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Scientists in Training: The Experience Dilemma
By admin | April 26, 2006
I happened to be browsing the science blogosphere and came across a couple of interesting commentaries from Sandra Porter at Discovering Biology in a Digital World about the lack of opportunities for high school and college students to gain real world experience in the realm of biotechnology and lab research.
While I am in strong agreement with Dr. Porter’s contention that opportunities for students to experience hands-on lab work are few and far between, I thought it would be appropriate to offer an opposing view to balance this issue – albeit from the eastern side of Washington state – from an undergraduate college student that is doing independent lab research on a daily basis. Link
- So when I started college, I started looking for jobs that would do more than pay the rent. I wanted first-hand impressions of potential careers… My medley of part-time and volunteer jobs were eye-opening forays into the working world.
I couldn’t agree more with this outlook. My return to school and my interest in pursuing a degree in Genetics and Cell Biology were instigated by a summer job with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, working with a wheat geneticist on developing and testing new breeds of wheat. The job itself was grueling physical work in hot and dusty conditions, but my interest in science was piqued, and I ended up returning to college as a freshman again after a seven year holdout (including stints as a writer, editor, manager – all past lives).
- The job that I wanted the most though, was the hardest to get. I really wanted to work in a science lab. Every now and then I would go to the student employment center and look at the job postings, but I was never eligible. The lab positions at my University required either work-study funding or work experience and I had neither.
This is also fairly true at Washington State University, although a number of other undergraduate students and myself have benefitted tremendously from a few principal investigators (P.I.s) that have relatively stable and abundant grant funding. These researchers tend not to worry too much about whether they will have enough money to keep the students working for another year, but rather take the annual opportunity to identify 1) students that have remained productive, and 2) students that have not.
- Even though some business leaders might recognize the long-term benefits of contributing to a scientifically literate society, and inspiring future employees, few companies want to accept the risk of having an $80,000/year employee spend the summer babysitting a student intern.
Essentially, our lab treats undergraduate students as low-cost lab technicians. With the right selection of hard working students and a little training from postdoctoral researchers, the “student researchers” become efficient technicians without all of the hassle of a pay commensurate with a bachelor’s or master’s degree or the added cost of benefits. While work-study funding is especially enticing for the P.I., it isn’t absolutely necessary given the obvious benefits of adding productive workers at a lower cost.
- We still have the same catch 22 that I experienced in college. Biotech companies and University research labs want to hire experienced people, but they’re unwilling or unable to provide that experience. Students need experience to get jobs, but they can’t get jobs without experience.
Apparently, the lab that I work in does not fall into this category. The majority of the students that work in our lab have no experience in a research lab prior to being hired, yet are often completing assays independently within a few months of hire.
And with these opportunities to work directly in a university research lab, students become more aware, for better or worse, what doing lab research really entails. The work ends up enticing some students to the research path and sending others running away from it.
The second part of the series by Dr. Porter lists several intriguing options for “scientists in training” to gain hands-on experience in the lab, including hands-on programs from technical colleges and collaborations between community college programs and private biotechnology companies. Link
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Topics: careers, commentary |
April 26th, 2006 at 9:32 am
Hi,
Nice discussion! I don’t think we disagree at all, though. Different schools are going to offer different amounts of opportunity and are often more likely to offer better opportunities for their own graduates.
I would be interested in knowing how flexible WSU really is. Do high school students have an opportunity to do internships? Does WSU hire students with community college degrees?
Some of my comments are more relevant to those groups, perhaps, than to students who completed a 4 yr degree.
April 26th, 2006 at 10:23 am
I know that high school students have definitely been given opportunities to experience different opportunities here at WSU. Now, I’m not sure you could really call them “internships.” I know of many labs, including our own, that have hosted high school students for a period of time and allowed them to get their feet wet with different assays and answer any questions that they have about the research that we’re doing and the various areas of research that are explored in various labs in the School of Molecular Biosciences. The student that was here in the lab this spring stayed for about a week, and she assisted one of the more veteran postdoctoral researchers.
I also know that some high school students are employed part-time, and some full-time during the summer, working in research labs and out in the field on various research projects. I managed several of them when I was working at the U.S.D.A.
In terms of students with community college degrees that are not pursuing a four year degree, I would say that it would probably be difficult for them to find a full-time, classified position here at WSU. The competition is too great for those positions and, unless they had specific training and experience relevant to the position, they would most likely be placed at the bottom of the list of candidates behind those with bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
However, as my experience suggests, the moment that you show intent to complete a four year degree and have a strong interest in the work being done in a research lab, it was extremely easy to find a job in a research lab on campus. My first week I began my training and by the second week I was doing procedures and assays for a postdoc. By the third month I was analyzing data for a research project and applying my knowledge in statistics to help put together a paper for publication.
April 26th, 2006 at 11:34 am
That sounds very good. It sounds like WSU is serving the area well.
Much of my dismay comes from the challenges that I know community college instructors face when trying to find internships for biotechnology students and the problems that high schools have in finding internships for biotech students.
The biggest problem is for high school students! One high school I know has 25 students who want to do internships and, even here in Seattle, we can only round about 5 spots. And that’s only one school - there are at least six different high schools who are actively looking for these opportunities.
With an increasing number of students who want to find positions, and a decreasing number of companies willing to provide them - we have to find other alternatives. Thus, the reason for part II of the saga.
April 26th, 2006 at 1:00 pm
I think that is really unfortunate for those high school students. I’m sure for many of them it would be a great opportunity to learn more about how they operate and what kind of work a career in biotech really entails.
But on the other hand, I completely understand the managers and company heads that don’t think it’s prudent to have one of their staff members babysitting a high school student. As I’m sure you well know, many of these managers are constant micromanagers and often expect productivity out of their employees that is well beyond the scope of reality. Many of them probably assume that the productivity of their $80,000/yr employee will go down the toilet as soon as the high school student arrives each week, as they will be taking a lot of time to train, answer questions, use the excuse to talk with another human being, etc.
And, frankly, if I were in their shoes I would be VERY skeptical that my company would get anything positive out of having a high school student intern in my lab. I would say that even the majority of freshman college students are not prepared for the maturity and reponsibility that is required in order for a lab manager to place ANY responsibility on their shoulders. And I think that is what is really required in order for the company or university lab to get something positive out of an internship. They want extra productivity, or at the very least to not diminish the productivity that they already have.
So it’s really not surprising to me that despite having a solid base of biotech companies in the Seattle area to choose from, so few are willing to open spots up for high school internships. The alternative solutions are steps in the right direction, for sure, but I think it will take some forward-thinking companies and initiatives that place these students in the right light to open up more doors for students like them in the future.
April 26th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
Yes!! that’s it exactly! And that’s what I wrote about in part II. I’ve had very good experience with high school interns - but I know that’s not going to be true for all supervisors.
How do we find a reasonable way to provide these kinds of opportunities?
Read part II for possible answers.
April 26th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
I think that the key would be to showcase the ways in which the biotech companies can benefit from having the interns in their laboratories.
I would have an article published in an industry publication that would be read by Seattle area biotechnology companies, or publish it yourself and distribute it to the companies that you would like to see participate. The article would highlight a story from one or several high school interns that worked at a biotech company, and explain how the company itself saw a tremendous benefit from hosting that intern. For example. they trained them as an intern, employed them part-time while they went to school, then hired them after they got their B.S. and saved a tremendous amount of money on training and acclimation to the work environment.
In addition, the intern may have become so adept at their duties that they ended up optimizing an assay and saving the company money on time and/or reagents. I saw this myself when working with the U.S.D.A — an undergraduate student worker was assigned to work on an assay in which hundreds and hundreds of grain samples were run. Their were problems with the assay, so he worked through the problems and discovered some alterations that could be made to make the reaction run more efficiently and provide more reliable results. This revised assay was then published the following year and is now used by a large consortium of wheat researchers to determine the viability of their wheat for the Asian noodle market.
The key is to show the companies all of the benefits of jumping into hosting interns at their lab/company, because all they really know and think about are the potential pitfalls and dangers to their bottom line.
April 26th, 2006 at 6:40 pm
Most of the high school internships have happened in this manner. One intern is great so the PI gets another. It happpens. But then grants are cut 10% across the board, and guess which position is gone? Or the person who supervised an intern moves on and institutional memory is lost.
No. We need more permanent solutions. Newspaper articles are great, but in my experience they are only a temporary fix and they don’t help much when the corporate headquarters decides that the program must go.
I have spent the last 15 years trying to find internships for students, 10 as director of a community college biotech program, and the last five years trying to help the high school biotech programs. So I’m speaking from the voice of experience. We need a better way.
Thanks for opportunity to better explain some of the points!
I enjoy your blog!
April 26th, 2006 at 9:08 pm
Thank you for the kind words about the blog. It’s a work in progress.
I freely admit that I don’t have a lot of experience with internships — certainly not helping students find them or convincing biotech companies to allow them.
I did get a discussion about this topic going in the lab today (three postdocs, a tenured faculty member and a couple of other students). Surprisingly, there was very little sympathy for the high school students seeking biotech internships. The general consensus was that even if a student was taken on as an intern during the summer, it would take so much time to “get them up to speed” without any background knowledge coming in (and potentially no experience working a real job at all) that it just wouldn’t be worth the effort.
One postdoc mentioned that it didn’t seem very feasible to make room for high school interns when they have no problem finding college students, often at a junior- or senior-level, to fill those spaces. And those college students come into the lab with knowledge of general biology, genetics, microbiology training, etc.
I know that WSU has a program going that brings students from local high schools into organic chemistry labs and biology labs, and allow them to do some chemistry experiments and general biology procedures. And representatives from the departments of biological sciences and chemistry are visiting local high schools with demonstrations of reactions, etc. to help build interest in the sciences.
But I suppose it’s very telling that there are a range of “summer internships” working in research labs that are available to WSU college students, and they are always very difficult to land one of those spaces (60-70 applicants for 10 spaces is a recent one that I am aware of). So it only makes sense that the high school students looking for a similar internship would get the short end of the stick.
It sounds like the west side of the state is not much better.
June 11th, 2006 at 1:14 pm
[...] Science Blogs, the compilation of science and health blogs run by Seed Magazine, has added 25 new blogs to their collection, which now features a total of 44 science voices. Updating the blogroll here at Epigenetics News, Dr. Sandra Porter’s Discovering Biology in a Digital World, who has provided some excellent commentary here in the past to spur conversation on science education, made the jump to Science Blogs. Additionally, the former Science and Politics is now known as A Blog Around the Clock, and Evolving Thoughts has made the jump as well. [...]