I had lunch with my direct workmates today – what I mean by direct workmate is that these people are those that I work closely within our Neurobiology group. These include Peter (my supervisor or boss), Shelley (post-doc) and Uğur (pronounced ‘or’ who’s Peter’s RA). It’s that time of the year that people at my work place have to do their annual Staff Appraisal where the boss sits down with individual staff and review the year. I don't need to do it coz students write Progress Reports at the start of year. So anyway, instead of having individual meetings with the boss, Shelley and Uğur suggested to go out for lunch and we can appraise each other, and bring in ideas to improve. It’s our first time doing it and I thought it was a wonderful idea and it turned out to be a great lunch too.
As a group, we work pretty well together, so the major complains or concerns we had was for the general lab – as in the people we share the lab with on our level. Throughout the lunch, I thought my supervisor made a couple of really good points in regards to working in such environment. Since we are a small group within a big group, there are a lot of things or people that we can’t control, such as people’s work ethics and the messiness around the lab. What we can do, however, is just do our best on our part and hopefully this will be followed by the rest of the lab. But in the end, we figured that it has a lot to do with authority and leadership from high up the hierarchy too. It’s great for a scientist to publish papers after papers in respectable journals but to be a good leader, it requires a lot of responsibility, patience, understanding and attention. I don’t know whether our lab head has all (or any) of these! The funny thing is the lab head was suppose to be my co-supervisor coz Pete hadn’t got his supervisorship yet last year, but I really question whether he knows anything about my PhD!
As a group, we work pretty well together, so the major complains or concerns we had was for the general lab – as in the people we share the lab with on our level. Throughout the lunch, I thought my supervisor made a couple of really good points in regards to working in such environment. Since we are a small group within a big group, there are a lot of things or people that we can’t control, such as people’s work ethics and the messiness around the lab. What we can do, however, is just do our best on our part and hopefully this will be followed by the rest of the lab. But in the end, we figured that it has a lot to do with authority and leadership from high up the hierarchy too. It’s great for a scientist to publish papers after papers in respectable journals but to be a good leader, it requires a lot of responsibility, patience, understanding and attention. I don’t know whether our lab head has all (or any) of these! The funny thing is the lab head was suppose to be my co-supervisor coz Pete hadn’t got his supervisorship yet last year, but I really question whether he knows anything about my PhD!
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