Putting our instruments to sleep – but not our team spirit
20 Apr 2020
From running courses for students and colleagues to donating kit to hospitals, how our technicians are preserving the community of the lab bench…and creating a legacy
When the University closed all but essential services on campus, our technicians stepped up to ensure their colleagues and our students were able to continue to work remotely.
And they immediately set about donating their gloves and aprons to local hospitals.
For our students, they loaned out microscopes, found secondary data in lieu of their practical experiments for final year projects and created a statistical programming course, which was also well received by colleagues.
Others set up videoconferencing platforms for colleagues and reviewed and updated methods and procedures while, having experimented with different ways of measuring polluting microplastics in the environment, our Geography technicians are writing their experiments into a guide for their lab.
So impressive is their work, it has featured in Technicians Make It Happen, a blog that showcases the impact of technicians’ work across the country.
“There’s a great community in labs, where students and academics work alongside each other at the bench,” explains Dr Tom Bishop, one of our Geography Lab technicians, who was interviewed for the blog.
“Technicians are at the centre of all that, and we’d like to keep that laboratory community continuing through this time. We’ve been using the time before our online classes, as well as chat groups to keep everyone included and stay in touch with our staff and students.”
Tom, who pays tribute to his subject by choosing fancy locations for his Zoom meetings, adds: “When the University closed, we started the process of putting our instruments to sleep. Given that a key part of our job is to keep all the kit running, this was a strange and sometimes disturbing thing to have to do.
“It’s quite an adjustment, but our work means we have to be ready to think up solutions to unusual problems.”
John Moore, Senior Technical Operations Manager, agrees: “We’ve had excellent feedback on Tom’s course from students and staff and the team have other courses in the pipeline which we will be able to offer out.
“Keeping in touch through our different media is both important for keeping our team spirit and also an opportunity to explore other ways of delivering teaching, communication and allowing a quality service to continue. One positive legacy is that once normal service is resumed, we will have built up a library of useful resources that will be available for students and staff.”
Tom adds: “I hope everyone can focus on looking after themselves and their families. For some, that means learning a new skill or focusing on some aspect of their normal work, but for others it means full-time caring responsibilities, or simply doing what they can to get through a really difficult time.
“If anyone would like to join the course, or ‘sit-in’ on our classes to see what we’re up to, you’d be very welcome. Just get in touch!”
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