<p>To make it short, I'll provide cliffs:
1. Recently started in a lab as a "volunteer." I'm a junior and will graduate spring 2014.
2. Working with a grad student. This grad student is not liked by his peers. His 1st PhD adviser got rid of him, now he's at the lab I'm at. From my convos with him and hearing from others, he's very selfish.
3. He laid out some tasks for me. For the foreseeable future, the tasks are to help him machine some stuff and clean his work space because "he does not have time to do it himself." </p>
<p>I'm concerned about a few things.
As a 1st or 2nd year student I wouldn't mind doing that, but as a 6th semester student, how would that be research? What I am going to talk about on my statement of purpose when I describe my research experience in this lab? I helped this grad student manufacture some parts and cleaned his work space?
Again, this guy seems to only care about himself (I am definitely not the only one who thinks this). I can't see him caring about my goals. </p>
<p>He's asked me the same question 3 times. I'm only at the lab ~ 10 hours a week and he keeps asking if I can go there 20 hours a week. I said I have classes and couldn't do that and he asked if I could go in during the weekend (okay this kind of *<strong><em>ed me off). I'm *</em></strong>ing volunteering too and am already busy as hell this semester. I said no and he seemed unhappy about it. I'm concerned that when I ask the prof for an LOR, the grad student is gonna say things like "he didn't help me as much as he should've." </p>
<p>I don't trust this guy at all. I also just joined this lab and I have a good relationship with the prof, so I don't want to leave....
What do I do?</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter what semester in school you are; it matters how long you have been doing research and especially how long you have been doing research in that group. If you haven’t been with them for at least a semester or so, doing the peon work like that is absolutely normal. Speaking from the standpoint of the graduate student here, we don’t like/want to rely on some unproven undergrad for critical tasks who we aren’t confident can actually do the job. If after a semester or so he still wants you doing cleaning jobs, then that would be an issue.</p>
<p>As for time, you have to understand that from our perspective, we are working incredibly long hours and then when our advisor sticks us with an undergrad, the first priority is finding them something to do. Of course, at only 10 hours per week, there isn’t a lot we can have undergraduate workers do that they will generally finish in a timely manner since usually we are pretty much constantly trying to push forward. I do realize that undergrads are busy and have classes and all that jazz, but look at it from our perspective. We are trying to find something for the undergrads to do and when they don’t have time, it just means that any work they do will be getting done a lot more slowly than we would like.</p>
<p>Yeah I understand that. My main concern is the graduate student because of his bad reputation. </p>
<p>Btw, did you do undergrad research? How long were you spending per week?<br>
Junior years are very difficult. It’s only the beginning and I found myself spending friday nights doing hw as well. I have little to no free time.</p>
<p>I did do undergraduate research. I spent most of the time it seems building CAD models of the components we were using, setting up experiments, performing the tedious parts of experiments that you really can’t mess up and the like. Part of the issue was that I worked for two groups and neither of them longer than a year so I never really built up that rapport that would get me a more independent role. It also didn’t help that I also only had 10 to 20 hours per week to give, so I didn’t have a whole lot of time to really gain that experience needed to move onto the bigger and better things.</p>
<p>To be honest, I don’t know what the norm would be. I never worked with any other undergrads while I was an undergrad and now it seems like most of the undergrads we have around our lab are there more than 10 hours. One lab at one school is hardly a representative sample though.</p>
<p>I know in my lab we try to get undergrads in at least 10 hours a week for a quarter or two. Then when the summer rolls around they’ll be well prepared to start working on a heavily directed research project (basically we tell them what to do and they’ve learned the tools to get it done).</p>
<p>Remember that any research you do will likely have both the grad student’s and your PI’s name on it. They want to be sure you’re capable and can be trusted to produce accurate results because it’s their reputation that’s going on the line when/if publications happen.</p>