The Mimic
It’s your first time in a lab, seeing all the chemicals, liquids, glass beakers, and sharps - all you’re trying to do is not get hurt or break something expensive. You’re somehow supposed to follow a huge list of complicated instructions using equipment you’ve never seen before to do an experiment you’ve never heard of before. Everyone says lab skills are essential for finding jobs, but is it this hard for everyone?
Feeling like you don’t know where to start is very common. You need a plan and systematic strategy for learning, especially when it comes to complex professional skillsets like lab techniques. Today let’s assume we’re all novices starting from the beginning, and talk about how to get the most out of lab classes using the mimic or copycat method.
Observe, Copy, Repeat
When you are a complete beginner, observing someone who knows what they’re doing is a great way to learn. It goes by lots of different names – apprenticeship model, job shadowing, the mimic method, and there is elegance in its simplicity – observe, copy, and repeat. If you do this enough times something will sink in.
This is very common in fields that rely on repeatable skills with an element of improvisation – athletes, musicians, creative industries, all use this process as part of their training. If you’re a new photographer, go and shadow a professional, to a wedding, to a nature scene, and see how they compose their shots, get the right lighting, and try to recreate their photos. If you’re new to making videos – visit a studio or filmset, and then try to mimic their camera position, audio settings, or lighting for yourself.
Pre-Lab Preparation
It's no different for lab skills, but it may not be obvious who you should be copying because labs and scientific equipment are difficult to access. We can start with finding a lab protocol, and reading the instructions step by step. Underline any words or phrases that don’t make sense and do some background research. Sure there are 10 steps in the protocol, but what does each step do? What are the chemicals you’re adding and what happens if you skip the step? This initial preparation is very important, and unfortunately most students don’t do this. The more prepared you are going in, the more you’ll get out of it.
Visualisation
Watching lab videos is also a great way to prepare, but what should you be looking out for? For a start - knowing the names of basic equipment – even something as simple as tubes, plates, pipettes, bacteria - and what they look like, can fill in some of the gaps. The order of steps is really important – missing or rushing a step is really common and watching every step and connecting it to earlier and later stages of the experiment will help you understand how everything fits into the whole sequence.
Visualising common mistakes, (sometimes in slow-motion), will also help a lot. Pausing and rewatching the technique being performed again and again is probably the most valuable part of these videos, and when you get to try the technique you should have the image of this in your head as you’re doing it.
This visualisation is just as important for your cognitive processing as the muscle memory developed by repeating the skill - the two go hand in hand.
The Ceiling
Observing, copying, and repeating will get you started, but there is a limit to this approach. Most of the time you’re testing the lab skills in ideal conditions, but biological experiments are full of variability. Will you know how to troubleshoot an experiment when something goes wrong? Which steps in the protocol do you need to finetune or tweak? We’ll talk more about experimental troubleshooting next time.
Jack.
