn't actually leave an impression, favourable or otherwise. As all anyone ever sees of them is e-mails, these PIs may actually be sophisticated experiments in artificial intelligence. They could also be Bigfoot. Nobody knows.
Working under the PI we find the postdocs, although in certain larger labs, there is a layer of administration that separates the two. This administrative layer is a godsend, as in most labs there is but a single person who knows how to navigate the bureaucratic waters of the university and that person is not the PI. Rather, it is most often the grad student that never left; the one that came for a Masters and stayed for a lifetime.
They know how to order equipment, deal with grant money, courier stuff, book meeting rooms, cater a meeting, get maintenance to fix stuff, and fill out the approximately eight million forms that are required for even the simplest of transactions. Without an administration layer, most labs are paralyzed when their manager takes a holiday. Paycheques stop coming, the copier machine stops working, nobody can turn on the heat, and within a few days it all becomes very Lord of the Flies, animal carcasses strewn throughout the lab halls and a war-painted grad student declaring himself overlord as he stands atop the centrifuge holding a spear fashioned from pipette tips.
Back to the postdocs. If the PI is the captain of the noble schooner that sails at full mast into the waters of scientific knowledge, the postdocs are his first mates. While the captain sets the course for the ship, the first mates execute his orders, suggest possible courses of action, and take care of other minor tasks, including issuing orders to junior sailors and ensuring the rum barrels are always fully stocked.
Continuing our nautical analogy, the graduate students are the able seamen of the ship, making up the majority of the crew. They carry out a good proportion of the ship/lab's daily activities, are occasionally called upon to swab the decks, and can often be found draining the rum barrels. Occasionally a seaman is forced to walk the plank, and equally often one runs screaming to the end of plank and flings himself off, not finding sea life to his liking. Most seamen, however, persist through the diet of hardtack and the odd bout of scurvy and work their way up the ranks as they complete their degrees. They rarely lose their taste for hardtack, though, which in lab reality is pizza or slightly stale sandwiches scavenged from recent departmental seminars.
There are a number of scientific and technical staff associated with a lab, too, many of whom have a technical specialty essential to the lab's functioning: Yeoman of the Microarray Scanner, Sergeant of the Robotic Equipment, Mate of the Mouse-tender.
Working together, the crew of the HMS Lab sails into new waters of knowledge. There are storms along the way, the occasional pirate, and the odd drowning, but there are also new discoveries to be made, rum to be enjoyed, and the mutiny attempts are far and few between. When it comes down to it, the lab isn't particularly different from any other workplace, really, except it's full of really expensive plastic and has way more radiation than your average cubicle. Just watch out for the hardtack.
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hierarchy,
lab
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JENNIFER GARDY 
