Sure thing. You seem like myself when I started—eager but not quite sure what to expect. I’ve trained quite a few undergrads in my time and I always try my best to remember how I was when I started, especially since I always compare myself to people who are at more established stages and think I’ll never reach that without acknowledging that once they were just as clueless as me. I think we don’t talk about failure enough, so because I have undergrads who look up to me in the same way that I look up to others I try to be open about all the times that I’ve failed and goofed. At the beginning though I usually scare the living daylights out of the ones I train because I get intense and insist that certain things need to be done a certain way when I train them. Then they find out I’m not scary at all and am really a hot mess. The reason I get so intense is because the people who trained me did not do a good job, and I had to basically learn everything over again. So if your trainer seems intense it might not be that. They might just want you to learn it correctly—at least that’s my mentality. I will teach people how to do something well at all costs.

Final piece of advice that I just remembered: don’t let being intimidated by something stop you from doing it. I’m currently very frustrated by my fellow undergrads because they are all too chicken to make media for the entire lab to use. Which means I have to take time out of my schedule to make it, even though we all use it and I’ve shown them so many times how to make it and honestly it’s not hard, it’s just time consuming. So from this I think you can say that what puts you over the edge as an undergrad is the willingness to do what it takes and not take cop outs and let someone else do the work. It’s intimidating—I get it. I was intimidated too. Even now I’m a bit intimidated by things such as our pH probe because it’s fancy and I don’t want to break it. But you have to, absolutely have to learn how to push on even though you’re intimidated. People can’t always do things for you. That’s not to say that you can’t ask for help—please do. And it’ll take you a while to reach a point where you can do things on your own, so this is a skill that you can cultivate in the meantime. But once you’ve been shown how to do something and been watched while doing it to a point where your trainer thinks you can do it by yourself you need to be able to try it on your own. Otherwise you will never truly learn. Not to mention whoever is doing the work for you will probably get irritated. I like to think I’m pretty laidback but I was upset that a) I have to keep tabs on the status of the plate supply even though I don’t use them as often as others and b) I constantly have to keep making them even though others should be able to. Not to mention the grad student also has to do this, and she’s got much better things to do.

Also I should mention that I delete my comments on this account after approximately 24hours (I kept my comments up for you longer than normal because I wanted to make sure you could read them), so if you want to keep what I’ve written I’m cool with that, even though it is a mess of text. Just copy them down and remove my username please and thanks.