Since some of the sciblr folks are early-career or aspiring STEM researchers, I thought I’d talk about the place I work, and explain that little piece of How Science Gets Done. As someone who came to this from a working-class non-technical family, I didn’t know how any of this stuff happened or who to talk to, and I missed out on tons of resources as a result.
So! I work in a core facility, which is one type of lab where research can be done. Labs come in a few different types.
-There are classroom labs, designed for the maximum number of students to get hands-on experience at once. It’s not common for them to be used for actual independent research, unless a professor has structured her class in a way that produces some data, or has some unusual-for-her project that requires really common equipment that she doesn’t normally need.
-There are labs that belong to one, or a very small number, of professors. If you do an independent research project or “join a lab”, this is probably where you’ll spend most of your time. The prof has purchased equipment, chemicals, etc, for that lab, and he’s probably carefully spent that money on things that align closely with his projects, that his students will use frequently, and that he wants a lot of control over. But there are downsides to buying stuff for your own lab. It’s like buying books (I’m talking experimental research, here, so assume paper books for the analogy to hold). Books look nice, and are nice to learn from, but they take up space, and they cost money, and their resale value is minimal. And if you let your students loose among them, they may spill some toluene in them and put them back and never tell you until you use them again and ARGH anyways.
But what if you need that equipment once a year and it takes up a ton of space? What if it’s a new shiny toy and you don’t have a million dollars to blow on it, just to find out it’s not that useful? That’s where core facilities come in.
-Core facilities are shared labs, a little like a library for instrumentation. Someone else maintains the equipment (hopefully), and either trains all comers on the equipment, or takes in samples and sends you data. Unlike a library, usually need to pay--either by the hour, or by the sample, or by the day of usage. The charges cover some of the costs to run the instruments, pay the staff, buy consumable supplies, etc, but it usually doesn’t cover all of it. The rest is covered by grants*, gifts, or professors chipping in to pay extra for something that’s important to them, but not enough to pay for *all* of. Core facilities usually have really expensive equipment, and staff that are very knowledgeable about operating the equipment.
Core facility staff, like me? Our whole job is to help researchers. We usually expect that you are not the expert on the equipment you’re about to use. We usually don’t expect you to know the first thing about it! It’s okay to say “My prof asked me to use this. Why?” or “Hey, I think this would answer my research question, can you help me figure out if that’s the case?” Meeting with students to talk about their research project is about 20% of what I do, and I always feel bad when someone has clearly been floundering for a while before contacting me.
We’re not here to do all your work FOR you. Sometimes I do have researchers who expect us to run their samples for them (fine, for the stated per-hour cost), and do some analysis (fine, for an additional cost), and research their specific project or write a report of the findings (not fine, especially for students). But that’s rare. Mostly our job is to help, and we probably know more about the techniques we specialize in than your prof, and have more free time too. Ask us stuff! We like to talk. As this wall of text indicates.
Core Facility Advertisement complete. Want to see what resources your university has? Search for core facilities and see what’s there. Different universities arrange their cores differently; some are all under one umbrella but most operate pretty independently. Schools focused on undergrad education will probably have fewer resources on this front, but even they are likely to have some shared instrumentation funded by individual departments.
*Grants run out. This blog stopped being updated this summer because the core facility I used to work at (not the CT place, the place I left two years ago) closed due to the soft money disappearing, and they brought me on temporarily to be an interim director, helping staff, talking to researchers, and distributing equipment in a way that minimized disruption to research. This was on top of all my day-to-day stuff, which is just as busy in the summer as it is during the school year. Anything that was not absolutely critical just didn’t happen, thus the absence. That project is nearing its end, however, so I’ll be around more, and looking forward to scanning and sharing some ridiculous bullshit soon.