Being slow in labs
I was slow in my undergraduate labs. People around me zoomed ahead in their experiments, stepping away from the bench sooner to use the IR machine, packing away their stuff before I’d finished my reflux, leaving before me. Hours before me. Not everyone has felt the shame of an impatient demonstrator asking you to hurry up or a patient one trying their best not to look bored. I have.
This situation is common enough – I have seen slow students every year I have ever taught in labs – but it’s not talked about very much either, and that’s what I want to use this blog for. My aim is to set out some of my experiences, describe how I became faster in ways which might help someone struggling today, and then to reflect from the perspective of an educator many years later.
Emotions
It feels bad to be slow. Speed is a visible part of lab performance in a way which yield isn’t: you can see that you are slower than everyone else, and everyone else can see that you are slower than them. There is an odd kind of silent alarm as the lab empties and quietens. It is hard for me to imagine that any slow student doesn’t realise how slow they are. The demonstrator saying “speed up” is not conveying new information to anyone.
Bad feelings have important risks for motivation. Feeling incompetent for an entire day? That’s an experience which will damage your sense of self-efficacy in its own right, but also damage your feeling of fitting in with other students. It can directly mean that you don’t spend social time with them, for example: you can’t chat with people who leave at 3pm. It also often robs you of small pieces of autonomy around the edges if, say, someone tries to help by running your spectra while you get on with the cleaning.
Being slow in labs can make lab days unenjoyable, and while this is unpleasant it is endurable. But your sense of becoming a scientist relates to a lot of the same emotions; a slow student might stop wanting to persist with Chemistry in the long-run.
Practicalities
It is an odd thing to say, but I didn’t realise I was slow at lab work for a while. My early course was done as part of a pair, and went ok - apparently thanks to my partner. The wheels came off later, and I took longer to realise it was me because by then I had already experienced some practicals being poorly calibrated to lab time; my first interpretation when I finished late was to think it must have been that specific experiment. The mix of experiments hid it, too. I found that PhysChem experiments were generally quick (with long write-ups later), and my central problem turned out to be synthetic practicals as these had longer experiments (with shorter write-ups). If you rotate through different subdisciplines, you can take longer to see a synthesis-specific problem.
Once I had recognised the problem, the solution to being slow was not obvious. Other people seemed to just “get it”. The person next to me on the bench didn’t do anything special, they followed the same script as me. The demonstrator tapping their foot at 4:30 gave no advice for how to improve, only a sense that I was not meeting expectations. When I thought back over the day, I noticed one or two moments to save a few minutes but not a way to finish an hour earlier.
In my own experience, “what can I do?” was the big question. I wanted to improve and I was committed enough to work at it, even happy to try things out and keep failing until something worked. Ready, willing, able. But I couldn’t find any advice about what I might practically do to become quicker. Thinking back, it might have been that demonstrators would have given me advice if I had asked in the right way. But it was hard to approach someone who clearly wanted you to have finished already, and hard to formulate the right question while feeling so pressured.
What I did
Bullet-pointing the procedures
One weird trick pretty much fixed things for me. I wrote down a bullet-pointed list of what I had to do in the lab. In my own words and with my own notes. This was normally about ⅔ of a side of A4 with each step on its own line. “Weigh 2.4g Na2CO3” “Reflux 30min” “rotavap then wash 3x with ether”. I could tick off each step as I went, like a shopping list.
I’ve been thinking about why this worked. Some part of it is probably that it put me in a certain mindset as I prepared and started the lab. Symbolically, the shopping list approach turned every practical into a procedure with the same measure of success: finish early. My job wasn’t to learn, but to perform. Speed wasn’t one aspect of a varied lab training, it was the sole consistent goal as all the experiments changed week on week.
Parallel protocols
Over time, my lists became more sophisticated. I saw how moments of lab time could be used more productively. I could sort my glassware for the next step during a reflux. I could run my sample’s IR a little later when cooling the mixture. I am not sure how everyone picks up these skills (do other people just figure this out?), but my bullet-pointing let me access them through writing out my plan for the practical. “Reflux (30min), set up ice bath.” “Submit NMR, clean away separation funnel KEEP ALL FRACTIONS”.
Calculations and Analysis
Later, I tried to economise the amount of thinking I did in the lab. I would work through the algebra of in-lab calculations before I had my results. “Concentration of iron = 5 * vol manganate * concentration manganate / vol iron”. This became another line on my list and I just plugged in my numbers once I had them. This was particularly useful for later practicals where I needed to use numbers later within the same session. Doing maths in the lab is still something I find horrendous; sadly (for me) it is a bigger part of a demonstrator’s lab experience than a student’s.
Pedagogical Reflections
Labs can be an extremely emotional space. While many students are doing great things in labs, some students are having a bad time. My own trajectory into realising this was through being slow and feeling bad about it, but of course there are others. One of PERIODically’s successes in Season 1 was describing how periods can affect the lab experience, for example, and Season 2 followed some of these themes up by exploring the experience of educators in the lab.
Thinking about speed as a Learning Outcome has been interesting with the perspective of hindsight. While I was explicitly taught how to flute filter paper I wasn’t taught to finish on time in a similar way. One question I still haven’t resolved to my own satisfaction is whether time is an administrative constraint (staff need to go home) or a professional one (Chemists need to be quick). Perhaps a slow chemist is academically ok, even if they are administratively inconvenient. Or perhaps speed is a piece of character education rather than being knowledge or a discrete skill. I don’t know.
The biggest thing I can see in retrospect is how my slowness taught me that doing well in your degree and developing your understanding of the subject were very different things. Labs were about becoming quick, and this meant that they were not about thinking. Specs on, (academic) brain off. Speed was something I experienced as a total goal, overwhelming any other education in the lab. I found those rare moments of understanding extremely satisfying, but I can only remember three of these: a Grignard reaction in first year, the PXRD work in second year, and diacetylating ferrocene in third year. (It is possible I have forgotten others.) I don’t know whether those moments of understanding were glimpses into what everyone else was experiencing all the time, or tiny windows into another vision for lab work.
But if speed is a central Learning Outcome of lab training, isn’t it weird that we discuss it so little? Other disciplines treat lab time very differently: Biochemistry often works through the theory of cell cultures or Western Blots before doing them in the lab; Physics often constructs the theory – or at least the theoretical tools – before exploring some application of them in the lab. Labs are often places where the point is to see or explore something you have some knowledge about.
In contrast, we routinely have conversations in Chemistry about doing lab practicals before we cover theory. This suggests that lab work has value even if students have no idea what they’re doing. I guess this is consistent with labs as a training in speed (or perhaps psychomotor skills), but I confess I find it less attractive than the approach of other disciplines.
Conclusion
If you’re a student reading this after a bad day in the lab and a hail-Mary google: you can get quicker. Try a shopping list, but perhaps also try - just for a week or two - abandoning the ambition to understand everything. Or try your own thing, perhaps after talking a demonstrator or a lecturer when you’re not in the lab.
If you’re teaching, you probably already know that labs are emotional spaces. But perhaps spare a thought for how it feels for a student to be slow, specifically. It’s a very visible way to differ from your peers. Students can get faster, but it really helps if they can see how this is a realistic goal rather than an impossible dream.