A soft spot for teaching labs

I often wonder if the most useful skill I learned in my undergraduate teaching labs was how to wash up! These days the closest I get to using glassware is my annual homemade apple juice production. Despite having worked in a university as a safety professional for many years, I don’t get to go in the lab very much and when I do it is generally to have a look at what someone else is doing rather than donning a lab coat and getting stuck in myself.

The relevance of the practical content of undergraduate chemistry laboratory courses is a frequently discussed subject. I will not get into the various arguments about which practical techniques are essential and which are merely tradition, or even the more nuanced arguments about curriculum design and pedagogy. I certainly won’t mention how much they cost to run. Instead, I want to discuss the long term impact of the softer side of laboratories.

Soft skills are now an essential part of any good degree course. The ability to communicate clearly, present a well-written document and manage your time can easily be transposed to the requirements of the modern workplace. Teaching labs are, of course, an excellent place to hone these skills: after all, nothing fosters good communication skills like being elbow-to-elbow with your classmates at a cramped fume cupboard. I think, however, it goes beyond the mainstream skills that are more or less compulsory on job applications these days.

Here are a few of the lesser acknowledged ones.

Good note taking

Long form written communication is often not the strongest skill for most chemists. I can say this with some certainty having marked a lot of exams, and written some absolute howlers myself. But short form note taking often is. The art of writing down key information mid-experiment is essential. Not just facts and figures, but shorthand to jog the memory when you revisit it hours or days later. My own notebooks are full of bullet points that may seem cryptic but still provide valuable context to me.

Tidiness

When writing an icebreaker for a COSHH course I searched for a generic picture of a ‘messy lab’. After filtering out the adorable pictures of dogs, there were no shortage of candidates. That said, a truly messy lab is actually quite a rare thing. Full to the point of bursting? That describes most labs! However, there is order there – it is simply not possible to be effective any other way. Even if your job is more likely to call for you to organise digital files than reagents, this tidiness is an excellent habit to have.

Tinkering

The ability to adapt equipment to experimental needs is essential. Where would we be without clamps and stands? The longer you spend in the lab, the higher your likelihood that you will need to fix a broken piece of equipment. I was lucky enough to experience this early as a teaching lab manager, when I partially dismantled an infrared spectrometer to fix a persistent anomaly. Even in a non-practical workplace being able to look at things differently and seek novel solutions is a real asset.

Risk assessment

As a safety professional I talk about risk assessment quite a lot, but once again the graduate chemist has an inherent advantage over almost all other graduates. They have encountered real risk. First-hand experience of flammable solvents and toxic compounds gives you an excellent baseline for what real world significant risk looks like. At some point in almost any career you will need to sit down and do the paperwork. For the chemist, the process is less abstract and more grounded in reality.

Camaraderie

Of course, in the discussion above I have generalised graduate chemists into one neat homogenous group. Let’s be honest, this is not remotely true. The people you work with in a teaching lab will have different skills and worldviews, but fundamentally you need to get along. Sure, you will be better friends with some than others but the sense of camaraderie you get from working so closely together is an essential skill that will serve you well wherever you end up.

The experience of the teaching laboratory – good and bad – tends to bind chemists together. I am proud that my degree had such excellent practical teaching. I am also fortunate that I see the fruits of similar experiences from across the sciences in the work of the many scientists I interact with today. My own professional life may have drifted away from the laboratory, but I wouldn’t be able to do the job I do now without the soft skills I learnt there. Besides, there is a certain pride in being able to clean the hard-to-reach corners of an apple juice bottle.