Alright, I’ll see if I can correct rikka.

Man, academic labs/shops are something else. Having worked in corporate labs now for over a decade, I look back on the “safety” training I got from the postdocs and older grad students at the time and can’t help but feel it’s a miracle more grad students don’t fall prey to accidents.

I was in a physics program and I think a big part of it is that people didn’t understand stuff outside their field. I did get lots of proper training on laser safety before I worked in our laser room. However, I think that is because the people training me are the ones that actually built the laser and understood it. Often, when I needed to fabricate a part, I was pointed to the right piece of equipment, but then never really trained on it and left to kind of figure it out (so many hours on an end mill messing things up).

Long hair around equipment can be deadly. That event happened while I was in grad school, and it really made me reevaluate all the long nights I spent in the lab without anybody else around.