So glad my supervisor is getting back soon! He's been gone for the past 3 weeks and I've been forced to babysit one of his grad students. I've been so frustrated with this student lately though that I can't even begin to write about it without launching into an angry rant.
Although I know he has good intentions and he tries hard, he is absolutely incapable of working on his own. If you asked him to pick a random number, he wouldn't be able to. He doesn't seem able to follow basic instructions (in English, which is his first language), never mind get into the design of the experiment or future test plans.
This leaves us in quite a strange spot. I'm here for half the year as a research assistant before I head back to class and get my undergraduate degree. So far, I've designed, built, and ordered all the parts for his experiment, looked through literature to predict things so I could get instrumentation that will measure things in the proper range, decided which variables need to be controlled/measured/varied, wrote a program to display and record the data... It's at the point where everyone refers to this as my experiment, and I delegate work to him only if it's trivial, simple, and not an immediate priority.
Basically, it's Freaky Friday, but all year long. What will happen when I go to grad school?
Friday, June 19, 2009
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