Job priorities for research assistants in the lab

• The main priority for the research assistants in the lab is to contribute to the maintenance of the lab. This is an important task and this task needs a lot of time. We try very hard to make sure that the lab is a reliable place to run experiments and we hope that our users understand that this requires substantial effort.
• A second priority is to assist in teaching new researchers how to use the lab. That, usually, involves guiding a new researcher once through the steps which are required for an experiment. Researchers are also encouraged to gain experience and to assist in experiments of their colleagues before their run their first own experiment.
• Typically there is no time left to assist researchers (new or old) in running or programming their experiments.
• Researchers who need assistance in running their own experiments should either cooperate with other Ph.D. students (who will benefit from getting more lab experience) or bring their own research assistants.
• Researchers are encouraged to program their experiment themselves. It is usually less error-prone and quicker to learn z-Tree and then explain the experiment to z-Tree rather than trying to explain a problem to a third person who then translates it into z-Tree.

Also see:

• Grundsätze fur den Betrieb des Experimentallabors in Raum E53
• Procedures for running experiments in Jena
• Using ORSEE