The lab

Getting familiar with the new environment is, needless to say, my first task before I start everything. Yetsterday, I was handed two booklets about safety from Lisa - a staff in the department office - and was told to sign by next week to show that I've exactly read them. According to the booklets, I noticed that many rules - actually almost all - are rather different and also strict than what I've ever learned. After asking Kerry some questions on the booklets, she oriented me some facilities in our lab briefly. To ensure that I could familiar with the environment, she assigned a small game and let me identify some facilities by myself (namely "treasure hunting game"). Including the mini-game and some documents reading, I would have to return back them within 2 weeks. That shouldn't be any problem. To sum up what I've learnt from and told by prof. and Kerry so far: 1. Security is extremely essential. Unauthorized persons and visitors are not allowed to come into the department building. Watchout strangers. There used to be thieves and have stolen a couple of equipments from the building. 2. Lab should be locked as long as there's no authorized person in the lab. Similar to the point 1. There're 3 rooms in our lab, and even students are in one of the rooms, the other 2 rooms still should be locked. 3. Chemicals will be purchased by technician. This is different from my MSc era. We had to order from chemical company by ourselves. 4. Materials such as bacteria and honey will be sent to the lab, hence we don't have to carry them from hospitals or suppliers. Also these will be contacted to suppliers by technician. We had to do all of these by ourselves in TW before... 5. There's no so-called group meeting every week. Can't agree more. According to professor, as everyone is working on different topic, it is no sence to spend extra time to show each other's result and discuss on them. Since discussion can be done anytime anywhere privately, and also it's hard to find time for everyone to get together, why waste extra time on preparing slides or powerpoint and meeting? Frequent meeting is totally waste of time and efficiency. 6. Attending seminars or presentations is not necessary. Basically similar to point 5, but also traffic is a reason. Moving from one city to another would spend lots of time and money, yet the school wouldn't support the expense. Besides, car is not a good choice since petrolium is getting rediculously expensive. 7. Submitting our works to academic journals is encouraged but not compulsory. That is, it is not necessary to submit to journals in order to graduate (although the submitting itself is a chance of reviewing our works, which is not a bad idea). 8. It's possible that we would see each other only for once a long time. As everyone has got their things to do, some of them wouldn't come to the lab every day (many of them are part-time students). 9. As there has been too many visitors and tasks, prof. Molan would stay at home so that he may keep away from those visitors and concentrate on his tasks. However, don't feel hesitate to call him if I get problem with my research; that is, my research is prior to anything else. Too many visitors and phone calls...poor professor...