Lab Work: The Commonly Misconstrued Epitome of Solitary Work

Lab Work -- Commonly misconstrued to be one-man's work

Sherry is a final-year Life Sciences student who is doing her Final Year Project (FYP) in Molecular Biology. She is hardworking, meticulous and possesses strong analytical and investigative skills, making her a perfect research candidate. As she has been in the same lab for her undergraduate research stints and performed well, the Principal Investigator (PI) of the lab assigned her to be a mentor to Ryna, an incoming Year 3 undergraduate who is working on her UROPS, a semester-long research project designed to let students try out research. Such arrangements are rare and coveted as only students who have performed well enough are let on such additional responsibilities.

Ryna is an enthusiastic learner who learns fast but tends to be careless as she finds all short cuts possible to solve a problem, since results rather than the process mattered for her. Also, being an active member in many extra-curricular activities, she often had to leave the lab early, leaving Sherry to tie up loose strings for her. When such things happened, Sherry would be angry that she has to take on this additional work that wasn’t meant for her to take on. Also, the PI has structured their projects in such a way that Sherry’s progression in her project would be dependent on Ryna’s project findings, since they are working on a novel protein.

Their partnership soon turned sour as problems came up one after another. For one, Ryna has no intention to put in her best for her UROPS because results do not really matter. As long as she understands the rationale of what she’s doing (thus she was able to take many shortcuts as she knows which steps are redundant), she would get a good grade. Unlike her, Sherry’s FYP is heavily dependent on generating substantial good results for her thesis. From her previous lab experience, she understands fully the consequences of cutting steps, even trivial ones, as those would affect the quality of results. This made her very careful but in Ryna’s eyes, Sherry is just overly careful, and unnecessarily so, since all of Ryna’s shortcuts worked.

As a result of Ryna’s shortcuts, her work is fraught with inaccuracies though she claims she has done her best and has checked for all possible errors. On a few occasions, Sherry found out that Ryna takes shortcuts when no one is looking, yet would afterwards claim that she did everything properly. Despite knowing this, Sherry didn’t confront Ryna on this, as she didn’t want to seem like she doubts Ryna’s words. As this cycle repeated itself, Sherry ended up doing double work as she does not trust the quality of results generated by Ryna for her own project use.

To improve the situation, Sherry tried talking to and guiding Ryna step-by-step in experiments. She also used this chance to point out to Ryna (subtly), the importance of some steps that cannot be skipped. Sherry knows that she cannot be there to constantly oversee Ryna. As such, whenever Ryna has to rush off for yet another appointment, and cannot learn the proper way of doing experiments from her, she gets upset. This further compounded the stress and tension between them, as Sherry is increasingly doubtful of Ryna’s abilities to commit and produce.

To Ryna, she is really putting in her best to what her tight schedule and abilities allow her. She perceives Sherry to be overly careful and uptight. In addition, UROPS to her is just a project she needs to take so that her days in FYP would be easier. It is not something that she enjoys or finds important, thus she prioritizes her tuition assignments and sports training sessions to be of equal importance with it.

In light of their vastly different importance placed on their own scientific project, further compounded by their negative perceptions of each other and different work ethics, what would you suggest they do so that Ryna would produce higher-quality work of more stringent quality such that Sherry need not do double-work?