What do I do all day?

I've had lots of people ask me what I do at my job, specifically what a typical day is like. I have one of those jobs that has no typical days, and I also have one with a sort of spiffy yet not specific at ALL title: laboratory technician. Now the answer I usually give to the above questions is this: My boss and I set up and clean up all of the equipment and chemicals for the undergraduate laboratories, all 60-ish sections. This includes making solutions, testing and fixing equipment, keeping track of a lot of teaching assistants (TAs) and students, and being a general goggle nazi.

This explanation works except that sometimes people's eyes glaze over at the mention of equipment and chemicals... they understand I'm very busy, but they still really have no idea what I'm doing.

So, I thought I'd try to explain what my job in terms of what it would look like in a kitchen, instead of a chemistry lab.

In each room, we have 12 mini-kitchens: each little set up has a oven/stove and a small counter for working at. Students work in pairs, 1 TA per room. There are 6 rooms on the 4th floor like this. There are 3 rooms on the 3rd floor that are very similar, but the number of kitchens per room fluctuates because they do more complicated cooking projects down there. Let's stay on the 4th floor for a while.

During the fall and spring, 4 of the rooms have 2 sections per day, every day of the week. This is about 950 students, they are the 2^nd year cooking class. Today they are making biscuits. Not too hard, it's only the 2nd week of class. So they have to mix oil, milk, and bisquick in the right amounts, stir, knead, roll it out, cut biscuits, put them on a pan, bake for 10 minutes. This teaches them about kneading, rolling, and baking; a previous class covered measuring. Each little kitchen has 10 locking drawers, one for each pair of kids that comes through during the week. In the beginning, they went through and made sure they had the right number of measuring cups, spoons, trays, bowls, knives, etc. and marked it on their drawer sheet. I get these sheets back (all 1500 of them) and if something goes missing or breaks, I charge the student that it belonged to.

For the ingredients, there are small bottles of bisquick and oil at each station, and a card to come to the stockroom window to get the milk, since that has to be refrigerated. I take IDs in exchange for milk, returning the IDs when I get my bottles of milk back- otherwise who knows where they would wind up. There are large bags of flour and large bottles of oil in the refill kitchen in the room, so the TA can refill all of the student bottles at the end of the period.

Down the hall there is different class learning to measure things very precisely- they are making pudding and varying the amounts of ingredients in small increments to see how it affects the final product. They are also learning some methods of how to tell what is in a batter that someone hands you- without tasting it.

The 1^st year students are in the 6^th room and are getting very basic classes in how to measure, what some of the equipment looks like, how to operate a stove although they’ll only use it once, etc. Both the 1^st years and the measuring class still have 12 stations, drawers of their own, and ingredients for each class.

Downstairs the 2^nd year cooking majors meet twice a week. Although there are only 7 kitchens in there, their cooking projects are much more complicated. They are making biscuits too, but from scratch. So they have 12 ingredients instead of 3. They also have convection ovens in addition to normal ovens. While most second years will leave knowing how to bake a few basic things and a few meals, these majors will learn to bake from scratch, put together multi-step meals, and harder things like making fudge.

Also on the 3^rd floor is a class where they learn to use as much kitchen instruments as possible- woks, ovens, blenders, etc. It’s all about the equipment (which has to be working!) but of course they use ingredients as well.

The final lab on the 3^rd floor is specialized cooking, focusing on Asian cooking techniques. Not only does this require special equipment and a LOT of ingredients, but the students design their own meal to cook as their final project, so we order a whole bunch of random stuff for them. The upstairs kids do meal projects at the end of class too, but they are assigned 1 of 5 menus, so I can have those ingredients ordered ahead of time.

So all of these classes are going on at the same time. Before each I have to make sure each station has the ingredients they need, as well as refill bottles for the TAs. Often the prep includes things like making the pie crusts ahead of time so the students can just use the crust and apples. I often have to put out additional equipment, like blenders and frying pans, for each lab, and then remove it after that particular class.

Professors give us a syllabus in the beginning of the semester that says what dish their class is making each week. Ordering usually falls to my boss, although I help her figure out what we need. Inventory the flour, they use it 4 times this semester, so that’s 4x ½ cup x 900 students, oh and have some extra in case someone drops something or needs to redo their pie. Also, the ingredients are charged separately for each class, so each class has their own flour, sugar, oil, etc.

After the class is over, I lock the rooms and make sure all of the stoves are off, and often begin switching out the ingredients for the next dish.

A good chunk of my job requires my cooking knowledge- knowing that trying to make biscuits requires vegetable oil, not olive oil. Knowing how to make most of the dishes myself. Being able to mass produce pie crusts. Being able to troubleshoot moody ovens helps a lot too. But most of my job is an exercise in logistics. I have work study students that are often found chopping vegetables, topping off student bottles of dry ingredients, refilling items like aluminum foil and saran wrap that the classes go through quickly, or doing dishes. We generate a lot of dirty dishes.

With so many classes going on, we’re always prepping for the next dish. But we always get lots of questions at the window too- I can’t find my flour. My measuring cup broke. My oven won’t turn on. My oven won't turn off (this is way more exciting). Sometimes someone cuts themselves with a knife or burns themselves on a stove- we provide first aid, and fill out an accident report.

There are also TA meetings- we go over the dish the class is preparing next and make sure everyone’s on the same page- PLEASE make sure there is bread flour for the bread class! Normal flour won’t work! Things like this. Check the blenders ahead of time. Please make sure your students CLEAN the blenders when they are through. The usual.

I do really like my job- there are days it is fun and days that its completely insane. Throw in that we make students wear goggles, labcoats, and no flip-flops for safety, and you get us kicking students out of lab occasionally for failing to wear these things.

This is what I do all day ^_^