I don’t think any of this is true. I think you’re all just making it up to torture me with mental images while I sent here in a cubicle working late.
I used to work at a pharmaceutical firm. The manufacturing, labs, and offices were housed in the same building. There were lots of rules about attire. You were supposed to put on a lab coat to even walk into the labs. There were “loaner” lab coats available if you didn’t have one. If you worked in the manufacturing area, you had to wear “whites,” steel toed shoes, and hair covers. Visitors to mmanufacturing could get by with a lab coat and hair cover and regular shoes, as long as they were closed-toe. BUT–if you worked in manufacturing and didn’t have your own steel toed shoes yet, you had to wear these awful shoe covers. They were bright orange and fit over the toes of the shoes and went CLUMP CLUMP CLUMP as you walked. They were downright embarrassing. Needless to say, everybody got their own steel-toed shoes as soon as possible.
Which gives me an idea–
Why don’t you provide “appropriate attire” for your students to borrow? Not lab coats. Too pricey. I’m thinking of some old dishtowels and a few safety pins. And a set of those Totes rubber overshoes for the flip-flopper.
Discuss proper lab attire with them, and tell them that they must start wearing it by the next day. Any violations? Out come the dishtowels and rubbers. 
How much do you all pay for lab coats? I go through the things like candy. We’re talking what, $20 each?
I am very happy to say that everyone working in my lab is bitter and disheartened after about a month, so there is none of this chippy chatty nonsense going on.
Tell me about it. Not to pull the “Back when I was a kid” thing, but I came to Columbia, Mo to attend the University here, and all these college kids are wearing flip flops like they are as fundemental as underwear. Now, I get it- hot summer day, summer class… but in WINTER time? At Olive Garden? At work? Back in Kansas City, I saw flip flops on occasion, but not like here. Of course I wasn’t hanging around 18-22 year olds like now.
My girlfriend has like 50 pairs of flip flops. A pair to match every outfit. Like flip flops are some fashion accessory comparible to high heels or even a nice pair of dress shoes.
Me, I compare them all the time to “wife-beaters”. If it is unclassy to wear a “wife-beater” at XXXX place, it is unclassy to wear flip flops. IMO, that means anywhere that isn’t a swimming pool or the comfort of your own home, but I am just an old codger. (or thats what my g-friend says)
You’re right, lab coats cost about $20 - well, closer to $30 after shipping, etc. One problem is washing them. We don’t have a laundry service and no one wants to wear a “dirty” lab coat. Occationally I’ll take the few we have and wash them at home, but the students still think they’re dirty. Also, a lab coat is hot, even with air conditioning.
Me: Why did you let her take the lab coat off?
Grad Student: She was hot.
Me: Uh-huh. I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night. Don’t let her break the rules.
As for the “chippy chatty nonsense”, the Stepford Students are only here for the summer. This is just another step on their way to med school, or Cancun. (I have bemoaned the fact that my career as a research assistant/lab manager is just a “plan B” for these students. [oz]Ignor the woman behind the curtain.[/oz])
When they come to the lab inappropriately dressed, are they asked to leave? How strict are the lab rules, and are you the one who must enforce them?
Every lab I’ve been in has been extremely rigid about attire (as well as items such as phones and iPods, which not only are not allowed but are required to be turned off). If sending them home to change is not an option or one you don’t want to enforce, I like the idea of truly horrible alternative attire. Huge rubber boots for flip-flop girl. Giant orange coveralls for midriff girl. That should give them the message real quick.
I’m working on a handbook for my student employees right now, and, as a result of bitter experience, I’m finding I have to be ridiculously explicit in the dress code: “You must wear shoes at all times. Your underwear must not be showing. You must bathe regularly.” I’m really tempted to do as my husband suggested and under Dress Code, just write: “No stank. No skank.”
The situation here is a little complicated. Right now, the Stepford students are the responsiblity of my boss’s collaborator. The collaborator’s enforcement of the rules are much more lax than mine. The students are sent over to do something for our joint research, I send them away for inappropriate attire. The students explain to Dr. Collaborator why they were sent back, and I have to explain to my boss and Dr. Collaborator the rules set by the University and why I enforce them. (There is a nasty, bitter part of me that thinks: Yes, they are very pretty and they dress in a very sexy manner. They are **not ** here for you to oggle at. Subscribe to Playboy, I’ll bet at least one of them will end up there.)
Nice! My syllabi now have four pages of ridiculously explicit instructions, such as “Papers must be submitted in Times, 12-point, black, with hyperlinks removed. Staple or paperclip only. When a hard copy is requested, an e-mail is not acceptable. E-mails must be headed with the name of the assignment. Your own name must be spelled correctly.” I’ve tried broader statements (e.g., “Your work must adhere to academic presentation standards”), but this merely gets me indignant threats when I take points off for, say, spelling “pychology” (“It’s not in my spell checker!!!”).
Sounds to me like they’d better reevaluate their plan lettering system, and that your job is a very unrealistic Plan A for all of these students, especially Ms. Gross.
I find that the vast majority of pre-meds at my college have no idea what medicine is actually about and just figure “I got an A in Biology last semester, and I want a BMW, so I’ll study medicine”. Er, no. If you can’t figure out simple algebra (true story–I took a Calculus class this summer with a good friend who’s pre-med and we spent hours and hours going over 6th-grade algebra concepts until he dropped the class) and you’re afraid of blood (check), and you don’t like dissecting things, you’re probably not going to finish at the top of your class at Johns Hopkins.
Yep, I have seen career plans change after a few weeks in the lab. Ms. Gross seems to think that people will be less “smelly and gross” than the mice. This girl needs to visit an ER stat!
The worst part is when people keep bombing math and chem classes and getting squicked out and use some absurd logic to convince themselves they should still be pre-med. Sigh.
I do not know. LittlestSisofILC at age 8 could not tolerate the idea of offal.
She just graduated from MedicalUniversity ofSC and has begun her fellowship in Richmond. Granted she was always a math whiz. I guess I wasn’t there when she took HS biology or anatomy, because offal apparently wasn’t so awful.
what?
Huh? What’s offal?
That was probably silver nitrate. No harm done to you except for the embarrasment.
The boss (read: graduate advisor) is big on the safety stuff. I’m a little surprised I don’t get yelled at more often. Actually, we’re fairly relaxed about safety glasses and lab coats (I still don’t have one and haven’t ordered one) and sometimes even gloves. I went all of today, I think, without putting a pair of gloves on as all I did was prep and run a flash column then combined fractions, took NMRs, and so on. Other than getting acetone, hexane, and ethyl acetate on me, no problem. I really hate gloves for routine work but will put them on when needed. I just don’t see why I need them while I rinse out the rotovap trap with acetone. But definitely long shirts, jeans, some sort of closed shoe (I like sneakers, others go with something a little more stylish, the Indian post-doc wears these kinda funny cloth things), and other PPE as needed. I joked once that I should come into work wearing hot pants. First, if you’ve seen me, you definitely do not want to see me wearing hot pants. Second, just imagining his reaction is a hoot.
The third item in a list posted on the SDMB, as in “Hi, Offal!”
Offal: viscera and trimmings of a butchered animal often considered inedible by humans