Smarter, not harder

"Work smarter, not harder"

Will and Matt hard at work in the lab

- every single one of my high school classmates who angered me the most

I hate the phrase "Work smarter, not harder." It drives me up the wall. I have built my career on hard work - it is the reason I am successful. Anytime someone else figures out a faster way to reach the same goal, it feels like they're cheating the system. 

Well, friends, you can probably guess where this is going. My lab has a number of interns from local high schools who come in once or twice a week and help with lab work. Recently, the interns have made so much progress on our larval sorting project that we actually finished the entire set of samples. The data are now in the hands of my graduate student, Kharis. Finishing the larval samples meant that our high school interns could move onto a new project - this time, sorting sediment samples from the high Arctic. 

I gave the students my little speech about why we're interested in the animals living between the sediment grains. I told them the background of the research and what question we're trying to answer. I prepared them for the long, time-consuming slog that sample sorting was inevitably going to entail. 

After just a few minutes at the microscope, one of the interns, Matt, turned to me. He had questions. 

"Hey Kirstin," Matt began, "You said you sieved these samples to get rid of the sediment, right?"

"Yes," I answered.

"Well, it's just," Matt continued, "There's a lot of sediment still stuck to the animals. Can we redo the sieving here in the lab?"

I rejected the idea initially. Re-sieving would take a lot of water, which would become contaminated with sediment and trace amounts of ethanol. We couldn't dispose of the contaminated water down the sink, so it would become a hassle. Plus, Kharis and I did a pretty thorough job sieving the first time. I was convinced Matt's suggestion would create a lot of watery waste and achieve very little. But he kept pushing. He asked me 3 different times why we couldn't just re-sieve the samples to make life easier. 

"You know what," I told Matt, "let's try it with one sample and see how it goes." Best-case scenario, we have a much easier time sorting the samples; worst-case scenario, we realize it doesn't work and I only have one sample worth of wash water to dispose of. 

Well, guess what: it worked brilliantly. We had to spend some time honing our methodology to minimize water usage, but for the most part, the sediment that had clung to the animals in each sample washed straight through the sieve. Matt and his partner, Will, were able to grab the clams in each sample straight from the sieve. I even figured out we could place the dry sieves under the microscope to find the smallest individuals. Will and Matt finished an entire sample in a single 2-hour session. I was floored.

I am grateful to our interns for their help in the lab and for their creative problem-solving! Once this project is finished, we will have data from multiple years to compare how seafloor communities are changing as the Arctic Ocean warms. I'm excited to see what the project shows!