Fifteen

We had lab meeting today. It was like months since our last meeting. Instead of a meeting, I felt that it was more like a chat where everyone was quite relax and talked and talked. This time we have another new master student Wenni joining us. She has actually been in the lab since early this year but this was only her first meeting with us. Imagine how busy my boss is!
Boss told us that the undergrads will start coming into lab for their final year projects next week onwards. He himself will do some sort of orientation but then after some discussion, we agreed that he will just give the undergrads an intro to the lab. After that we will give a briefing about the do's and dont's in the lab (as we are the ones actively working in lab). Well you see, the purpose of such orientation is to help undergrads get familiarise with our lab environment so that we can minimise the possibility of them 'jeopardising' our research work due to their ignorance. I don't mean to be harsh as I myself have once been a junior in lab too. I understand the feeling. It's just a precaution step taken (based on our previous 'experiences'). Anyway, it is also a tradition of our lab to brief the freshies before they start labwork.
There will be a total of 15 undergrads with us this year. Man, this is the largest batch that we ever had! Besides that, we also have an industrial trainee from UTAR. Hu hu hu... Don't know how the three of us postgrads can manage such a number of people. During the meeting, boss also described some of the characters of the students from his own observation and experience with them, to get us prepared I guess. We were actually analysing some of them and it felt like we are HR people conducting a job interview. Haha.
Anyway, I just hope that it will be another peaceful year for me with the undergrads. (^_^)