Collaborations are important in academic science, the exchange of ideas and cross-disciplinary interaction can lead to some badass shenanigans. Grownup PI bloggers have discussed such things in much detail, how to choose collaborators, how to deal with collaborations once they get going, etc. But there’s not a lot of talk from the n00b grunt side of the equation. D-List Monktress to the rescue!
My first experience with ‘collaboration’ was as a wee little undergraduate engineering taking Mechatronics. Which consisted entirely of ECEs wailing at the ebil Mech Es who insisted on building a system with rotation rather than a tiered gantry system while the Mech Es growled that they had just spent 2000000000 gajillion hours in the machine shop and all the ECEs had to do was sit on their ass and code stuff for a little while. Of course we were mostly civil and at the end of the class we little nerdling veterans for life. But for much of the class there was a fundamental lack of respect and understanding between the two disciplines.
I learned some things from this, and from my actual collaborations in Sciencez, so I decided to make a list. Because that’s basically all I post now, bulleted lists. Fuck.
Respect the other’s work
They’re doing something you don’t know how to do, which is why you’re collaborating in the first place. And since you do not know how to do it, you furthermore do not understand the amount of hard work it takes, or the infinite number of ways it could go wrong. In my experience, this problem is exacerbated the further apart the interacting disciplines are. No one’s getting a free lunch in this economy, so trust that what they do is hard.
Provide comically detailed instructions
You’ve spent four, five, ten, etc years working with your system, to the point you can do it at 2am, even when the coffee has run out. This makes you the worst possible person to write instructions on how to do anything, yes it does stfu. Therefore you must be extremely conscious of detail when you do provide instructions to your collaborators. You need to spell out every reagent, every tool, every assembly step, and even which side is up. Because…
Both of you will fuck up
It’s inevitable that you are going to take a sample that your collaborator put days/months of blood, sweat, and tears into and fuck it up. And they probably will not even be respectable fuck ups at first, they will be comically incompetent fuck ups that will cause your collaborator to stab a kimwipe voodoo doll of you, repeatedly. And they will do the same to you.
Figure 1: You didn't know that Hoozit liqueifies Bajondong at 400C? IDIOT
