{"id":80,"date":"2008-02-29T10:14:26","date_gmt":"2008-02-29T10:14:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2008\/02\/29\/on_the_care_and_training_of_students\/"},"modified":"2008-02-29T10:14:26","modified_gmt":"2008-02-29T10:14:26","slug":"on_the_care_and_training_of_students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2008\/02\/29\/on_the_care_and_training_of_students\/","title":{"rendered":"On the care and training of students"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have just had two days of Honours<\/a> proposals talks, in which all our fresh-faced young<\/a> students have to talk for ten minutes about what they intend to do while in the lab for the next six months.<\/p>\n

\nThese talks are open to the entire Department, and people are encouraged to go along to see what everyone else is doing, as well as to support their own students. (I actually skipped our students’ talks; not just because their session was at an awkward time and I would have had to catch the cattle train, but also because if I am forced to listen to another LIM domain talk I might actually go quite Dagenham). A rolling panel of post-docs and academics assess these talks; comments are made on forms that subsequently disappear into Gareth’s office and \u2014 oh, I don’t know \u2014 get made into papier m\u00e2ch\u00e9 models of Ayers Rock or something.<\/p>\n

\nI was roped in to the assessment panel \u2014 I don’t really mind doing it, if only because it gives me a reason to stay awake \u2014 for two sessions (thirteen talks) on Thursday. This meant I got to sleep with my head on a desk on the front row of the audience while the plebs crowded in behind.<\/p>\n

\nSo, joking aside, I was doodling on my notepad at the end of one talk, desperately trying to think of something sensible to ask about UV-induced cell damage, when Prof C to my left queried the student’s proposed method of detecting apoptosis. Specifically, how was she going to distinguish ‘programmed cell death’ from necrosis? The student replied that she was going to use the DNA analysis method she had already described, but Prof C insisted that she would not be able to tell if it she was detecting apoptosis or merely necrosis.<\/p>\n

\nThis could have led to something of an impasse, but Prof C took pity and said, “What about caspases<\/a> ?”<\/p>\n

\nTo which the student replied,<\/p>\n

\n“Oh, do a Western?” as if someone had suggested she eat her own grandmother, “We could look at caspase 3 and nine, but that takes a long time and we’ve got kits<\/strong> to do the DNA assay.”<\/p>\n

\n“Kits?” I said, somewhat more loudly than I had intended, “We’ve got news for you, sunshine,” which corpsed certain less ‘serious’ members of the assessment panel as well as not a few plebs behind me.<\/p>\n

\nI can see we are going to have to invest in re-education<\/em> this semester.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We have just had two days of Honours proposals talks, in which all our fresh-faced young students have to talk for ten minutes about what they intend to do while in the lab for the next six months. These talks … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}