It’s fraternity pledging season on campus, which means there are dozens of slightly addled sophomores wandering around being forced to do silly things by upperclassmen. This, combined with the passing mention of cable-making in the college advice post, got me thinking about scientific hazing– the sort of crap jobs that get given to first-year grad students in research groups.
I suspect this is mostly an experimental phenomenon, as experimental work provides many more opportunities for really unpleasant tasks. There are oil traps on vacuum systems that collect thick, nasty sludge that somebody has to clean out from time to time, and there are cables to make, and wires to be threaded through inconvenient spaces, and that sort of fun stuff. These are tasks that fall to the lowest seniority person around, and that every person stuck doing them is happy to pass on to the next victim.
I’m not sure what the theoretical equivalent would be. Copying stuff down off blackboards before erasing them? Carrying bags of scrap paper out to be recycled? Dealing with Microsoft software?
My favorite example of scientific hazing comes from a couple of groups at MIT. New students in one group are sent to the other to ask for a BNC-to-Swagelock adapter, which is always embarrassing for the hapless student. (If you don’t get it, I’ll put the explanation below the fold…)
If you’re in grad school, or attended grad school, what was the worst task you got stuck with as a junior graduate student?
The explanation of the MIT gag: BNC is a type of electrical connection, while Swagelock is a type of plumbing fitting. A BNC-to-Swagelock adapter would be used to connect electrical cables to water lines, which is just silly. They did actually make one, I’m told, by gluing a couple of unrelated connectors together, just to further confuse the students.
Weirdly, I actually have something in my lab that’s very close to a BNC-to-Swagelock adapter– it’s a Swagelock fitting plugged up with a glob of vacuum epoxy with a piece of 14-gauge wire running through it. It was used on an apparatus which had water-cooled magnetic field coils inside a vacuum chamber. I’m not crazy enough to do that, but I kept the fitting around because you never know when you’ll need something strange like that…